okay, we’ve all seen them. those ‘hearing-aid looking things’ that everybody on tv seems to be wearing. so what’s the deal?
well, if you’ve been on a stage before you know about monitors. and you also know how loud and silly they can get. guitar player plays too loud. singer needs more level in his monitor. keyboard player turns up his amp to hear over the singer. guitar player turns up to get over the keyboard amp. lather, rinse, repeat…
what you might not know is how much loud monitors can mess up how things sound for the audience as well. all that stage volume doesn’t stay obediently on the stage. it bleeds all over everything. many is the show i have mixed around the monitor roar [i once mixed an entire show around a guitar amp, but you really don't ask b.b. king to turn it down...]. that does not make for an enjoyable evening for anyone.
enter our temporal audio salvation, the in-ear monitor. put simply, these are just little headphones with a mix of everything in them that only the wearer hears. so, no open speakers on stage. no problems, right?
well, kinda. you see, for every issue that in-ear monitors solve, there’s an issue that they create. i have folks ask me all the time about my in-ears because “i want to get some of those for my band so we can hear better’, and i can tell they have no idea what actually goes into a successful in-ear monitoring system. and yes, it’s a system, not just the little bits you put in your ears.
so, what’s needed to make in-ear monitors work? well, first you need some sort of monitor mixer. i’ve seen in-ear monitors mixed from FOH, but i don’t recommend it. every person chews up 2 aux sends [for stereo mixes... more about that later...], so a band of more than 4-5 requires a pretty big console. and most churches don’t have the personnel resources to man a separate monitor console. so the answer for many churches is a ‘personal monitor system’. these are little distributed systems [often run on common cat5 cable like computers use] that put a small mixer at each performer’s location that they can adjust themselves. hear technologies and aviom both have very popular systems. i’ve also seen some interesting things from roland [theirs is integral to their digital mixing system]. the idea with all these systems is that you feed these little mixers from some combination of inputs/groups/auxes and then each performer makes their own mix to suit their needs.
secondly, you need the actual monitors themselves. and just as there are dozens of good speakers to choose from, there are dozens of in-ear monitors to choose from. but they all fit into two basic camps; universal, and custom. universal monitors come with a variety of different sleeves/inserts so they can be worn by just about anyone. customs are custom made from an impression of the performers ear and can only be worn by that person. the trade-offs between these are fairly obvious. customs are more comfortable and provide a better fit, which contributes to better sound, especially in the low-end. universals can usually be had cheaper and are a one-size fits all, so many members of your team can share the same unit.
well, as usual i have prattled on and i haven’t even touched wireless issues, ambient mics, the occlusion effect, the importance of stereo mixes, blah, blah, blah. so we’ll call this part one of another [sigh] multi-part series. until then, if you have any specific in-ear monitor questions, please feel free to drop me a note or comment…
bfn,
brian
