One of the biggest challenges most musicians face when playing live is being able to actually hear themselves in the monitors. This is a problem that is only made worse by Bass players that wanna feel that thump even louder (that’s me), guitarist’s who need just a little more volume (that’s Paul), drummers who hit like the god of thunder (you know who you are) and singers that always seem to need more vocals in their monitor….whew, it’s wonder we can hear anything at all.

Ultimate EarsFor some the solution has been to move to IEMs (In Ear Monitors). Over the next few weeks we will run a series of articles that cover every aspect of setting up and using IEMs for your monitoring needs. There are musicians that swear by IEMs and others that swear at them. It’s not a one size fits all solution. Indeed for the best IEM experience it’s all about finding that custom fit that works for you and your band.

We will detail exactly the approach that our band has taken and break down all the components so you can figure out what the right fit will be for your band.

Part 1 – The Overview:

A lot of musicians are uncomfortable with making the jump from floor monitors to IEMs because they’ve heard horror stories from other musicians. Or maybe they “tried it once” but didn’t like it. Often, it’s just cause they’re used to the way they’ve always done it with the tried and true floor monitors (and all the potential problems that come with them).

I’m not going to try and tell you that IEMs are the best solution for every musician. They’re not. If you play in a cool jazz trio, you probably don’t need them. But if you play in a band with lots of volume and have trouble hearing yourself, you may be a good candidate.

Ray rockin' his Ultimate Ears

There are a few things that will help to make the IEM experience better:

1. It works best if every member of the band is using IEMs
2. Custom Molded IEMs generally make for a far better experience if you can afford them.
3. Unless you have a dedicated monitor engineer, then you will tend to get a much better mix if you control your own monitor mixing for the band. Of course exceptions to this rule apply, but you can not assume that every FOH (Front of House) sound man will know exactly how to mix your IEMs. And a bad IEM mix is many times worse than a bad floor wedge mix.
4. It’s best if every musician has their own individual mix. You can get away with sharing a mix if you have to (Paul & I shared a mix for a while), but it’s so much better if you hear everything just the way you like it.
5. A digital monitor mixer is a nice addition since you can quickly save mixes and adjustments. Not that an analog mixer won’t work (the Allen Heath MixWizard’s work very well), but a good digital mixer can help to keep you from bringing in extra effects/compressors/limiters/eq’s, etc.

Ok, let’s discuss some of these points in a little more detail. I have played in bands where no one used IEMs, bands where a couple players used IEMs and bands where everyone in the band used IEMs. By far the best experience for me has been when everyone is on IEMs. Eliminating all floor wedges helps to reduce potential feedback problems. Additionally, it will help to reduce the overall stage volume (sound guys will love you for this).

In our current band we all use custom IEMs from Ultimate Ears (UE-11′s). We have all used the universal fit IEMs previously. Paul used Ultimate Ear universals, I had the Westone UM2′s, Chance (our singer) used Shure universal fit. While they all did the job to a degree, it was a HUGE step up when we moved to the custom molded Ultimate Ears. Yes, there can be a significant price difference. But when you look at the difference even the entry level custom fit gives you in sound, it’s worth spending the money if you can. For instance, Paul initially purchased the Ultimate Ears UE-4 (which is their entry level custom mold) for his first custom molded IEMs. These are $399 on the Ultimate Ear site. I paid around $250 for my universal fit Westones. An extra $150 would have got me into custom molds. To be technical about it, you’ll have to spend an additional $50 or so to get the molds made by a local audiologist…but really that’s a bargain…I mean, I would have paid a lot more to get that goo shot in my ears…wouldn’t you? A quick word of warning here: Make sure you do your research and go with a quality IEM manufacturer. I have personally been burned by trying to find bargain IEMs and ended up spending $400 and waiting 6 months for IEMs that did not fit …at all (more on this in an upcoming article).

Let’s move on to who should do the mixing for your IEMs. You can go about this a couple different ways. If you don’t want to buy a mixer then you could get wireless units for all your IEMs (your gonna want these anyway…no one wants to be tethered). You could then have the FOH sound guy run his aux outs (monitor mixes) to your wireless units and then he will work with you to set up your mix. You need a really good sound guy for this and usually a fair amount of time for a sound check. We’ve had to take this approach on a few fly-in gigs and it worked out ok every time since we were working with pro sound guys who really knew their #%$@.

However, our usual setup is a rack mounted mixer that lives next to our drummer (Brian). We have used the Allen Heath MixWizard WZ3 as well as the PreSonus StudioLive 16.4.2 and are currently using the Yamaha LS9-16. PreSonus StudioLiveAll three of these mixers (and many others) will work quite well for this application. I’ll get into more detail about all the gear we use (and have used) in future articles. Since there are four of us, we need at least 4 aux sends (8 if you want stereo mixes). Each aux send will go to the wireless transmitter of an individual player (ie: Aux 1 – Drummer, Aux 2- Guitar, Aux 3 – Singer, etc). One of the reasons we like digital boards is that the monitor mixes can usually be controlled using the faders instead of knobs. This makes for much quicker adjustments if we need Brian to fix something for us during a performance.

As I mentioned above, it works much better if every player has their own mix. You can share if you absolutely have no choice (ie: not enough auxes or wireless units) but it’s not the best situation. Even though Paul and I like roughly the same mix, we found that the small differences in what we like really do make a difference. Also, I sing quite a bit and so I like to have my voice relatively high in the mix. The problem is that if you’re a singer, the person sharing your mix is going to get blasted, since it’s harder to hear your vocal when you’re actively singing, so you have a tendency to turn it up. Another nice thing is to have stereo mixes if you can. We found that it really helps to open up the sound stage of the IEMs when you have some stereo separation of the instruments. We can get by fine with mono when we have to, but we smile bigger when we have stereo.

The next question would normally be: How do you get the inputs to both the FOH mixing board and the monitor board. There are a few different solutions, but what we’ve found that works best for us is using a splitter snake. A quick search on Google will show you that splitter snakes can be very expensive. However, a good solution for most weekend bands or smaller working bands is what is sometimes called the “Poor Man’s” splitter. These are snakes that don’t have ground lifts or transformers for each channel and can be had for around $275 (16 channel). We used one of these for quite a while and it worked perfectly fine at every gig and we never had a sound guy give us a problem about using it…although we have on occasion had to explain what what we are doing with this setup. All the sound guys at big venues had seen & used splitter snakes before and the smaller venue sound guys were just ecstatic not to have to setup and run our monitors. We’ve made good friends with a number of sound guys by setting up and running our own monitors, which in turn helps to keep the stage volume down. Sound guys love us! Our attitude is to try and make their night/life as easy as possible. So, all the instruments/mics run into the splitter and then that splits off and one snake runs to FOH and the other to the monitors….easy peasy. If you find that you absolutely have to have ground lifts and transformers on every channel you will find the price goes WAY up (like 3 to 4 times or more). We were lucky enough to find a rack mountable 24 channel splitter with ground lifts and transformers on eBay for $400!! So, keep your eyes open. For an awesome article on splitters, check out this article by Whirlwind.

So there you have it. That’s a general overview of how we run IEMs for our band. In the next article I’ll get into the details of all the gear we use and our likes/dislikes, etc. In the meantime, as always, we welcome your comments. Do you have another approach that works for you? Other products that you’ve found to be great for IEM mixes? Is there anything we left out or that you would like us to cover in more detail.

Until next time…enjoy your gig!