In Ear Monitors - help needed...

[EBS_freak]

Would anybody be interested in actually hearing one of my inears mixes? For shits and giggles I recorded it off the back of my PSM900 from my last gig... which happened to be in a pub (pubs and IEMs can coexist!)

[Owen]

[quote name='EBS_freak' timestamp='1476190066' post='3152103']
Would anybody be interested in actually hearing one of my inears mixes? For shits and giggles I recorded it off the back of my PSM900 from my last gig... which happened to be in a pub (pubs and IEMs can coexist!)
[/quote]

Yes.

[FuNkShUi]

Yeh i'd definitely be interested

[EBS_freak]

OK - I'll grab 30 secs or a few clips or something from the HUGE file and post them up later somehow.

[EBS_freak]

Sorry about the delay - I have been doing some long overdue housekeeping to make room to upload the file!

OK, here's a lovely bit of Taylor Swift for you Warts and all - but thats part of the fun isn't it? This was at a pub - you know, those places where it's not the done thing to wear IEMs? In this example, we have vocal mics, 7 drum mics, a guitar mic, bass DI to desk (via EBS Microbass 2 - no amp), 2 keyboards in stereo Died (again no amps on stage) into the desk... oh and a sample trigger thingy. Stage volume was very low - yes, even the guitarist! - and the front of house duties were taken care of by a pair of RCF 745s and 8004s. I should clarify, there are no ambient mics in the setup - any crowd noise is down to spill though the open mics that are on stage. If you feel that this sounds isolated, you can always XY a couple of condensers at the front of the stage to give you a stereo image of the audience. I'm not that bothered by it to be honest - I prefer less stuff to mess up my mix, although as a front person, you may have more of a want for this. (That's fine - remember it's your mix, so even if those mics were there, you don't have to include them in your mix).

Please take into account that this is mixed for my inears setup (JH Roxannes) and my preference - e.g. lots of kick and snare and bass! Don't listen to it expecting it to sound like a CD mix or front of house mix! Remember, each set of IEMs have their own sound signature so what may feel like too much/too less of certain frequencies may be fine when using a different set of IEMs. This is just to give you an idea of what you can expect.

So here's a bit about the mix - (sorry if it's a bit of a brain dump - it may come across a bit garbled).

This is a stereo feed (from 2 auxes) on the desk, into a PSM900. I took the line out of the PSM900 to record this inears mix. The whole band were on stereo IEMs with their own individual mixes. What you hear through your headphones whilst listening to this is what I heard when playing... obviously, this is mixed for me, playing bass. If you are wondering if IEMs are for you, please do listen on decent headphones so you can get an idea of what it would realistically sound like.

First up, the bass is set the highest it can be set and then everything else is mixed up to that level. Ultimately, if you find yourself craving more bass, everything else needs to be turned down! This level is crucial, as this is the instrument you need to hear and not distort in your in ears... so I tend to start here, regardless of who's mix it is (obviously other people may not want as much bass as you! )

The kit -

The kick drum is compressed to hell and gated - the key is to get this as clean as possible with no end rumble. 65Hz is the key frequency here - it's what gives it the punch in your ears (Same applies for front of house). Pretty much anything under 30hz is rolled off aggressively - although depending on what your IEMs are capable of, you may need to roll off a lot higher as you'll need some serious headroom to make it kick hard. If your inears aren't up to it, you may find the sub frequencies will really muddy up the mix. My JH Audios are fine with it... my ACS, not really.

The snare is compressed pretty heavily (to stop it taking your ear drums out) and pushed up high in the mix. I like to hear the kick and snare to lock on to. Trouble is, the snare starts to sound really dry and boxy - so I liven it up a bit with a lashing of reverb.

The toms (x3), again, are gated to keep the cymbals under control - the cymbals are the most fatiguing thing that you can have in your ears... so I do my best to control it. I roll a lot of the highs off to help keep the toms sounding clean - but more about the overheads later. The best bit about the toms of course, is the ability to have fun with the pans... so yeah, theres some hard panning on the toms, mostly for my own amusement.

The overheads as I stated, are tamed quite heavily - lots of cut on the high frequencies and a hpf to keep the mud out. The overheads are a bit of a nightmare as they tend to pick everything up (especially if you are on a relatively small stage) - on this gig, the guitarist was running a guitar amp, so there is an inevitable bit of bleed... Again, I like to pan these hard left and right for in ears as it makes the kit sound a lot wider in the mix. The key thing is, these are the mics that are going to fatigue your ears quickly... so be very wary of them!

You may have heard some extra percussion - not too much in this track - but there doesn't need to be much processing as it's a spdsx... so pretty reliable at delivering a decent sound. Again, despite being mono foh, you can have some fun panning the sounds in your monitor mix.

I add a tiny bit of reverb on the toms, overheads and spdsx - nowhere near the amount as applied on the snare - just to give it a more live, natural feel. I think there's some claves in the bridge thing - panned right)

AND yes... you could probably get away with two mics on the kit if you wanted...

The keys are run in stereo in the ears - but are mono front of house - again, I pan these around, hard right and left, or depending where I am compared to the keys player. EQ to taste, again, I tame the top to stop the ear fatigue - and if the patches have no reverb, a smidgen of reverb to make them sound less sterile.

Guitar - usually the hardest - as the volume can be all over the place, especially if the guitarist hasn't sorted their patches. So again, compressor comes to the rescue to help even out the low and high volumes. You will probably hear that the guitar solo doesn't really pop out as much as you'd expect - it certainly did front of house - but in your ears, that's not a very useful thing to happen if you are trying to keep your ears fresh for as long as you can! I tend to apply a mild gate to cut some of the spill when the guitarist isn't playing - but this will depend on venue and proximity to other sound sources - on this gig we were quite spread out so the only spill that was really a problem was the sub low bass coming back from the front of house subs - but a HPF at 200Hz cleared that up - no problems! Again, panned to where I wanted to place him in the mix! (He was actually to my left)

Vocals - eqed to taste, again, I tend to tame the top end, HPF to keep the crap out - most of the spill from vocals usually comes from the drums so I try and keep the drummer and vocalists as far apart as possible. Vocals will fatigue your ears quickly - especially female vocals, so keep them under control! You'll notice that the two vocalists are quite far panned. Two reasons, they are placed how they were on the stage compared to me - but crucially, when I sing (my vocal is bang in the middle of the mix - not that I sing on this example), I find it a lot easier to pitch against the other singers. If you try and sing against the playback - you should find this. When your voice is central in your IEM mix, singing becomes even easier.

On the main outs, I use the main eq for the aux to tailor depending upon which IEMs I am using. The ACS don't handle anywhere near what my Roxannes do - so I tend to tame the bass here... and also put a compressor on the main output, just in case somebody does something soft like drop the mic.

Last thing - I'm sure that some guys are going - hang on, how are you eqing and compressing the channels that are on the aux independent of the foh? Simple, I split the inputs - for example, one vocal takes up two channels - so you have a channel for the front of house mix and a channel for your IEM mixes - Like having a separate FOH and Monitor desk in one place!

So that's a brief overview I guess, hope you enjoyed it. Let me know what you think!

[b]Rename the file to have a mp3 extension[/b]

Edited October 12, 2016 by EBS_freak

[EBS_freak]

(Should probably state that the lowend hum at the end is nothing to do with the band - when the fridges or something like that kick in at this particular venue, all the speakers, whether it be the bands or the pub's speakers, start to emit a low end rumble! (Quality filtered electrics then, right?)

Edited October 11, 2016 by EBS_freak

[FuNkShUi]

I cant open it in work, so will check it out later when i get home.
Thanks though Russ.
Super useful to have that overview too

[Lee-Man]

Sounds like a nice usable mix. What desk are you using?

[EBS_freak]

[quote name='Lee-Man' timestamp='1476263714' post='3152732']
Sounds like a nice usable mix. What desk are you using?
[/quote]

I tend to use either a GLD80 or a Mackie DL32R. That mix is off the DL32R - GLD80 in a pub would be even more overkill than the rack of IEMs!
The Mackie stuff is great though, very portable (unlike the GLD80 and the A2412 and AR84 that all come along with it), even better now that they have finally fixed the fairly naff reverb that was previously on it with a new much better sounding one.

There's no reason you can't get a mix like this on pretty much any digital desk - although if you want to use the split trick, you will need enough channels to do it. (You don't need cables to do the split mix either - you just route one preamp input to multiple channels within the software).

Edited October 12, 2016 by EBS_freak

[EBS_freak]

[quote name='FuNkShUi' timestamp='1476256304' post='3152665']
I cant open it in work, so will check it out later when i get home.
Thanks though Russ.
Super useful to have that overview too
[/quote]
No worries - hopefully it is some help to somebody, somewhere!

[charic]

[quote name='EBS_freak' timestamp='1476227517' post='3152589']
(Should probably state that the lowend hum at the end is nothing to do with the band - when the fridges or something like that kick in at this particular venue, all the speakers, whether it be the bands or the pub's speakers, start to emit a low end rumble! (Quality filtered electrics then, right?)
[/quote]

Wow! You like to hear yourself a LOT!

Each to their own though, whats your setup time like?

[EBS_freak]

[quote name='charic' timestamp='1476275263' post='3152888']
Wow! You like to hear yourself a LOT!

Each to their own though, whats your setup time like?
[/quote]

Ha! No struggling to hear and no turning up of any amps!

Setup time is actually really quick, certainly no longer than it would be to set up any other band (and there's less worry about monitor wedges and potential feedback woes that they cause) - the inears mixes don't change that much from gig to gig. It's prudent to have a technical rehearsal to get everybody's inear mix in the ballpark... and because of the close micing, nothing really changes that much from venue to venue, so just a few tweaks to taste sorts it.

All the IEMs are wireless and all the vocal mics are wireless... so there's not that much cabling across stage to actually do. The IEMs are in a rack - connected via a loom... as are the microphones.

The thing that takes the longest is probably micing the kit up - but again, 7 is probably quite a lot for inears, but the venue was quite big, so I used those mics for front of house anyway... so it makes sense to put them in the ears mix. Otherwise, a kick and an overhead would do for most gigs... a couple of mins at most to set those up?

Edited October 12, 2016 by EBS_freak

[charic]

[quote name='EBS_freak' timestamp='1476276118' post='3152911']
Ha! No struggling to hear and no turning up of any amps!

Setup time is actually really quick, certainly no longer than it would be to set up any other band (and there's less worry about monitor wedges and potential feedback woes that they cause) - the inears mixes don't change that much from gig to gig. It's prudent to have a technical rehearsal to get everybody's inear mix in the ballpark... and because of the close micing, nothing really changes that much from venue to venue, so just a few tweaks to taste sorts it.

All the IEMs are wireless and all the vocal mics are wireless... so there's not that much cabling across stage to actually do. The IEMs are in a rack - connected via a loom... as are the microphones.

The thing that takes the longest is probably micing the kit up - but again, 7 is probably quite a lot for inears, but the venue was quite big, so I used those mics for front of house anyway... so it makes sense to put them in the ears mix. Otherwise, a kick and an overhead would do for most gigs... a couple of mins at most to set those up?
[/quote]

I was thinking the clip on route for speed!

Very crisp sound though

[EBS_freak]

The drum mics are clipped onto the toms and snare.

Edited October 13, 2016 by EBS_freak

[EBS_freak]

I don't know if anybody else has been following the progress of the Stephen Ambrose's Adel technology but I found this keynote speech pretty interesting and exciting for so many different reasons - not only for the music world but also giving hope to those with hearing loss issues.

Thought I would share in case anybody else is interested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS_2UchbEPM

[Bigwan]

Has anybody any experience of Audiofly IEMs? I'd never heard of them until watching the DTP tour vlog and Mike St Jean (DTP Keyboard player, programmer) is an endorsed user. Prices seem pretty good at £370 for quad driver on Amazon.

[EBS_freak]

No experience - 370 for a quad is pretty good... but I'd still take a UE900 over one (under 200 from eGlobal)

[Dood]

[quote name='EBS_freak' timestamp='1476054216' post='3150931']

The P9HW still requires XLRs - it has a splitter cable that goes to two XLR cannons. I personally don't like it as I see it as a weakness that is bound to fail on you st some point - and you are unlikely to be able to source a spare easily.

The EQ on the pack is fairly primitive compared to what you can do with a decent desk and the limiter is pretty primitive too - all it does is set a max volume on the volume knob so if you turn it up it doesn't get any louder.
[/quote]

Just coming back to this one briefly and apologies for derailing the current conversation; last night's dep was another great gig and I had the pleasure of using a Sennheisser EW300 G3 which did a grand job. It is still out of my budget though and I don't want to settle for a system that isn't fully up to the job for a busy function band.

I'm still wondering about a 'wired' solution for now that isn't so clumsy as my external mixer. In short, I'd like something of the Fischer / LD HPA / Behringer P1 belt worn pack... but why do they have to be so hefty! It's ridiculous. Now, I do appreciate that a certain amount of room needs to be made for a pair of XLR combo jacks but the P1 practically pulled my suit trousers down!

Is anyone making something which isn't a daft price essentially for a headphone amp with a pair of balanced line inputs? - I've found a kit type board for less than £30 so I can't imagine that the design really warrants spending 100's!

[Dood]

Oh and I'd prefer a powered (battery) system rather than a passive volume control.

[EBS_freak]

Solution is simple - desk aux to headphone amp on top of your amp... then headphone extender cable that is plugged into passive volume control on your belt.

Edited October 15, 2016 by EBS_freak

[TrevorR]

Dood, I use a Fischer belt pack but our guitar player found it too bulky. Solution... a small Fischer passive in line belt pack from Thomann, and a custom cable from Obbm (normal Jack to mini Jack) as an extension from the bigger Fischer belt pack that now just sits on his pedal board. Sorted!

Edited October 15, 2016 by TrevorR

[Dood]

[quote name='TrevorR' timestamp='1476573437' post='3155398']
Dood, I use a Fischer belt pack but our guitar player found it too bulky. Solution... a small Fischer passive in line belt pack from Thomann, and a custom cable from Obbm (normal Jack to mini Jack) as an extension from the bigger Fischer belt pack that now just sits on his pedal board. Sorted!
[/quote]

Thanks TrevorR!

I have to admit to being a bit of a fussy pants and am hoping for a solution with as few additional parts as possible. Yourself and Russ I think are suggesting the best way forward so I think something like the Fischer, LD, Presonus or Millennium style headphone amp with a break out box will do the job nicely. It'd probably only be a temporary measure until i get a wireless pack anyway.

[EBS_freak]

Dood - just go for the radio... by the time you have sorted all the units and the cables you still won't be happy. Bite the bullet and get a Sennheiser... or a G2 off eBay.

[Dood]

[quote name='EBS_freak' timestamp='1476618603' post='3155631']
Dood - just go for the radio... by the time you have sorted all the units and the cables you still won't be happy. Bite the bullet and get a Sennheiser... or a G2 off eBay.
[/quote]


You know me so well

The G2 is still a good system yeah?

[EBS_freak]

[quote name='dood' timestamp='1476650649' post='3156044']
You know me so well

The G2 is still a good system yeah?
[/quote]

Yes - its like the G3 without the bells and whistles. The audio and RF are comparable - with the exception that the G3 uses both the inbuilt antenna and headphone cable as aerials. The G3 has slightly lower noise floor - but negligible once you are playing.