# Monitoring, IEMs, and setup time



## meowfaceman (Aug 5, 2015)

Hey all. So, to set the stage (so to speak), my band has a guitar, a bass (me), two violinists, a keyboard, and drums. Additionally, four of us share vocal duties, including myself. Violinists and keyboardist are on DIs. Guitarist and I can be DI since we use sims, but we have our own cabs.

We're just starting out, and we mostly play on small, multi-band shows. None of the shows we've played so far have had any sort of monitoring available, so singing is pretty difficult. I'm fairly new to gigging, so I don't really know what "normal" is when it comes to playing live, but having no monitoring doesn't seem normal.

I'm also a little leery of trusting the sound guys we've encountered -- I played a show with a different band where we had everything available via DI, and this seemed to flummox the sound guy. This is partially my fault, as I didn't give as much warning as I should have (told him an hour or two before the show), but the result was that everything was super complicated. As a result, I'd like to minimally impact FOH.

The way I figure it, there are a few approaches we could take:

1. The most sensible: we bring our own powered wedges and XLR splitters for our microphones. We won't be able to hear each other sing, which sucks, but it's better than nothing.

2. A little more complicated: I'm getting a Crest XR20M, which we could make our own individual monitor mixes with. This is more flexible. Complexity goes up here in terms of cabling, this could be manageable. We would still bring our own wedges, but each singer could get their own stage mix.

3. Go hog wild: IEMs and my Crest XR20M. Initially I assume we'd start with a single stereo mix for cost reasons and build up as needed. I'm not worried as much about cost, as I don't mind improving over time. What I am worried about with this idea is that setup time between bands seems basically unmanageable. In this case, what I imagine we'd do is that I'd get some XLR snakes like these and pass them to different parts of the stage. Everyone plugs their DIs and mics into the snakes and FOH can take what they want/need from there. In this case, the guitarist and I would remain with cabs for both stage noise and in case FOH isn't prepared for DI guitars and bass.

Option 3 is really attractive, partially because I have a gear addiction problem, and partially because it opens up other options like click tracks, individual mixes, etc. However, setting this up in the 15 minutes in between bands seem like an impossibility.

So, I guess I have a few questions: Is a complete lack of monitoring normal? Do bands with IEMs actually set up that fast, or are they playing solo shows where setup time isn't as big of an issue? Do any of these approaches make sense, or am I insane person?

Any improvements on what I've suggested here would be appreciated. Sorry for the wall of text.


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## Alex Kenivel (Aug 5, 2015)

I've played so many underground and DIY shows, I'm pretty used to not being able to hear anything. 

That being said, I don't know much about personal monitoring, but it sounds like a fun endeavor.


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## meowfaceman (Aug 5, 2015)

Alex Kenivel said:


> I've played so many underground and DIY shows, I'm pretty used to not being able to hear anything.
> 
> That being said, I don't know much about personal monitoring, but it sounds like a fun endeavor.



I guess I should have also added option 0: do nothing and deal with it. 

It's kind of a neat puzzle to try to unwind!


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## Blasphemer (Aug 5, 2015)

meowfaceman said:


> Is a complete lack of monitoring normal?


Nope. Sounds like you're playing basement shows or some really crappy venues.



meowfaceman said:


> Do bands with IEMs actually set up that fast, or are they playing solo shows where setup time isn't as big of an issue?


We use IEMs in my band, and we get set up pretty quickly. We have all of the IEMs, the interface we use to do our mixes/get our clicks in our ears and samples to FOH, and all of the DIs we need all in one case. Open the back of the case, plug in the XLR to my cabinet (has a mic eliminator) and the other to our other guitarists Axe-fx, and the final one into our bassists head. Then the DI's mounted inside the rack are for FOH samples and the bass DI (which is the same that we have in our ears - the signal is sent parallel to FOH). 

We had a show semi-recently that we felt like we took a long time to set up, but one of our friends timed it after we kind of jokingly asked them to earlier. From the moment we first started putting stuff on stage, we were playing in almost exactly 10 minutes. Having everything in one rack makes everything a lot quicker as long as you have a routine of plugging in that you can all get down in a timely fashion.



meowfaceman said:


> Do any of these approaches make sense, or am I insane person?



Yes and no. From my perspective (I do live engineering professionally, and not to sound too cocky, but I'm fairly good at it ), you're on the right track with your 3rd option, but the idea of everyone sharing a mix will go sour pretty quickly. Also, if you plug in your DIs to the snake heads you posted, where does the sound dude get his lines from? You would need both ins AND outs to make this work. Mic splits would be what you need, which can vary with quality depending on what you get. 

You said price isn't a big issue, and if that is actually the case, something like this would be a good way to go. You can build something like this yourself for less than half the price of what these guys want (depending on what board, IEMs, and snakes you get). With this it would be a super fast plug 'n' play kind of situation.


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## Devyn Eclipse Nav (Aug 5, 2015)

I'd definitely go option three, I played with a band that had lots of DIs and in ears, and it helped immensely that everything was pretty self contained - setup took no time.

Agreed with blasphemer that a single mix get real annoying, real fast. The guitarist in the band relied on the front monitors instead of in-ears, because the way the monitor mix is for inears, he can't hear himself, because it's so vocal focused.

But yes, if you're having so much go DI, then you'll want reliable monitoring of SOME SORT, be it front wedges your bring on your own, or in-ears. And lemme tell you, as long as they don't fall out and get tied up in your hair, in-ears are A LOT more reliable than front wedges. At said gig, I couldn't get a good monitor mix for the life of me that wasn't causing issues with other people - and then I used the in-ears.


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## DudeManBrother (Aug 5, 2015)

Check out a Jam Hub. You can get a great mix of each individual and turn up or down their instruments in your personal mix without changing what they hear. For awesome and inexpensive IEMs, check out MEelectronics m6 pro.


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## meowfaceman (Aug 6, 2015)

Awesome, thanks for the feedback guys. Good to know I'm on the right track.



Blasphemer said:


> We use IEMs in my band, and we get set up pretty quickly. We have all of the IEMs, the interface we use to do our mixes/get our clicks in our ears and samples to FOH, and all of the DIs we need all in one case. Open the back of the case, plug in the XLR to my cabinet (has a mic eliminator) and the other to our other guitarists Axe-fx, and the final one into our bassists head. Then the DI's mounted inside the rack are for FOH samples and the bass DI (which is the same that we have in our ears - the signal is sent parallel to FOH).



Do you bring your own mics? Also, what do you guys do about drums? I've heard of people hooking up just the snare/kick to the mix.



Blasphemer said:


> Yes and no. From my perspective (I do live engineering professionally, and not to sound too cocky, but I'm fairly good at it ), you're on the right track with your 3rd option, but the idea of everyone sharing a mix will go sour pretty quickly. Also, if you plug in your DIs to the snake heads you posted, where does the sound dude get his lines from? You would need both ins AND outs to make this work. Mic splits would be what you need, which can vary with quality depending on what you get.



Interesting. So if I get something like this (disregarding the fact that I don't need 100 feet of snake) for the violins/keyboards/potentially the bass/guitar, then we get a bunch of these for the mics (including the drum mics), then I should be golden?



Zeno said:


> But yes, if you're having so much go DI, then you'll want reliable monitoring of SOME SORT, be it front wedges your bring on your own, or in-ears. And lemme tell you, as long as they don't fall out and get tied up in your hair, in-ears are A LOT more reliable than front wedges. At said gig, I couldn't get a good monitor mix for the life of me that wasn't causing issues with other people - and then I used the in-ears.



Time and age have fixed the hair issue for me.  I definitely love the idea of IEMs for a lot of reasons, so I'm glad that this is a lot more doable than I was thinking.


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## Blasphemer (Aug 6, 2015)

meowfaceman said:


> Do you bring your own mics? Also, what do you guys do about drums? I've heard of people hooking up just the snare/kick to the mix.


I have my own 58 that runs off of a split for vocals, but other than that, no. All of the guitars and bass that we hear in our ears is coming in DI, and our drummer doesn't want to hear his kick or snare (I've asked. I don't get it, either). We're all playing to a click, so hearing each other isn't necessarily the most important thing, as we're all synched to the same source, anyway. As long as each individual can hear what he needs to, it works out well (for us, anyway). 

This also means that the FOH engineer can throw up his mics in front of our cabs however he wants, which can be a struggle when using live mics for both FOH and monitors. 




meowfaceman said:


> Interesting. So if I get something like this (disregarding the fact that I don't need 100 feet of snake) for the violins/keyboards/potentially the bass/guitar, then we get a bunch of these for the mics (including the drum mics), then I should be golden?



The splits are what you would need, yes. The snake with the returns, though, is still not quite there. If you look at that ebay link I posted before, that console has direct outs that you can send to front of house. Those take the signal from the input, and patches it directly to an output before it even hits the gain pot. Most monitor-specific consoles have those, and they would work better for you than returns on a snake, IMO. Look into a used Allen & Heath Mixwizard. Those go for pretty cheap (usually around 4-600 USD), and have direct outs on them. 





If you had a console like this, you wouldn't even need the mic splits, as they'd be doing the same thing as the DIs on the console.


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## GalacticDeath (Aug 6, 2015)

I'm basically on the same boat as you. Currently building my monitoring setup and I was going to buy the Crest XR20M but ultimately decided to buy a digital mixer instead, the Behringer X32 Rack. Haven't gigged with it yet but so far so good. During rehearsal it's nice that everyone can adjust their own mix via WiFi. We're just using headphones for rehearsal but we're gonna be buying Sennheiser ew 300 IEM's for live use.


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## BlueGrot (Oct 8, 2015)

Rolls Corporation - Real Sound - Products PM55P

Run your common IEM mix through this, plug the instrument of your choice(guitar/bass/vox) into the other as a pass through. Done.


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## JohnIce (Oct 9, 2015)

If you have the cash then IEM is a great idea. I don't do it myself but my co-guitarist and drummer do, and a lot of my friends in other bands.

As just a singer and guitar player I can manage without it, but dude... as soon as I read violins, my mind just went: "Fuaark, drop what you're doing, go out and get in-ears!"  If your band is loud enough that you can't hear yourself singing, trying to intonate a fretless instrument in that environment is gonna be, well, impossible really. I sh*t you not, damn near every time I see a rock band perform with strings it sounds like crap. Even big acts like Apocalyptica have done festival shows where they sound way too out of tune to be enjoyable. Screw the vocals, get those violinists some decent monitoring!


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