I recently purchased a CQ 18T and have put a lot of time into learning it. I am having problems with the levels changing as our show or practice progresses. We used it for one gig so far and had many people come up to the stage and say they could not hear the vocals. I used gain assist for the set up and everything sounded great. That sound check. But as the night progressed the vocals, went down so low into the mix. I’m not sure if I had feedback assistant set right. I tried everything during the show but kept getting feedback so had to just keep moving forward. In our practice set up we are seeing the same issue. We set up the gains each time we play and then as the night goes on the input, especially the vocals get reduced in gain considerably. For instance, my gain assistance set my vocals to 34 dB. At the end of the night it was at 20 and I could barely hear myself. We have a gig this Saturday night and I’m panicking a little to be honest. I hate to go back to my analog mixer so I would hope I could get some help. I was thinking about turning off the game assistant, but I know that that is monitoring for clipping. Any help on the basic set up of the gain and the feedback assistant for a live show would be greatly appreciated. We are a cover band with three vocals, two guitars base and drums. Pretty straightforward set up. Please help.
This seems to be a common problem when people leave the feedback assistant “on” during a show. Depending on how the FBA is set up, it tends to continue to cut whatever frequencies are loudest until there is nothing left.
My advice would be to use the FBA to “ring out” your monitors, but then turn it off. Do NOT run it during the show.
If you must run it during the show, then be sure to set the “Live Recovery Time” to the fastest setting. This will force the system to “release” any frequency that it cut as quickly as possible. This will help prevent the system from cutting and never releasing frequencies which will give terrible results.
Thanks so much for the advice. I’m not familiar with how to ring out the monitors. We have just started with in ears (on of the reasons we bought the CQ) but we still have floor monitors until we get use to IEM (which is a whole other challenge)