Monitor Yourself

MIX IT YOUR WAY

Coming back to the real world from those high-end tours, I was determined to incorporate in-ear monitoring with my own band, Spiraling. This posed some challenges. For starters, we’re an independent band that often tours without a monitor engineer. We would require either a house monitor engineer to take care of our in-ear needs, or a way to do our own personal monitor mixes. Relying on house engineers wouldn’t work, for several reasons. For one, they don’t always care. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve met many fantastic live sound people in venues all over the world. But the reality is that a lot of them hear tons of bands every night, many lousy and/or rude. So, they just want to get the job done as easily as possible, get paid, and go home. Can’t hear your synth over the guitar? It’s much easier to grab a knob two feet away from you then try to get the attention of a soundperson who is also harangued by other band members.

You might ask, “Isn’t that what sound check is for?” Yes, but even if your group gets the luxury of a sound check, sound during the performance can still be different for two reasons. First, adrenaline. With the energy of the audience feeding your band, it’s natural to play louder, hit harder, and sing with more energy. Second, you sound check in an empty venue. Sound waves bounce everywhere. When the room is full of people, a lot more sound gets absorbed. Also, even with the isolation that in-ear monitors provide, the outside world can still affect on your mix, for example, if the venue places their PA subwoofers under the stage. This is why supplementing in-ears with a personal monitoring system makes sense.

THREE DEGREES OF CONTROL

There are three basic approaches to doing this, each offering more control than the last. Here they are, along with products that do the trick.

1. The simple “more me” knob: You control your own levels, plus a total mix you get from either the house or your own additional mixer. The Rolls PM50s combines a single mic input (use an adaptor to give it a line from a keyboard) with a mono or stereo monitor feed. Shure’s P2T is a wired or wireless mixer with two XLR/TRS combo inputs for mic or line signals. It’s also available with a beltpack receiever and ear buds as the PSM-200 system. Need more channels for your keyboards? Go for the four-input P4M or PSM-400 bundle. TC Electronic’s new VoiceSolo VSM-300 is interesting: It puts three channels of “more me” (mic and two lines) and an overall mix input into a compact, powered speaker format you can mount on a mic stand, making for an “in-face” as opposed to in-ear solution.

2. The “me plus stems” approach: You control your own mix of mic and line signals, plus aux sends or subgroups from the main or auxiliary mixer. These feed an input hub, which then feeds each band member’s personal mixer. Both the Aviom Pro16 and Hear Technologies’ Hear Back systems can be used in this way.

3. The total personal mix: This setup offers maximum control, as you can mix all channels individually without the need for an additional mixer or aux sends from the house. My band chose the Pro 16 system from Aviom for this, and I’ll explain how we set up and used it below.

Once any of these systems is in place, the next issue is how the sound gets from the mixer to your ears. Wireless belt pack receivers are available from companies like Shure and Sennheiser, or you can plug ’phones right into personal mixers like the Rolls or Aviom. I recommend putting a limiter in the chain to protect your ears from volume spikes. Plus, you may need stereo headphone extension cables. Pro earpieces come in generic or custom-molded versions from companies like Future Sonics, Sennheiser, Shure, and Westone. On a budget, nothing says you can’t use earbuds intended for portable MP3 players like the iPod. Audio-Technica’s ATH-EC7 and the brand-new IE series from M-Audio are two great options here.

CASE STUDY

Sprialing went whole-hog with choice No. 3 for a recent tour. The Aviom Pro16 system consists of an input rack that takes up to 16 analog signals, converts them to a digital signal, then feeds this to personal mixers via standard Ethernet cable. Each A-16II mixer is daisy-chained off the previous one (a central distribution box is optional), and each decodes the signal so the listener has volume and panning control over every analog input. The input rack also has splitter outputs you run into the stage snake, and there’s the key: Not only are band members’ monitoring decisions independent of each other, but all of them happen upstream of whatever’s going on with the house system. If that system (or the person running it) is subpar, there’ll be no impact on your stage mix. Likewise, your monitor needs will have minimal impact on the venue’s resources.

We fed all mics (vocals and drums), and lines (keyboards, bass DI, and the drummer’s click generator) into the inputs on the Aviom AN-16/i-M input module, which has both 1/4" and XLR inputs with mic pres. A 1/4" line-level-only model, the AN-16/i, is more affordable, but to incorporate mic signals, you’ll need to use external mic pres. Or, compromise by running your mics directly to the house, having the engineer route them into as many pre-fader aux sends as can be spared, and taking these back into the Aviom. It’ll help to tell the engineer that this initial hassle means you’ll be bugging him or her far less during the actual gig.

After using the system as described above for some time, I added a rack-mounted 4-channel Behringer DI-4000 into the system, ran my keys into it, then split to the Aviom, then the house. This was mainly to use the DI’s ground lift switches to deal with the inevitable ground hum issues one encounters on the road.

If in-ear monitors make you feel too isolated, here’s a common fix: Place a mic on stage to capture the live stage volume, or point it towards the audience to mix in a bit of the crowd. This doesn’t go to the front-of-house, of course. Still prefer speakers to in-ears? Use a 1/4" TRS to XLR male adaptor cable to feed a powered speaker — like a JBL Eon or Mackie SRM series — right from each A-16II’s headphone jack. Since that jack puts out a stereo signal, and the speaker is expecting a mono, balanced signal, you’ll need to pan each channel on the A-16II all the way to one side or the other to get enough volume.

THE MONO GHETTO

While an in-ear mix can give you a nice stereo perspective, there’s still the outside world to consider. Many venues run their PAs in mono, which means that if you’re relying solely on the PA for your keyboard amplification, then you’re in mono too. This is mainly an obstacle with piano sounds. Many keyboards have lush stereo-sampled grand pianos that sound great — in stereo. Use the keyboard’s “L/mono” output, however, and a lot of them become cheese city. What can you do?

1. Use your keyboard’s “other” output. That’s the one that is not the mono mix output. You’ll get one side of the stereo picture, but won’t have two out-of-phase piano samples thinning out the sound.

2. Many keyboards, such as Yamaha’s new CP300 stage piano (reviewed on page 68), also have piano sounds optimized for mono. Use these in mono amplification scenarios.

3. Carry a small stereo mixer, run both channels of your keyboards into it, pan all channels to one side, and send that side to the house. Use an aux send to feed your monitor. If your keyboards’ left and right outputs are in phase (they should be), all the intended sound will be heard, albeit in mono.

4. Carry a stereo amp system with you. For more info on today’s best options, see “Amps in the Real World” on page 38.

Personally, I like the idea of not carting amplifiers around, especially with our in-ear system working so well. But guitar and bass players still bring their amps to get the all-important tone, so there is something to be said for generating your own sound for all to hear.

A final clarification: Though in-ear and personal monitoring systems are often used together, they are separate types of product. On one hand, big tours employ a dedicated monitor console and engineer located stageside to feed banks of wireless in-ear transmitters; on the other, you can use personal mixers with conventional amps and speakers. Point being, there are more ways to take control of hearing yourself than ever.