in my last post i talked a little about the finer points of in-ear monitors.
this time around we’re gonna get even finer. [more fine?]
there are a couple of inherent hazards in dealing with in-ear monitors. one of them affects singers [and sometimes horn players], and can be a particularly pesky issue to deal with. this little issue is called ‘the occlusion effect‘.
the occlusion effect can best be experienced by putting your fingers in your ears and singing. sounds weird, don’t it. it’s not that the sound of your voice goes away, it’s that the sound just gets all boomy and muffled sounding. this is caused by the vibration your voice makes in your head resonating in the small space left in your ear canal when you plug your ears.
so, guess what happens when you put a set of ear-monitors in your ears and sing? same thing. you’ve got the inherent amount of boomy icky voice mixing with whatever the ear-monitors are doing. and this can lead to some unhappy singers, and confused sound engineers. the latter because the only person who can hear this weirdness is the singer themselves. so their vocal sound can sound awesome to everyone else in the band and still sound weird to them. and then when they complain we all just look at them with that ‘there goes the diva singer again’ look, and we can’t figure out what all the fuss is about.
so what do we do about this? well, there are a couple of things you can do. the first approach is to cut the lower frequencies on the singer’s channel so that the sound they hear coming back to them will then ‘mix’ with the sound in their head and sound good. of course, that means their vocal may sound pretty thin to everyone else. if you have the luxury of a dedicated monitor console, you can split the singer’s channel and eq one for them and one for everyone else. if you’re like most of us and are using some form of ‘personal monitor mix’ system, you don’t have that luxury. in that case, i usually try to split the difference. i’ll cut quite a bit of the lows out of the singers mics, but not enough to make them sound like AM radios to each other. just enough to help overcome the occlusion.
the second approach is actually more effective in the long run. since the occlusion effect is caused by the chamber left in our ear canal between the ear monitor and our ear drum, the more of that space we can eliminate, the less the effect will be. and the way to do that is with custom in-ear monitors. you see, universal in-ears only go a short distance into your ear, but customs go much deeper, usually up to or beyond the ‘second bend’ in your ear canal. there are many good reasons to use custom molded in-ear monitors, but this reason alone is enough to give them a go, at least for all your singers. i know the occlusion used to drive me batty, but as soon as i got the customs, the problem became far more manageable.
and that brings me to a discussion of universal vs. custom in-ear monitors. which will have to wait for another day. until then…
bfn,
brian
