Sorry, I put this in the wrong place so I reposting it here under CQ troubleshooting.
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.
Under the Gain Assist button there is another button called Auto Gain. You need to turn that off. If you leave it on it can do exactly what you described is happening.
Use the Gain Assist to set the initial gain, then if you’re sure it’s where you want it, turn off the Auto Gain. Problem solved.
BTW, the Auto Gain can also be very useful if you use it right. I use it for the first song because it’s not uncommon for musicians to play or sing softer during soundcheck then crank it up when the band actually starts. Auto Gain can help keep that under control, but you do need to turn it off once you’re done with it.
OK, thank you so much for the advice. This is exactly what I was thinking of doing but wasn’t sure. Everything I read about auto game says that it is monitoring for clipping, which seems like a really good thing to have. But to have it go in and dramatically change the game during the show certainly doesn’t work for me.Can you still run the feedback assistant in live mode with it set up like this?
This is a pet peeve of mine with inexperienced singers. No matter how much I badger them, they will NOT sing at full gig volume during soundcheck. They think they’re belting it out, but nope. It’s only once the band starts and the adrenaline gets pumping that the true voice comes out, obliterates the entire mix and makes the monitors screech with feedback.
The Auto Gain has nothing to do with the FBA. You can use both at the same time, just one or the other, or neither.
The Auto Gain monitors the input gain and will lower it to prevent clipping but as you found, sometimes this can work against you. My suggestion is to use the Gain Assistant to set the initial gain levels, then use the Auto Gain for maybe one song in case your bandmembers tend to turn up or play louder once you start, then turn it off.
Also, if you use the mixer with the same band, same mics, same PA, once you have set the perfect gain levels for everything you can just turn off Gain Assist and Auto Gain and simply save all the settings as a scene. You can save up to 100 scenes and if you need more, just save a second show to a USB drive.
I play in two bands and run sound for both of them. In just a couple of months I’ve already saved a bunch of scenes for each band at different venues. The scenes also include the FBA so when we play a venue we’ve already played, I don’t even need to set gain levels or ring out the room with the FBA. I just recall the scene for that venue and band and I’m done, with the exception of a few very minor tweaks to account for things like crowd size, slightly different acoustics due to speaker placement being off by a few inches, etc, but nothing major that would require resetting gain levels or FBA.
I can’t thank you enough for the advice. I will do exactly what you said here on Saturday.
Actually, I forgot to ask. What do you do with the feedback assistant? Do you put it on hold? Or do you use the live setting?
Depends on the gig and the venue. For outdoor gigs I tend to not use the FBA at all except maybe on the floor monitors.
For indoor gigs I will set my fixed filters then switch it to Live mode with a very fast release time.
I usually leave Hold turned off the the FBA in Live mode because I want it to catch any stray squeals.
But if it’s a venue where feedback isn’t a huge problem I might just set a couple of Fixed filters then enable Hold so it doesn’t add any more filters.
Isn’t the auto gain supposed to be used for monitoring the gain during a performance to prevent peaking? Also, my band mates and I share a single vocal mic. Of course some of us sing louder than others. How would you approach that situation.
Yes and no. Under the Gain Assistant section you have Auto Set and Auto Gain.
Auto Set is to help set your optimal gain level initially. This is what you would typically use when doing a soundcheck and setting your input levels.
Auto Gain is there in case you set your initial gain a bit too high and if this is enabled it will automatically REDUCE the gain if it gets close to clipping. However, it will not bring it back up if the input signal to the channel drops (like someone starts singing softer). That’s why it’s a bad idea to leave this on. As the band gets louder you run the risk of the input gains being lowered too much. Also, I’ve found that the CQ18T has more than enough headroom on the channels and your gain would have to be set ridiculously high to start clipping. You should still try to keep the levels so they’re consistently hitting 0dB but if the levels go a little above that, you have quite a bit of room before it actually clips.
For my bands what works best it to use the Auto Set to set the input gain levels initially.
Then the Auto Gain is useful (to me) for only the first song or even half a song to make sure the input gains weren’t set too high. As soon as I’m sure the input gains are set correctly I turn off the Auto Gain.
Another use I found for the Auto Gain is if we sometimes have a guest singer, our lead singer’s voice is kind of soft and when we’ve had some guest singers, their voices end up being WAY too loud so if we have a guest singer come on I will turn on the Auto Gain which will lower the gain for the guest singer. But I have to remember to turn the gain back up when the guest singer is done.
As for your band sharing a single vocal mic, you have a couple of choices. One of you will have to sing louder or softer, or, deal with someone’s vocals being louder than someone else’s, or, you can do what you should be doing if more than one person sings - give each singer their own mic.
There is no reason I can see why each singer can’t have their own mic. If you’re out of channels on the board, you have the wrong board or maybe you need a second submixer. I’ve seen this done with drums, basically you get a small cheap analog mixer for the entire drumkit and send the output of that to one of the main mixer’s channels. But you can do it with vocals or any other instruments too. A cheap little $200 analog mixer with 8 or 10 XLR inputs is fine for that.
If you’re not out of channels then you don’t need to worry about that and you can just go straight to giving each singer their own mic. You can get a half decent mic for $50, a mic stand for $20, and XLR cables are a dime a dozen.
I’m in a bluegrass group, and many folks like the idea of a single vocal mic, especially when singing harmonies. We don’t use monitors, so we have to rely on being close when singing to hear the blend. I use a Ear Trumpet Myrtle mic, which many bands use as their only mic, even with instrumentation. Those bands have to work on choreography when taking breaks. The mic tends to pick all the instruments pretty good. In my band we run several AT Pro37 instrument mics.
I should mention that I followed the instructions that you gave me and everything went very well last night. I sent the mics and instruments with auto gain and then kept on the gain assistant for just one song. I actually made notes for the original settings and then what it knocked it down to afterwards and it was not dramatic at all. Just a few decibels. I also set up the feedback assistant where I rung out the monitors and the mains. I had the setting on fixed and then took it off hold and created some feedback. You could see that it detected it and put some filters in place. I then placed it on hold so no other detection would happen in other spots. I put the monitor and the mains on live for the whole show. It worked like a charm.
I have one person that has seen us many times come up at the end and say that we sounded so much better for this gig. And I attribute that too this mixer. Thanks again for the advice.
That’s fine but you will have to live with certain limitations. Basic physics - the loudest sound at the mic wins. Whichever voice is loudest at the mic will be loudest through the PA.
If there is a way to do what you’re asking, I’m not aware of it but I’m also not a professional sound engineer.
I would recommend asking this question on the Reddit /livesound forum. There are a lot of people there with an insane amount of knowledge and if what you’re trying to do is possible, someone there will know.