Let me tell you about a feeling you might know.
There's a queue forming at the door, the place is filling up, and you're crouched behind a digital mixer poking at a touchscreen full of words you half-recognise. Gain. Threshold. HPF. Q. There are five buttons down the side and forty things on every screen, and you've got about four minutes before you're supposed to be singing. So you nudge a couple of faders, hope for the best, and walk up to the mic.
Then halfway through the first song it happens. That thin whistle climbing up out of the PA. Feedback. You step back, you point the mic away, you turn yourself down — and now you're too quiet and you've got the rest of the set to get through being timid about the one thing you're there to do, which is sing.
I've been a full-time musician since 2006, gigging around Surrey and beyond, and I did exactly that for years. I bought a proper desk — an Allen & Heath CQ12 — thinking it would fix everything. It didn't, at first. It just gave me more knobs to be confused by. I'd watch my speaker's clip lights flickering in loud rooms and not really know why. I'd get a sound that was fine through my headphones and have no idea what the room was actually hearing. And I had nobody to ask, because when you're a solo act doing your own sound, you are the sound guy.
So over a long stretch of gigs and soundchecks I sat down and worked it out properly. Dial by dial. What every control actually does, and — more importantly — what to set it to. Then I wrote it all down.
That's The Vocal Chain.
What it actually is
It's a 34-page PDF that walks you from your mic to your speakers and gets you one clear, solid live vocal — the kind that cuts through a busy room without you fighting it all night.
The thing that makes it different is that every setting is a real number. Not "roll off a bit of low end" — high-pass at 100 Hz. Not "add some compression" — RMS detection, soft knee, around 3:1, set for 3 to 6 dB of gain reduction, attack about 15 ms. Not "watch your levels" — limiter at minus 1 dB, fast, in. There's a vocal frequency map so you know where the mud and the harshness and the air actually live, an EQ "by symptom" table for when a room sounds boxy or honky or thin, an effects reference so you're not lost in the reverb menu, and the exact gain-setting routine that finally made it click for me (here's the big one: the fader doesn't set your gain — that caught me out for years).
I built it by photographing my own desk, every screen, every dial, while I set up a real vocal. So it matches what you're actually looking at, not a manual diagram.
Honest version: it gets you about 98% of the way to a gold-standard live vocal. The last 2% is taste, and the room, and your own ears — nobody can hand you that in a PDF. But the 98% is the part that's been killing your gigs, and the 98% is in the book.
Want a taste first? I've put the whole vocal chain — gain, EQ, compression, feedback — on a single page you can print and tape to your case. Grab the free CQ12 Vocal Cheat-Sheet here.
Who it's for
This is for anyone doing their own live sound and singing over it. Specifically:
- Solo singers running backing tracks — just you, a mic, and an iPad or laptop into the desk.
- Singer-guitarists — you and a guitar, maybe over loops, doing the lot yourself.
- Band singers who've ended up in charge of the desk because nobody else will.
If you own a CQ12 or CQ12T it's built exactly for your screen. If you've got a different digital mixer, the controls have the same names and do the same jobs — gate, EQ, compressor, reverb, limiter, feedback notches — so the numbers and the order carry straight across.
And about that whistle
Feedback is the number one thing that ruins these gigs, so it gets its own proper section. The CQ has a tool called the Feedback Assistant, and most people either ignore it or don't trust it. I show you the routine I actually use: ring out a few "fixed" filters at soundcheck so the room is tamed before you start, then arm the "live" ones to catch whatever the night throws at you. It doesn't fix bad mic technique — I cover that too — but it buys you the headroom to sing properly instead of hiding from your own PA. Since I started doing this, I genuinely can't remember the last time I had feedback ruin a song.
How to get it
The Vocal Chain is £19.99 as an instant PDF download. Grab it, set your desk up once tonight, save it as a scene named for the venue, and never start from scratch again.
A couple of other things. The Vocal Chain is the first in a new live-sound series — the acoustic-guitar edition is coming next, same approach, same real numbers, for getting a clean live acoustic out of the same desk.
If you found this useful, come and join The Soundcheck — my newsletter where I send out new guides and the odd story from the road. No spam, just the stuff I'd have wanted when I was crouched behind that mixer with a queue at the door.
See you out there.
— Aaron