To EQ, or not to EQ…
The first point to make about these units is, for the most part, you should not be using them to apply EQ to your vocals. It may be OK to add EQ to one or two of your effects patches, to create a particular effect for a particular section of a song. But in general, there should be no EQ added to the mic overall.
The reason for this is because even if you think it sounds better, it only sounds better now, for this particular microphone playing through this particular PA system. You’ve no idea whether these EQ settings will sound any good at your next venue, or any other one, and you could easily be making yourself sound worse on that system, giving the engineer more work to do to try and reverse the changes you’ve made.
You’re far better leaving the EQ flat and allowing the sound engineer to control the EQ at the mixing desk. He can take his time and set it correctly for the particular venue and sound system being used, which will probably require different settings than from the next venue. Indeed, the very first patch you should store on your unit should be a completely clean, “pass through” setting with nothing added to the microphone at all. Starting with this at sound check, this will let the sound engineer get the basic sound of the microphone correct and match the sound to your voice, the room and the PA system. Only once this is done and you have a great sounding baseline should you then start going through your effects settings and ensuring that they also sound good for the show.
Dial everything back
Another common mistake is putting too much effect on your voice.
And it’s easy to see how this can happen. In almost every case, the settings on these units will be chosen in one of two places. Firstly, the singer will want to have a play with their new toy in their house. They will plug a microphone into it and start to play with the unit, get a feel for the sounds and the effects it can produce, maybe even dial in some rough settings for a couple of their songs. Then they will bring it to practice with their band and start to work on it some more. In those two environments the effects they choose and the settings for them probably sound really good and fit in well with the music.
However both of these locations have the same thing in common, they are very ‘dry’. The soft furnishings and small room sizes in your house mean that there is very little in the way of noticeable natural reverb in the room. And in terms of your practice location, it’s probably a bigger room that may in other circumstances have some natural reverb to it, but it almost certainly has some acoustic treatment on the walls who’s very purpose is to soak that reverb up and ‘dry up’ the room. And so the effects chosen by the singer, and more specifically the amount of that effect added, is chosen to sound good in these dry spaces.
But this is not the environment that your effects are going to be used in. Ultimately, you’re going to use these effects at a live show, in a room that (almost certainly) has very much more natural reverb than you’re practice studio. In this case, when your vocal effects are added to the reverb and the acoustics that are already naturally part of the room, they become too much. The vocal sound is swamped in effect to the point that a) it becomes much harder for the sound engineer to mix and the audience to hear, and b) you give yourself a LOT of problems with feedback in the stage wedges.
So at the very least, dial it back a bit, and have your unit set up in a way that you have an easy way to control the level of the effect while you’re soundchecking so that you can work with the engineer to get the correct amount in the mix. Or even better…..
