How to Run Your Own In Ear Monitors - A Complete Step by Step Guide

hey guys this video is part two of four of my in-ear monitor series in this video i'm going to go over how you can run and mix your own in-ears for your band using a digital mixer an app and a splitter so with this video you're going to learn how to be in charge of what you hear in your monitor mix and you'll never have to ask a monitor a guy for more vocals in your monitor ever again instead you'll have an app on your phone or tablet and you can turn up your vocals in your ears instead of having to ask someone else before we continue i'm assuming that you have a general understanding of how in-ear monitors work and how they are set up if not i would watch video one in this series which you can find by clicking the link up above or a link in the description down below this does take a little while to set up initially and this video is somewhat long but i wanted to give you all the details you needed but once you have it set up it's pretty straightforward after that if you have no idea how to do this i'd recommend watching the whole video but if you're interested in certain parts like you tried figuring this out on your own but you have questions i'll post the time codes on the screen right now so you can skip around and find what you need but if you have no idea how to do this i would watch the whole video because you might miss something okay so first of all why would you do this so this is beneficial for multiple reasons and when my band started doing this it was a huge change and made everything so much easier to hear and it was just beneficial for multiple reasons so first of all running your own in-ears means you don't have to use floor wedges and you don't have to ask a monitor guy or a sound guy to adjust your mix if something isn't sounding right in your mix say you need less guitar in your in-ears you use an app on your phone and you turn down the guitar it's up to you to control your mix second the mix is always going to be the same from venue to venues again you're in charge of setting your own mix and then you save those settings in your digital mixer so the mix you had at your last rehearsal or your last show is the same mix that you're going to have today so you don't have to worry about the mix changing from venue to venue third this is extremely helpful if you use backing tracks i can't tell you the number of shows i've seen where a band uses backing tracks without in-ears and they can't hear the mellow piano part and the bridge of their song because it's not loud enough in their floor monitors and they lose where they are and they turn around and look at their drummer to find their way back into the rhythm of the song i've seen that happen so many times this way you can hear the backing tracks and an optional click track if you want directly in your ears as loud as you want them fourth if your band has to provide sound or pa for shows this is almost a complete no-brainer because it saves so much space on floor wedges um it's just far more efficient you need less equipment it's just cleaners are definitely a lot less time consuming than having to set up floor wedges and mix those and fifth as long as you tell them ahead of time many sound guys actually prefer this because they can plug directly into their system and they don't have to run cables anywhere this isn't always the case some sound guys you know get grumpy um many of them get grumpy if they've already ran the cables and then you show up and say you want to use your own system so just be sure to tell them ahead of time but most people in my experience most sound guys actually prefer this okay so what gear do you need in order to make this work you need three things a digital mixer a splitter and then an app on your phone or tablet to control your mix so first the digital mixer most digital mixers are in a rack space and those are the ones i usually recommend most common ones are the behringer x 32 the behringer x series the 1816 or 12. soundcraft and presonus also have models as well i personally have used the behringer ones almost exclusively so those are the ones that i personally like and i recommend but i've seen other people use the other ones as of right now it seems like the x32 seems to be the most common one that i've seen people use in my experience and for good reason it's a great great system which one you need really depends on how many inputs you need and how many in-ear mixes you're going to be sending to musicians so for example the xr18 has 18 inputs and then it also has six aux outputs the inputs are pretty self-explanatory the aux outputs will be what you use to send the in-ear monitor mix to each musician so again if you need to send six different mixes to six different musicians you're going to need at least six aux outputs the second thing you're going to need is a splitter there's two types of splitters a floor splitter and a rack splitter the splitter is used to split the signal so everybody plugs all of your instruments into the splitter one side of the splitter goes to front of house for your sound guy to mix and one side goes to your in your monitor system for your band to mix your in-ears and you guys mix those separately and the last thing you're going to need is an app every company has its own mixing app to control their digital mixer and each musician will use their phone or their tablet to control their in-ear mix it just connects over wi-fi and i'm going to go over that once we go over the how to set up all right so the setup so again this is going to take a little while to get it initially set up but after you do some of these steps you won't have to do them again so the first step is the digital setup labeling everything in your mixer with a tablet so first download the app you need to control your digital mixer every system is different but every system is going to have an app that you control a mixer with most of the time you'll need an ipad or a tablet instead of a phone to do this but some are able to do this on the phone for the x32 rack which i'm using to demo this video i'm using x32 mix if you cannot find the app for your mixer or they don't have it for like the phone um but they do have it for an ipad but you don't own an ipad look into the app mixing station this is one you can get on your phone and it controls multiple different mixers okay so you'll need to connect a wi-fi router to the digital mixers many digital mixers have a built-in router um and you can use that especially for this initial setup but i found that most of them are really weak and if you look online a lot of people complain about that as well the built-in routers to these mixers are you usually suck so i would definitely recommend getting an external router that's going to be a lot better and more reliable um this isn't really a video on how to set up wireless routers every wireless router is a little different so you'll have to look into your specific router that you get on how to set them up but it's not usually difficult once it's set up plug your router into your mixer with an ethernet cable so once your router is connected to your mixer connect your tablet to the wi-fi network that's connected to your mixer now open the app that controls your mixer for the x32 again this is the app that i'm using um sometimes i do use an x air 18 and i use this app so again every app is a little different at this point some apps require that you know the ip address as well as the wi-fi network um but most of them once they're connected to the wi-fi router that's all you need just keep in mind you might have to manually input the ip address here so once i'm connected to the ip address and the wi-fi network you should be able to control your mixer now so for this tutorial i'm gonna have the smallest band in the world they only need four inputs one vocal one electric guitar which is controlled with an hx stomp amp modeler backing tracks and a click track so in your mixer app label everything on the x32 app you tap here and you select the naming tab and then you give it a name so input 1 is going to be vocals i'm going to go back to home i'm going to do the same thing for input 2. i'm going to label it electric guitar or hx stomp or whatever you want input 3 i'm going to label as backing tracks input four will be click now to label the individual mixes to send to different musicians you do that in the bus setting up here so it's usually labeled bus not aux on mine it said bus this might get a little bit confusing because my x32 has aux listed as something else but those are the quarter inch inputs in the mixer it's a little bit confusing because on the behringer x air ones like the error 18 they label the auxes as the output so just keep that in mind but it's usually under bus so now you want to label each of these buses and give them a name as well just in the same way you click it hit naming and give it a name so musician a who is going to get mix bus one you're going to put their name followed by ears or monitor or mon or something like that so bus one is going to be labeled steve ears steve is musician a in this imaginary band gonna do the same thing for bus two bus two is going to go to musician b this is bob ears bob is the imaginary guitarist and so on and so forth so you keep doing this for every musician in your band so now everything should be labeled all your inputs are labeled with the instruments you're plugging into your in your system and all of your bus sends are labeled as the different mixes for the different musicians who are going to have an in-ear mix okay now that everything's labeled in the digital world let's make some connections so first we're going to go over plugging in your in-ears if you have a rack system and your digital mixer lives inside of a rack you only need to do this once if not you'll have to do this at every show and every musician will bring their own in-ear monitor system and plug in when they get to the show that works as well i've done i've done this both ways this is pretty simple you plug each in your monitor system to a different aux out or out of your mixer so my x32 actually has it labeled out one through eight and labels out seven and eight as the main left and right so remember musician a steve in this case is getting his mix from bus one so you need to plug his in-ear monitor system into aux one or in my case out one and therefore mix bus one is going to go to his ears make sense so musician b bob in our example is going to plug into output 2 because bob mix is coming out of mix bus 2. make sense so plug musician c into output or aux 3 so on and so forth so keep in mind this can be done by plugging in a wireless in your system or you can run a long cable to a wired headphone amp to someone like the drummer for example because the drummer doesn't need to be wireless necessarily so at this point everything is labeled in your digital mixer and all of your in-ear monitor systems wired or wireless are plugged into the proper out or aux ports of your digital mixer all right so plug in your instruments into the split snake for this example of how to set up i'm using my x32 mixer and this is the floor split snake that i'm using if you do end up getting an x32 i'd recommend getting a rack splitter because they can both live in the rack and just makes your life a lot easier but for just doing this tutorial it's just easier for you to see and me to explain it using a floor splitter for this video this is my setup this is my art audio patch bay all it does is just a clean patchbay that allows me to plug in here then i have the cables already connected to my x32 so input one here goes directly in to input one on my mixer input two goes into input two on my mixer again your system might vary up how you're connected this is just mine is set up for this tutorial so on the split snake input one is vocals two is guitar three is backing tracks and four is click just in the exact same way that we labeled everything in the digital mixer so i'm going to plug in vocals into input one of the splitter i'm going to take the output from my hx dump and plug it into input 2. you might have an amp and you'll mic your guitar amp and plug the guitar mic amp into input 2 of the split snake and all this depends on your setup i'm just using an hx stop for this one so for the backing tracks it's coming from an ipad this is my splitter cable it takes a stereo signal coming out of the ipad and splits it so that the right side is coming out of the red cable and the left side is coming out the white cable so the backing tracks are panned all the way to the right and the click track is panned all the way to the left you don't know how to do this i do have an entire backing track tutorial series um you can find links for those above or down in the description down below so i'm plugging these into a direct box right this is the right side which contains the backing tracks i'm plugging that into the direct box click is on the left which is the white cable so i'm plugging that into a direct box and then for both direct boxes you take the xlr out and plug those into the splitter however at this point if you want you can just plug the left side the white cable directly into your in your monitor mixers without it going to the split snake because remember the splitter sends your instruments to both the sound guy and you're in your monitor system you don't have to send the click track to your sound guy i mean he mo likely he just won't plug it in but you have that option you can just plug your click directly into your mixer because you don't need to send that to front of house so all my inputs are connected for this imaginary band you're going to keep doing the same thing for all the instruments in your band okay from the split snake you will take your side of the split snake and plug that into your mixer accordingly so your cable should be labeled so plug in input one the one that says cable one into your side of the split snake into input one of your mixer cable two goes into input two three into three four into four so on and so forth so you plug your vocals into input one of the splitter you then take your side of the splitter plug cable one into channel one of your mixer your sound guy will then take the other side and plug those into his sound system and mix run of house so now that everything is connected to your mixer you also want to properly set your gain here and again this is something you're only going to have to do once and then the mixer will remember these settings so you shouldn't have to do this than that once all this is set up so you want to set your gain for your vocals your eq and all your compression and stuff like that remember this is just for your in-ears this does not change the eq for the front of house system at all you split the signal all the instruments run to the split snake you take one side front of house takes the other side and you both mix differently so the eq you set on your vocals will not be the same as the eq they set at front of house so now so you know singing your mic get the right level set and then add eq and compression and stuff like that to taste do this for all your instruments again once this is done you won't have to do it again unless of course your guitarist changes his setting or turns his guitar up or turns up louder than last time which as a guitar player i admit that's a very likely scenario okay so to review now everything is connected your instruments are all plugged into the split snake your side of the split snake is plugged into your mixer the sound guy has taken the other part of the split snake and plugged it into their system your in-ear monitor systems are all plugged into the correct outputs of the mixer and everything is labeled properly in your mixer with all the gain eq compression stuff like that set up how you want it all right now how musicians control their own in-ears every digital mixer will have some sort of app that you can download to mix just the aux channels so when you get these smaller apps and you can't change things like eq compression and gain you can only control the overall volume of what instruments you want in your mix which is actually a great thing because there's less room to get confused on for all your musicians to find the right menu it's really self-explanatory so when your router is plugged into the mixer have all the musicians connect to that wi-fi network now have all the musicians load the app i'm using mxq to control my x32 again most of these apps will automatically find the ip address once you're connected to wi-fi but if not you can enter it manually here the first step is have them select their specific bus channel in mind you do that by clicking up here and then you click the mix that you want to hear make sure that all your musicians in your band understand this is the first step to do i guarantee within the first three shows one of your band mates will go how come i can't hear my bass in my ears is because they're trying to adjust the bass on their guitarist mixing guarantee it's going to happen make sure they all know this is the first step so make sure you're on your mix and now you just control your own mix so for example i've selected steve ears and steve's ears he wants a lot of vocals a little guitar a lot of tracks and very little click i'ma switch over to musician b bob in his mix he wants no vocals ton of guitar a little bit of backing tracks and a lot of flick back make sense once the musicians are connected to the digital mixer and the wi-fi network they are in charge of mixing their own ears it's super helpful it makes everyone happy with what they hear in their in-ear mix and they're in control of it no one else has to change it it's up to them also again it should save automatically when you're done so what you have set at your rehearsal or your setup for this will be the exact same that you use the next time and that's it you're finally set up it's a lot of steps but again once it's set up next time you should just be able to turn on connect to the network and you're able to control your mix all right that's about how you set it up so my personal recommendation is for gear um for in-ear monitor systems i went over that in my first videos just so you can go watch my recommendations in that video but i'll post links uh down below to my recommendations for in-ear monitor systems and earbuds for mixers i personally love the x-32 rack but it really depends on how many inputs and in-ear mixes you're going to need again if you need 16 inputs don't get a mixer that has 12 inputs really that's pretty basic the x32 pretty much the most common ones used now and for a good reason it's a great system it's about a thousand dollars to twelve hundred dollars for the rack for what it does that's a killer deal it's such a good system the xr18 works really well too it's about half that price at about 500 600 dollars um you get 18 inputs and six aux sends the xr 16 and 12 are also good options depending on how many inputs and aux sends you need the thing that's weird about those is that the 16 has eight combo inputs that accept either xlr or quarter inch and then eight of those inputs are only quarter inch and then the 12 has four of those combos of xlr's quarter inch and eight of them are only quarter inch inputs which is kind of annoying um so just keep that in mind i mean i've survived on them but it's kind of just obnoxious also keep in mind you can use the headphone out as another monitor send with those which i did once when i used the 12 with my trio we needed three different mixes and mix three ended up coming out the headphone amp then there's a way to do that in the mixer so i personally recommend the behringer ones just because those are the ones i've used a lot of people do like the soundcraft ones which i've seen them use i've just never used them personally with my setups but i know a lot of my friends do enjoy those all right for splitters the cheapest one the most common one i've seen are the seismic audio ones either the rack or the floor ones i've used both of them i've never really had any issues with them again you'll just need the one with the right amount of inputs for your band i do plan to switch over to the btpa stuff i follow them on instagram they make some really cool stuff and they do for all sorts of touring acts i would check them out for sure and i do plan to switch over to their setup links for all of those are in the description down below okay just a couple of tips first get an external router almost all the onboard ones suck i did a gig once where i was using the internal router at a wedding and i swear to god it like it lost its connection and then it sounded like a stormtrooper exploding i don't i don't that's the only way i could describe it it was it was horrible luckily it was during the setup of the wedding so we just got glares from the uh from the catering people and stuff like that but um it didn't happen during the ceremony thank god but just get an external router so even if you don't hear stormtroopers exploding the internal ones are just really weak and you almost always lose signals so you have so you're trying to adjust your in-ears and it can't connect over the wi-fi so i would definitely recommend getting a good one another piece of advice let the venue know ahead of time that you have an in-ear monitor system and send a stage plot and an input let's send it with email and also have it printed out with all of your stuff labeled accordingly on your gear i guarantee you will piss off your sound guy if you show up and you don't tell them about this ahead of time you'll piss them off even more if you don't have everything labeled properly third have each musician know exactly where to plug in their instruments and their in-ear monitors the absolute hardest part about this is if you're the only one who knows how to set up your in-ear monitor system and everyone is asking you while you're trying to set up hey where do i plug in again where's my belt pack what channel am i on and so on and so forth so tell your bassist when you get set up plug into channel 3 of the splitter your in your belt pack says base on it the password is 1 2 3 4 5 on the router if you remember those you're good to go it makes your life a lot easier trust me have everyone know exactly where they plug in and exactly how to set up another tip get a wreck to help minimize setup and have as much pre-connected as possible the more pre-connected you can have ahead of time the better another tip are you low on money in-ear monitor systems do get expensive um everyone can get for example a single mix with just a click and vocals for example so if as a band you decide on one mix all you guys are going to get is just click and vocals and then you'll hear the rest of the instruments on stage or in the wedges so you would just need one in your monitor transmitter and then multiple receivers so you would plug from your mixer into one transmitter and then everyone would have an in-ear monitor receiver on their belt set to the same channel as the transmitter so you're all getting the same mix so again that only works if you all agree on sharing a mix so if you all can agree on sharing the same mix you don't have to have your own mix although i will say usually what happens is you guys start to argue your guitar was too loud at the last show i couldn't hear my vocals that's going to happen so if you can get your own mixes it is helpful but i realize budget is a part of it another tip get a talkback mic set up a mic to the side of the stage or behind the singer so the saint or singer or whoever can turn around put their back to the crowd and talk into the talkback mic this will only go to your in-ears and not front of house this way the singer or whoever can say hey skip the next song or pause for a minute i need to tune before we start the next song or whatever inside jokes your band says this is usually what you end up using it for um but it's a great way to communicate with everyone who has in-ears and then the audience doesn't hear it another tip drums are the hardest to set up especially if you're doing a show where you're like second out of three bands and you have to do that minute changeover um it you know drums are the hardest thing to set up with this some bands just do a kick and a snare in the ears others just do like a kick and overhead others do like a trash can mic so it just kind of gets a general mix it really depends on you if you have a good you know 60 to 90 minutes for a sound check you should be good with miking everything but with that 15 minute changeover it always takes a while it always takes a while for the band before you to get all their crap off stage and then you have to run every single drum mic cable to the splitter it just takes a while if you do decide to do this you could get a stage box which is really nice because you plug into that and then has a loom of cables that you go to plug in to the split snake so that really does help i like the elite core ones i'll post a link down below if you are interested in that but just realize that this does take a little while longer to set up but everyone plans ahead of time and everyone knows exactly where to plug in it shouldn't take that long um my last tip honestly plan that something is going to go wrong the first few times you do this this is a new piece of gear get used to just setting up and how it works it might sound silly but practice setting ended up at rehearsal but seriously it's a new member of the band give the in-ear monitor system a name call it karen or something and treat it as such you know get used to how to set it up with any sort of new piece of technology plan for something to go wrong that's just the way it's going to be but the more knowledge you have on it the less likely it's going to be a show stopper you know and it's just going to be a minor inconvenience instead so just plan for it and it gets better once you get comfortable using it it's a new piece of technology it just takes some learning i'd rather be honest with you and let you know something is going to go wrong it's just going to happen just with any new piece of gear so plan ahead and just be as knowledgeable as you can all right that's about it so thank you guys for watching the next two videos are going to be kind of unconventional unique ways to set up in your monitor systems including a diy way to do wireless in-ear monitors for only a hundred bucks and then some other cool little tips so links will be down in the description down below once that video is available if you guys found this helpful please like and subscribe it definitely helps out my channel when you do that links for everything are down in the description down below including my recommendations for gear i'll post some of my band links down below so you can see some of the bands that i use this setup with in case you're curious on that shameless promotion thank you guys for watching and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Scott Uhl

Views: 27,235

Keywords: how to run your own in-ear monitors, how to run your own inears, how to run your own IEM, How to Run Your Own In Ear Monitors, run my own in ear monitors, in ear split snake, x32 rack in ear monitor, X32 rack in ear monitor setup, IEM splitter, in ear monitor rack setup, behringer x32 rack, build an IEM rack, behringer x32 rack setup, in ear monitor setup for band, how to set up in ear monitors, in ear monitors tutorial, in ear monitors, inear monitors, in ear monitor

Id: XQjFhkQTVP8

Length: 21min 57sec (1317 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020