Strategies for Live Vocal Processing with MPC

I will try to keep this brief; I am trying to come up with a workable approach to processing vocals during performance with the MPC.

The songs we are working on feature a variety of vocal effects: reverb of course, compression, some dynamic delay sends, as well as dynamic chorusing, flanging, and EQ. For reasons that you can probably guess, this did not go as well as I had hoped during our first performance, mostly because of the lack of a clean monitor signal.

So for our next show I am planning the following changes:

- Add a clean parallel track for vocal monitoring only; the only processing on this is a 100 Hz hipass filter.
- Eliminate or reduce compression on the processed FOH signal.

For those who like pics, here ya go. (Mics are wireless with preamps in the receivers, they go straight into the MPC.)



Does anyone see any issues here? We'll be playing small (~100 people) venues for now; is feedback from FOH to the mics a concern, or will having a clean monitor signal eliminate the problems caused by the effected signal? Is compression om the FOH signal an issue in this situation? (I'm reluctant to ask/allow the house engineers to compress vocals because of the processing.)

TIA

Without knowing the problem from the previous setup, we are left to speculate.

A clean signal for monitoring can be helpful for the vocalist to know if they are in tune… and delay can cause a lot of ‘where am I’ isaues that can make the vocalist off time.

Or did you have feedback issues because your mic is too sensitive or does not have a way to ignore directional audio.

A lot of unknowns and I am just scratching the surface.

Only thing I do agree on is that you will not want the main mixing board responsible for doing any fx or mixing duties for you.

Yeah, good point. The problem was feedback due to the compression and some EQ effects, plus an issue with delay in one song.