For live use, i have my macbook doing all of my vocal effects through logic 8. I have had considerable problems with feedback and was wondering if anyone here knows of any plugins that i could use instead of my almost useless Sabine fbx2400 and the completely useless Behringer feedback "destroyer". Please take into consideration that we use heavy distortion, delay and reverb on our vocals. We also use Sure Beta 57a mics (that supposedly have the highest gain before feedback of any mic) and that we use NO onstage monitors. Any help would be great, especially considering we have not had one person point in us the right direction for years now. Thanks Ben

Hi Ben, the first thing I can think of to cause that is if you have software monitoring on in your preferences. Should be by the 24 bit recording check box too. Make sure it's unselected. What's your soundcard to record it? Does it have a software mixer to control the channels? Check those for feeding signals in to each other or you may have multiple busses and one may be doing something long forgotten about! See what you find out. Cheers John

I am not recording, just direct monitoring, using logic as a live effects processor. The problem is coming from the effects. But all of the noise gates and EQing does not take care of the feedback problem created by the distortion, delay and reverb. So basically, all I am asking is if there is an AU Plugin that acts as a feedback eliminating device (like the ones stated above), and if anyone knows of any other tips or tricks for eliminating feedback in a heavily effected live vocal performance. thanks -ben

Hi Ben, I'm still not sure I follow exactly. Software monitoring will impact direct monitoring as well as recording by the way, I was thinking more feedback generated from effects signals going back in to a mic going back out of your monitoring in to you mic etc. But from what I can gather, you're just chucking loads of feedback on to your signals and you want to tame it. Is that right? Reverb and distortion won't give any feedback by themselves unless it's from a scenario I outlined above. The feedback controls are in the delay plug in. There's no feedback eliminating device that I'm aware of, you just want to play with resonance, feedback threshold, delay time length and cross channel feedback.. off the top of my head. Noise gates will help create your own decay envelopes for sounds but if the feedback is heavy, the amplitude will not drop to a level for the noise gate to kick in rendering it pretty useless. Does this make sense?

I suddenly started getting feedback when listening to a recording I had made - voice and instruments both live and software - and found that it was due to the bus on the audio/reverb channel being switched on, and the same as the bus/sends on the instrument and voice tracks (Bus1 on all tracks including reverb..!) I just needed to get rid of the bus send on the reverb track - of course... Hope this is useful for someone. :-)

Thanks Ted, that is a very useful reminder! especially for those who are new to mixer routings and may not have as good a handle on send & return routings yet. Ted pointed out that if a reverb Return Aux has a Send on it and that Send is accidentally routed to the same bus that serves as the input to the reverb [from other channels], it sets up an internal feedback loop -- Send output back to the input of the same channel strip, back out the Send out, back to the same channel strip input, etc -- a classic feedback loop! It can be easy to do that accidentally, usually by selecting all channels to quickly set something up on them all at the same time. For those who are not as experienced as Ted with bussing/signal routing, the rule would be to avoid having a Send on a channel strip set to a bus [which is an output] that's used as the input to that same channel strip -- reverb Return Auxes are probably where that would be most likely to happen.