We are using IEM for a while and I have some thought about fx (reverb) into the inear for the vocals.
Situation:
We have 3 vocals.
When you have your iem mix as a singer you have the other vocals at a lower volume in your ears.
We have routed all the vocals to one FX as reverb for vocal only voor IEM. So it is not that DRY
As my understanding, you only have in SQ4U the FXreturn as control.
So when you lower a other vocal for your IEM the reverb stay’s the same, but if you lower the FX return you lower the complete F, not one person.
My question is:
Is there a way when changing the volume of a other vocal in your IEM mix that the fx send of that vocal channel into the effect stays in proportion to its volume? So you will not end up with only the reverb of that vocal in you IEM mix?
If I understand your question correctly:
It’s obviously not possible to get three different FX mixes (for your three IEMs) with a single FX engine.
No matter how you adjust the vocalists’ three FX sends, there’s only one mix to one FX return.
Generally a vocal FX group like you are describing is set up with “post fader” sends. This way when the person changes the fader of a vocal channel in the FOH mix, it also changes the relative volume in the FX group as well. However when set up like this, this post fader setup follows the FOH faders. It does not follow the individual vocal channel levels in the individual aux buss mixes.
If you ‘really’ want vocal reverb in the IEMs, and you want the vocalist to be able to adjust the vocal reverb mix as well as their dry mix, you will have to assign one FX unit to each vocalist IEM.
Do they really want this? If you can get rid of the requirement, the requirement goes away…
Just wondering whether there is a half-way-house by taking the output from one FX unit (used for vocal reverb) and feeding it back into an input channel (either analogue or - more preferable - digital).
The vocalist will not be able to adjust the relative mix of vocalists feeding the FX unit, but will have separate control of the overall FX reverb in their AUX/IEM.
I can make a special IEM reverb channel with all the vocals with the same level of reverb. They can use the return as control.
But there is a situation with the backing vocals that have to accept. The lead singer has for (extreme)example his own voice @ 100% and the backing @ 50%. So the lead singer has to accept the backing will have probably too much reverb. The same for the backing vocal, they should have to accept that the lead singer probably have too much reverb.
The fx send of this separate fx channel I will configure pre fader. So FOH does not have effect on it. A stable reverb but not always balanced. Just for a touch of reverb but not too much.
I would probably create two FX groups - one for the lead singer vocal FX (with only their vocal going to that group) and one for the backup singers FX effects (with all of the backup singers going into that group).
These would still be set up as “post fader” sends and set so that any changes to the individual FOH vocal faders would change the relative volume of the vocal FX in the mix. This would mean that FOH would have one more FX fader to worry about, but you could easily set up a Vocal FX DCA group that included both the lead singer FX group and the backup singer FX group if that would be easier to manage.
Now for the IEM, each musician would have two vocal FX faders available - one that would only affect the lead signers FX level in their IEM and one that would affect the FX level of all the backup singers in their IEM.
Overall I think that is a good compromise where the lead singer can dial in their FX volume independently of the backup vocalist’s FX volume.