[hungry_pete]

Guess I encountered a classic problem of trying to sing some backing vocals for our band. I'm the main guitarist of the group but I really think backing vocals would (eventually!) make us sound better and to be honest, I'd like to develop my singing.

Now I'm no natural singer so I practise quite hard. I like to plug my mic into a monitor speaker back at home and practise singing whilst playing simple bits of guitar to try and keep me in key. When it came to putting into a band practise, I found it difficult to hear myself! In my limited experience singing is about hearing and adjusting your pitch to complement the muscle memory of notes and tones. So I bit the bullet and turned my mic up at band practise so I could hear - for our main singer to promptly turn my mic back down. I did try and point out that singing without hearing myself is just impossible and got a look rather like I'd just spoken Martian.

Obviously, I don't want my voice to dominate, but I've got to hear. Good monitoring would help I have no doubt, but I'm not sure the band can push to a mixer that will have enough channels for different mixes for everyone. I'm wondering if there is any one out there who's had similar problems with singing in a band, any good rants they had with the main singer and how they solved the problems!