Compressing live ELGuitar

[Jace]

Can anybody give me tips on, Compressing a live preformed ELGuitar lead part,
so that it does not over power the vocal.
As i have been asked to try out some stuf for a live band, but i noticed we need some sort of compression on the guitar to tame it down, so maybe some EQ too, anybody
playing out -do you have a rough guide line? to help me on my way.

Or know of any MTm tutorials, i can route out?

Thanks

[Escape Velocity]

What tool are you mixing this in? Or is this more of a PA question?

[Jace]

I may do a studio mix, But i am talking more in genral terms of playing live.

[Jace]

Rock_ pop_ indie band.
All this is just specualtion,

I have been looking for my own session/band members to try and get a kind of penduelem or live dance style act going eventually, but as usual it has turned out more me maybe joining this band if we have mutual benifits, and then uesing them for my needs too.
Anything has to be worth a shot - One never knows what may come.

As for the guitar, it is just what i hear on hearing one of their demo songs on their myspace, it is all good stuff, but this guitar does swamp the vocal, so i was wondering if i could set up a sidechain Compressor to cut the problem Freq and duck the loudness .
i.e Band_ mixer in_mixer out to my daw_Add Proscessing and out to master, or just use some sort of specialised guitar hardware for the live side if i they are not useing a laptop/daw, i was wondering on both scenario's

On the whole i do not have a clue to if i will end up doing this project, as poeple contact poeple and many do so on a whim, with no real intentions - so i will have to wait and see, but i just wanted to be a step a head with anything that i may be able to help with..

[Escape Velocity]

Okay - so do you have the raw tracks? Or are you looking to do something like multi-band compression to squash the problem frequency area out of the master?

[Escape Velocity]

Had a bit more of a thought about this. Firstly, part of the problem could be that the guitar amp is bleeding into the vocal mic - pretty common in a live room. If the mic is in a "live spot" with respect to the guitar cab (i.e. reinforcing phase + reflections), you could be hearing the result of a vocal + guitar track being added to a guitar only track. One of the quick and easy ways to deal with this in a live room is to have the guitar amp face a different direction (as opposed to directly at the vocal mic). Another is to have the vocalist actually face the guitar cab head on and use a cardioid mic - a dynamic mic like an SM58 is excellent in this kind of application. Point the back of the mic directly at the guitar cab and you should get good rejection levels.

A more hard-core approach (which may be required if the live room is small and you can't contain the reflections) is to place the guitar cab, then find a dead-spot in the room where the guitar cab volume drops appreciably due to inverse phase reflections, etc. Place your vocal mic in this spot and you should also get a reduced amount of bleed from the guitar.

Of course, once you've isolated the bleed you can also compress the vocal, (I routinely compress vocals from a live room at around 1:3 over -35dB threshold with +10dB or so gain), run it at higher gain and make sure you've got a good solid -12dBFS RMS signal from your vocal mic before you record. This will give you some headroom on the vocal channel, allowing you to boost it in the mix at mix-down (7db is a de facto industry guideline for how much more you should give the vocal than the rest of the track).

Finally, you can do what serious producers do... do a "guide track" of the vocal in the live room, then redub the vocal in a vocal booth after the fact using the guide track as a reference. If this is a home recording, I've found that recording vocals in a bathroom or laundry can give you some natural small-room reverb that can (if you get the mic position right) sound musical, and add some extra warmth to the vocal track. Of course, it's also hard to remove those reverberant artifacts after the fact, so another option is to record the live vocal take from a less "lively" room, then pipe the track into the laundry via a speaker and run a mic in their back to the mixer. This is actually pretty similar to the approach used by producers in the 50's and 60's who used reverberation chambers (often a corridor in the studio) to get a similar effect.

The key point I'm making here is that regardless of what they've done in the past, there's always an opportunity to show them some new ways to approach things once you're behind the mixing console.

HTH

Jez

[Jace]

Thanks Jez, just got back off hols, so i will have a good read when i am back in order.

Cheers

[DAN JUNK]

Hello there,

If your talking about live performance you can try a little EQ for reducing highs and add a little more guitar in your on stage monoitor and less in others, and get your self a guitar Compression pedal mite help. Or you can just turn your amp more to the wall. Everybodys gigs are different so I hope this helps a little.

DJ.

[Jace]

Yeh i know what you say Daniel,but its more just to tame the peaks which impose on the vocal, so compression Triggered by the vocal would seem the best option.
i have the ideas on what i need to do, but could do with the advice of any other live preformers/bands and any guidlines or rules they go by, to give me a compare with this band.
maybe its me thinking too hard, but i like to keep all things covered in my mind.

Cheers

[Loki Laufeyiarson]

So this is really about mixing a live performance and not studiorecordings?

As a guitarplayer I would say: tell your guitarplayer to turn his lead-channel down a bit (and pray he listens, mosts guitarplayer only know how to turn their amp up and not down :P ) and get the PA-guy (you?) to turn the guitar up a couple of notches on his monitors. If it is just some peaks that impose on the vocals, then the guitarplayer needs to play with a little less dynamics. If he isn't able tot do that, then maybe he could buy a compression-stombox tot put between the guitar and amp or in the effectsloop of the amp wich he turns on for solo-parts (some mulit-effects processors for guitars have them built in so it's just adding one extra thingy to a preset).
With liverigs you want to keep things as simple as possible because otherwise you would have to carry all the extra stuff with you (and set it up and stuff, time better spent on soundchecking and drinking beer :P).

[Jace]

Cheers for advice Loki.

[Escape Velocity]

You know - one of the reasons people keep turning up their instruments is that they aren't hearing enough of themselves in the monitors. Guitarists are particularly prone to this as in small venues they often don't have the guitar going through the PA, and the amp is more often than not blasting straight into their legs. Try getting them to either tilt their amp up towards their ears a bit more (especially if they're using a combo cab), put the speaker cab on top of a couple of milk crates or simply have them stand 5-6 feet in front of the cab rather than 2 feet in front. Another common trick is have the guitarist play a little to right or left of center, place their amp in the corresponding corner (rather than at the back of the stage pointing straight at the crowd) then turn it around 30 degrees towards the centre of the stage - this should overcome their monitoring difficulties, plus it will provide a slightly more directional "stereo" sound for the audience.

For larger live setups where the guitar cabs are miced or DIed through the desk, there's also personal monitoring mixers out there which will allow people to pass their own instrument output through their mixer before it gets routed out to FOH. An overall mix (or a handful of stems) of the rest of the band is also passed through the mixer, but the guitarist has control over their own monitoring level. This can then be routed into a side-fill monitor, a front-fill monitor or an in-ear monitoring system to give the guitarist exactly what he needs. These mixers are also very handy for vocalists and keyboard players and keep people away from the knobs on their amps.

Finally - worth noting that over the length of a gig, the hearing of the people on stage will get less sensitive. In-ear monitors are a good way to address this (especially those that provide a degree of ambient sound cancellation or insulation to take the edge off the SPL rolling around the stage). Really professional bands with a tight live show tend to know this, and also know their own parts so well that they don't need to hear their own instrument over the mix to know what their instrument sounds like at a given point in time. Throwing down that gauntlet can lead to some interesting results - especially if the band is pretty serious (e.g. people will actually practice their own parts outside of rehearsal time). ;)

Hope that helps!

Cheers


Jez