Piece of gear to control Background Vocal level from stage??

[SecondSon]

My background vocalist levels between songs change a lot in our live situation. It seems like such a pain in between songs to tell the sound guy to put him at the same level as i am for songs and then other songs, tell him to take him about 5dB below me. It never seems to work.

Is there some cheap piece of gear we could run his mic into to control his levels without using it as a preamp??? He would like to do his levels himself, that way we don't have to tell the sound guy every song where it should be.

Also, what is "Vox"? Is it Vocals? Why Vox?

[sismofyt]

Shure LevelLoc? Or is it a nono not to abouse it.. haha? Could be found real cheap on ebay for the Tchad Blake era.. Don't know if there is any other mic in/mic out limiters out there..?

Or just tell the soundguy to patch in a limiter/high ratio compressor.

Yes, vox is vocal..

[Scodiddly]

Could the backup singer just learn how to back away from the mic during those songs?

The other option I can think of would be one of those onstage vocal effects units - just program a couple patches with no effects and the appropriate volume levels.

[chris harris]

don't change the levels when you practice... this will force your background singer to learn some mic technique. Bad mic technique is one my biggest frustrations when running live sound.

"you can't hear his singing"

"well, it would help if he'd sing INTO the microphone!"

[AGCurry]

I was going to post a sarcastic message, like...

"Yeah, there is such a device - it's called the singer."

or

"Yeah - it's called microphone technique."

But it looks like that's been covered nicely.

Seriously - given the ability of the human voice to be soft or loud or in between and the technique of varying one's distance from the microphone, why would you need to change gain levels? The only reason I could think of is a case where you would want the singer to sound like he's kissing the mic and singing loud but not have it come through loud...

[colinandrew12]

yeah, i agree. don't spend any money, just have the person sing quiet or back away from the mic. it'll sound better in the end too, probably.