Live Band Rant

ElvisFan

ElvisFan

ElvisFan

Soldato
Joined
4 Jan 2004
Posts
4,100
Location
Sheffield, England
On Saturday nights my local has on what I would say are some pretty decent bands. Speaking as a non-musician they might not be good but their musicianship seems good to my ears anyway. You see all these guitarists with their banks of effects pedals and stuff but one thing really boils my goat and that is:

WHY DON'T THE SINGERS EVER HAVE ANY EFFECTS ON THEIR MICS???

The musicians go to all the bother with the pedals etc, yet they can't put a bit of reverb on their damned mics. Totally ruins the entire performance to me because it sounds so harsh and dead with no ambience.

The singer in the band that was on last night was a girl with a cracking voice, yet she sounded terrible because of the dry mic.

Am I missing something here?

I would like to hear dmpoole's input on this subject.
 
I think it can very easily ruin voices if not done correctly. A lot of people seem to be of the opinion that it'd be somehow *cheating* as well.

I love distortion and reverb on vocals, it can sound amazing done correctly.
 
Zefan said:
I think it can very easily ruin voices if not done correctly. A lot of people seem to be of the opinion that it'd be somehow *cheating* as well.

I love distortion and reverb on vocals, it can sound amazing done correctly.
Click to expand...

It's not cheating. A live PA robs the voice of a quality that simply has to be put back in. I'm not talking about strange effects, I'm talking about just enough reverb to bring the ambience back. Without it everybody sounds as bad as Nizlopi.
 
What I mean is that it can be very easily overdone, at which point the audience (most of whom don't really know what's what) notice it and think "ffs stupid girl can't even sing without effects". I don't think it's cheating btw :p
 
Totally agree.
A dry PA sounds awful but too many artists also have the 'Elvis effect' which over does it.
The one thing I hate is singers talking between songs with the reverb still on.
 
It also depends on the venue too... if it's big with horrible features for sound reflection then it's very easy to have too much verb and turn everything into sloppy mud soup!

Very difficult to get right but I agree - dry vocals sound bad as it really doesn't gel with the rest of the instruments...
 
I had major trouble saturday night.
I could hear feedback all the time and I was being unprofessional by pulling faces and swearing about the sound on stage.
During the 2nd spot I'm getting angrier and switching mic's until my bass player said that he couldn't hear any feedback at all.
I asked the audience and they said they couldn't hear feedback :confused:
Up until this point I kept turning the reverb off because it can make it worse.

It ended up being my in-ear monitors that were feeding back because the buggers were on so loud and when the mic got close it would feedback only in my ear :D
 
dmpoole - You are right - Reverb would create large amounts of feedback, uless you are miles away from the monitors, or in a recording booth. ;) You can get quite creative with Delay (instead of reverb) and a mic, and have stuttered bits of feedback if yer into the whole noise thing. :D

The whole point of adding reverb in a studio is to recreate the whole "live sound". If you add more reverb, you will have a job to hear what the singer is singing!

It depends in the venue, but to get an idea, shoot a gun in a church, and tell me how long the reverb lasts, it's normally more than 1 second in a larger church. When you fill the venue with people tho, the amount of reverb goes down a bit, but you normally get lots of natural reverb at most live gigs. Reverb units are becomeing ever more complex in order to re-create this live sound. Convoluted reverb anyone?

Distortion can be less of a pain for the engineers as it doesn't cause feedback like reverb does, but it should be used springly as it can become a bit tiresome.
 
Mike,

I think you have missed the whole point of the thread.

I'm on about people who don't use ANY reverb, not people who use too much.
 
ElvisFan said:
Mike,

I think you have missed the whole point of the thread.

I'm on about people who don't use ANY reverb, not people who use too much.
Click to expand...
But the thing is, if you are in a decent sized venue, you will have plenty of reverb due to acoustics.
 
I used to run a VERY aggressive compressor with scooped mid-hi and an occasional stomp-box delay set with a very fast attack.

Digitech VFX unit was used when I did goregrind (a fun six months...that stuff attracts weird girls) and I still play about with it occasionally.

*n
 
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