live vocal mixing

Yes - dead flat.

EQ is used to adapt to a room, a voice, a particular PA system... not to mention your ear. I always start with zero EQ then start my adjustments to taste. Generally I find adding a little bit of highs to be most common.

The most common mistake (my opinion) I hear in bands is pushing too much bottom and top - sucking the mids out of the sound. It's kinda cool for about 30 seconds - makes you sound like a schlock-jock radio voice. But then the vocals just drop into the mix behind the instruments and nobody - I mean nobody - can discern a single spoken word. It's all mush.

agree with kfischer and dmassey. until you hear it in the mix you don't know what to do. if your mix is heavy, you'll have to cut quite a bit (mostly bottom) to get the vocals to fit. a light mix may not need that much (depends on proximity effect of the mic, room acoustics, and so on). the octave you are singing in can make a difference.

since you asked about live vocals, the obvious thing to do is try and practice ahead of time with as much of the real equipment as you can, so you know ahead of time what songs need what. if you have a graphic eq for the vocals then you can hit some problem areas like 100hz, 400hz, 800hz for male vocals (don't know what it is for female vocals). otherwise you'll just have to watch the lows and highs.

in a live space you tend to get a lot of low end mud and high end shrieking (especially indoors with the shrieking, some art house places with their brick walls!). so less is more in those situations.

How do you mean "live vocals?"
Is that as in you're doing the live mix and need advice on how to work the board, or as in you're mixing a multitrack recording of a live performance?

If it's the latter (mixing a live record), then basically the same rules apply as a studio recording, with the understanding that the source material may be different and may need more work, since live recordings are typically done with different gear in a different environment than studio recordings. But the mix process after the fact is typically the same in terms of overall strategy.

And I agree with the above advice, especially about using your shelving filters to remove some of the lows and avoiding the self-defeating "hype" sound of smiley-face eq.

If, on the other hand, you're working the board at a live show, that's a whole nother can of worms, as different as a good bassline is from a good guitar riff.

Cheers.

ORIGINAL: yep

How do you mean "live vocals?"
Is that as in you're doing the live mix and need advice on how to work the board, or as in you're mixing a multitrack recording of a live performance?

Yeah I agree, it's unclear what you're referring to. Assuming it's live sound - there is always a lot of slop built into a live sound gig. In my experience (which involves mostly local clubs, bars, pubs and the occasional outdoor fest) hardly anyone gets the benefit of an actual soundcheck so most soundmen (including me) have to rely on the ol' "fly by the seat of your pants" method of running sound. So much depends on the equipment and room. We tend to tailor the settings to the room as much as to what's actually coming from the stage. I love doing fests because there's no room to get in the way :-)

I generally set everything flat to start with and then determine what needs to be tweaked as the band starts playing. Usually, by the end of the first or second song, things are more or less under control. For vocals, I don't usually do anything except cut the lows say from around 125hz-150hz. A bit of compression and you're good to go.

For backing vocals, I might cut even more low end just to make sure the backing vox aren't messing too much with the lead vocal.

I don't claim to be the world's greatest soundman so let's hear other points, but after 30+ years of doing this, I don't remember it being any more complicated than that. Usually there are worse things happening that need attention (like feedback, broken mics, blown speakers, bad faders, cables, bad power, ground loops, drunk patrons, etc). How the vocals are EQ'd is almost like the last thing I worry about - with the exception of feedback which requires either a Sabine unit or a 31 band graphic to notch the offending freq's

I'll tell ya what really helps - if you can get the artist or band into a decent rehearsal space for a day, set everything up and tweak it until it's perfect. Usually, board settings tend to fall into place from venue to venue. If you have a known good starting point, that's at least a good place to start. You might find those settings work 90% of the time.