How to create such a great live vocal and guitar sound?

[jonpall]

Check out this live cover of Wrecking ball. I don't like the song that much but I noticed how great the vocals and the guitar sound for a live recording. Does anyone know which effects, if any, they are using in the mixer on this recording? Maybe an exiter? Just a lot of reverb and good eq?

http://giel.vara.nl/media/307311

[gno]

The mix is really nice. This sounds great for a live mix. Definitely studio quality. Here are some things I'm hearing:

I'm sure some very nice tube pre-amps for both guitar and vocals are in use.

There is heavy compression on both vocals and guitar as the dynamics are kept to a fairly narrow window. Example 2:22 the held out guitar strum doesn't decay in volume at all - the volume is even from start to finish. Of course heavy compression on acoustic guitars is very common. The quality of the compressors they are using is great as are the settings - for example the attack setting on the guitars it not too fast to allow the picking sounds to breathe.

The EQ's are set up really well for both vocals and guitars - for example high pass filters on the vocals to prevent the vocal low end to interfere with the guitar low end. There is nice high sibilance - it could be an exciter or multi-band compressor set up just right for the high freqs.

There could be some psuedo-stereo processing going on for the guitars as the width of the guitars seems larger. Could be a touch of stereo processing for the vocals too. I use PSP stereo processing plugins to achieve those types of effects. PSP makes excellent pro plugins and they are not terribly expensive.

And then the reverb is excellent. Very transparent. Could be a really nice convolution. Some of the high end true stereo convolution reverbs (like Altiverb) can add to that stereo effect.

[Felipe Carvalho]

Well, it IS a studio after all.

The problem of reproducing this live with amplification (on a gig or bar for example) is that you have to deal with feedback from the audience mix, plus you have to take your fancy gear around.

I would never bring my modest gear down to bars and gigs (I am very reluctant even with my cables, mic, and the small efx pedal already). I do know people that take interfaces and notebooks, then nowdays its fairly easy to have an effect chain that even reproduces tape saturation on the audience mix.

Mainly, the problem to get the commercial CD quality is compression levels, due to feedback. And broadcast mix is usually more compressed.

Edit: AND, they are awesome :)