Cutting Thru
We’ve been having a lot of trouble with our live sound lately - mostly centering around my live vocals. The two big problems are not being able to hear me clearly over the band and me being pitchy because of pushing and not being able to hear myself over the band. 
Today I was able to get the guys to come play in the garage where things are a little more separated and I was relieved to find that my pitch problems mostly went away. I could sing at a fairly comfortable volume the whole night - sometimes pushing a little, but never really having to scream to be heard. I was using the TC Helicon to smooth things out a little, but when I would look down at it, it seemed like it wasnt doing that much. When I went to check it out after the rehearsal i found out that it was in bypass mode, which makes the result of the practice even more satisfying.
There were a few rough spots, but things sounded more or less the way I intended with a few exceptions.
The first was that the vocal tracks winded up with a lot of guitar. I think this was because we left Kris’ mic pointed at his amp, but theres a chance that the vocal compressor is picking up guitar. This shouldnt really be the issue because the OM5 I’m using is supposed to have a very tight polar pattern. Actually one of the problems I have is that the working distance of this mic is very small - maybe an inch or so. Backing off even a little can cause you to totally disappear.
Second problem was that the first song was a little pitchier than the others. The solution to this is to practice the chest-head voice transition and .
The final problem is that my setup is letting a lot of power through in the 150-750Hz range (frequencies sort of centered at the soft palate). The guitar basically has enough distortion that it occupies the entire band from 50Hz-5kHz at a constant level, so to cut I need a lot more power (10db?) in the 1-3kHz range, either by changing the eq setup or vocal technique. The problem with using on-board eq is that a lot of feedback can happen right around 3kHz, which will only cause the engineer to turn me down.
Things i need to do:
- stay right on mic all the time and learn to control volume by how loud I sing
- sing at a moderate pressure level that I can maintain
- warm up and practice the voice transitions
- see if I can boost the 1-3kHz range to get some clarity above the guitar using both fx and technique