Understanding In-Ear Monitors

greetings drummers today we're going to look at something that i get requests for all the time we're going to talk about in-ear monitoring should you use in-ear monitors how are they used what is it all about let's take a look okay so there's probably nothing more misunderstood as drummers than this concept of in-ear monitoring now you may have heard the terms being thrown about and what we're going to do today is we're going to have a look at what in-ear monitoring is and how it's all how it all works and how it differs perhaps from the way that you're doing things now and perhaps even give you some insight on as to why you should move towards an indian monitoring system or whether in fact you even do need to go towards an in-ear monitoring system before i even get started a few people to thank obviously a big thanks to the perth drummers community they've put forth a bunch of questions on this topic that's allowed me a really good platform to address monitoring and what it's all about if you do like this content of course be sure to like and subscribe but also want to point out another channel on youtube uh it's called riffs beards and gear and the gentleman on that particular channel um was somebody that i looked towards i watched a lot of his videos when i was learning to put in-ear monitoring systems together he's done a great series of videos on how he came about how he arrived at his monitoring setup why he bought the things that he did the importance of planning it and all that sort of stuff so if you haven't already definitely go to that channel check out those videos because he explains things very very well and he also uses some terminology like open closed systems that we'll be getting into today i'll probably go a little bit more in depth but what i'd like to do is to make sure that you you get an understanding really of the concepts of in-ear monitoring so i'm not going to worry too much about brands it's not about brands it's really about understanding what the whole concept is about and to do that we firstly need to have a little bit of a backwards step and do a refresher or perhaps this is new information to you about a basic pa system and what all the components of a pa system do it's important to understand that signal flow so that when we move to talking about in-ear monitoring you know why it's there in the first place okay so if you're not aware when we get on stage most of the instruments at venues are going to be marked up okay and especially vocals but often drums as well and what will happen is we're going to get a series of microphones kick drums snare drum toms potentially overheads vocalists guitarists bass players keyboardists it's all going to be plugged in microphoned up but though each microphone or each channel let's call them is going to be sent to the mixing desk which is a board digital analog which all of the microphones will be plugged into and then you'll have a sound engineer or a mixing engineer whose job it is to mix or balance all of those different signals that are coming in your kick your snare your toms guitars bass mix it all together to get a satisfying blend of all of those sounds in regards to volume and you know and shape of the sound and to send all of that as one signal out to the audience and that's done via the main outputs on a mixing desk which we call the main left and main right or the main outputs so the microphones on stage are inputted or inputs for the mixing desk the mixing occurs within that desk and then the mixed sound is output to these main front of house speakers which face the audience so hopefully that's clear now the reason i bring this up is in addition to our main outputs most mixing desks also incorporate auxiliary or secondary outputs which can feed more speakers okay why is that important well because those more speakers are typically the speakers that we see as musicians on stage when we perform and you probably already know that when we fire up those speakers what we want to hear through those speakers is absolutely different to what the audience wants to hear while the audience wants a nice balance of everybody if you're a vocalist on stage you want your speaker to have more vocals in it so that you can hear yourself right so it's important that these auxiliary outputs or these extra speakers that are sent out of this mixing desk are able to have their own specific mix relevant to the person that's listening to them why is this important for drummers well because as drummers we usually have one of those speakers facing us when we set up so if you've ever got to a venue you know that we normally have what we call a drum fill or sometimes called a fold back or a wedge or a monitor it's usually quite large and it sits typically over by our hi-hat side if we're a right-handed player and what that allows us to do is to talk to the sound guy and tell him what we want to hear coming out of that speaker when we perform now bear in mind the number one role of the sound engineer is to mix a nice blend of all of these channels so that the audience can get the best possible representation of what your band is all about that's his primary role you're now asking him for something different in your mix and while he might be quite prepared to do that while you're setting up once the ban starts it becomes difficult for you to firstly get his attention because he's focused on the audience mix but also to tell him what you want because there's noise on stage now now also he can't even hear your speaker from where he is he might be out the front of the venue somewhere so it gets difficult to convey what you want and what you need when you've got a big speaker next to you and no means of adjusting any of that stuff yourself so in the typical system speakers on stage are very loud they often don't give you everything that you want and when you don't hear what you want the first instinct is to start playing louder which means you're going to play worse you're going to start feeling stiff the guitarist is then going to turn up his guitar because he's not hearing himself well because you're playing louder now the vocalist wants to come up because the guitars are drowning him out now in the process what we get is this volume war on stage where everybody's turning up to hear themselves and part of the problem with that is that everybody is hearing to some extent everybody else is speaker so what we want is a system where we can hear what we need to hear yet bring the stage volume down so it's not interfering first of all with other people in your band and their instruments because instruments will feed back when the volume is too loud but also we don't want the guitar amps being picked up through the vocal microphone and if they're getting picked up through the vocal microphone he can't the sound guide can't turn the vocals up without getting more of the guitar as well because it's spilling into the microphone so we want to bring everything down we want low stage volume and maximum coming back to us without using massive speakers so this is where the in-ear monitoring system comes into it now when we move to in-ear monitoring the first thing we encounter is what we would call an open system now with an open system what we mean is it's open in the sense that the sound engineer the guy who's mixing still has complete control and visibility over your mix so even though you've got your own little in-ear monitors now you still can't control anything other than the volume of what you're hearing if you want more guitar bass whatever it may be you still need to get his attention and he still needs to to adjust that for you what we do when we move towards an open system is we replace effectively replace the speaker that we normally have next to us with speakers that we put in our ears so a basic open system or a basic in-ear monitoring system would consist of a few components first of all you need some ear pieces okay so this is what you're going to be hearing with now these can come in a range of different types a range of different qualities obviously you can get some reasonably cheap ones for about a hundred dollars the shore se215s are a very popular option but what this allows you to do is to stick some things into your ears okay much the same as if you're listening to with earphones on on your iphone or whatever you might be using and you could of course use over ear headphones as well they look a bit silly on stage perhaps but the option is there these are just basic earpieces okay and what you would do is you would plug them into a body pack now currently i'm using the behringer p1 which you can see here which has a couple of different inputs there and i have control over the volume i have a volume and i have a balance control now this does two things not only does it allow the sound engineer to send me a an xlr cable which has got the the mix in it or the signal okay so i clip this on my belt plug in the signal all of a sudden i can hear what he's mixing and sending me through one of those auxiliary outputs we talked about and i can start telling him what i want to hear in this but the other thing that it does is it acts as a power amplifier when a signal comes out of a mixing desk let's say through one of the auxiliary outputs there often isn't enough signal or enough energy in that signal for it to be heard just by using earphones if you were using a speaker what you typically have to do is to send that signal through a power amplifier first which will boost the volume of that signal to something that is loud enough to be heard through a speaker okay now when we talk about speakers we have active speakers and passive speakers active speakers and these are usually speakers that we plug into the power on the wall that power is actually powering a power amplifier which sits inside that active speaker but passive speakers actually have the power amplifier removed and they're run as a separate component the takeaway point here is that when we remove a speaker we also remove the power amplifier that gives us enough signal to hear this mix so we need to use something like a body pack with either a battery which this can accommodate or mains in my case which acts as my power amplifier that the speaker would have had so i plug my earpieces into the body pack and now when i receive that signal from the sound engineer i have more than enough volume to hear what's going on through these earpieces all right this is now my fallback speaker so it's a case of literally replacing the speakers that you have on stage with speakers that you have in your ear that's an open system disadvantages to an open system well one of the disadvantages of course is that we still don't get any control over the mix that we hear in our ears we do get control over the overall volume of it but if the guitars are too loud we still have to wave down the sound engineer and get him to adjust it okay similarly um you know one other problem one of the challenge we get when we go to in-ears is that once we start sticking things in our ears we can't easily hear what's going on around us anymore and this is a very common complaint from people who first start using in-ear monitors they feel isolated or cut off from the gig that they're a part of and that's a big problem because if you can't hear the cheering of the crowd if you can't hear the the bass player and the vocalist talking about or telling everybody to flip two of your songs around or change the order then you're not a part of that gig and that's it's not only demoralizing but it's actually also very problematic because you're not able to hear instruction and what's going on could even be a safety issue so when you incorporate indian monitors that's one thing you need to be mindful of is that you need to find some way of still being able to hear what's going on around you and we'll talk about that a little bit later the other disadvantage of it's not really a disadvantage but something you need to be mindful of with in-ear mixers is that if you plan to move to an in-ear monitoring system you need to give the sound engineer warning that you're going to be using it right if you're a sound engineer and you turn up you spend you know 20 minutes trying to position a a speaker for the drummer that weighs about a hundred kilograms and then you turn up with your little body pack say oh yeah i don't need that he's going to be aggro and rightfully so what what i do in my bands is i actually have a stage plot or a stage design and i use a program called stageplot pro go and check it out it's very very cool piece of software it allows you to draw and design how your band lays out on stage where you require power where speakers are going to be and importantly for this tutorial whether you or not you will be using an in-ear monitoring system and what allowances he or she will need to make for that so there is some preparation involved if you're moving towards any monitoring you need to send some sort of notification to the sound engineer ahead of time telling them that you will be using in-ear monitors and how you need to have them set up ready or how you need him set up ready to go for when you when you arrive at the venue so that's the open system then you may wish to move for the next kind of monitoring system which is what we call a semi open system so like an open system you still don't have control over your mix it still requires the sound engineer to give you what you want but with a semi-open system you are now adding some more devices to your mix which you will control yourself to do this you're going to need to purchase your own mixing desk now it doesn't have to be a massive 32 channel desk like the sound engineer is using it might only consist of two channels maybe four channels one of the channels will be the mix that the sound engineer gives you through one of his auxiliary outputs so he gives you that xlr cable and rather than plugging it into your body pack this time you're plugging it into your little mixing desk that you've bought with your two or three channels and channel one is now that mix and you've got control from that desk over the overall mix and balance of that signal that the sound engineer is giving you but in addition to that and this is where the semi-open system differs from the open system you may wish to plug in something else like maybe a laptop that has click tracks now because you're plugging the click tracks only into your mixing desk it's not going front of house it's not going to the other musicians it's only going to you so if this is something that only you need to hear but you want to have control over how loud that thing sounds relative to the mix that you're getting from the sound engineer then you plug that into a second channel and then you now get control over the balance of those two channels so hopefully that makes sense and then of course if you have something like an ipal an ipad or something or maybe you have a digital metronome that you want to plug in however many devices you feel you need to have you would then buy a desk that accommodates all of those inputs and off you go you have to remember with a semi-open system when you buy your mixing desk if that sound signal is not going to the sound engineer then no one in the audience is going to hear it so this method doesn't necessarily work if you're running say backing tracks with click tracks all right you can make it work but it involves a little bit more it's a little bit more complex all right so when we talk about a semi-open system let's say i wanted to have control over instruments in the band what about if i wanted to hear more kick drum i've just explained to you that in a semi-open system we get one channel that is our mix and i'm completely at the mercy of the sound engineer does that mean that i can't have any control you know to perhaps make my kick drum louder if i wanted to just for me in actual fact you can but it requires a little bit of ingenuity on your behalf what you can do is with your spare channels on your mixing desk let's say we have one extra channel that we haven't yet used i can take potentially any microphone that is being plugged into the main mixing desk and i can introduce a little box which can split that signal into two okay so let's take the example of a kick drum the kick drum is microphoned up it's running to the main mixing desk but now i come along with my little splitter box and to give an example i'm showing the radio the radial branded pro ms2 ms stands for mic splitter and what that will do is it will take one microphone signal in our case the kick drum and it will split it into two independent equivalent signals one of those signals of course just continues on to the main mixing desk as if it was never interrupted the second send of that microphone that kick drum microphone now comes into my little mixing desk and now all of a sudden i have individual control over that kick drum channel in addition to the main mix that the sound engineer has sent me two channels that i can balance and manipulate 100 under my control hopefully that makes sense so we can start getting control over various things and if i was to get a second splitter box i could then take for example the snare drum microphone plug it into that splitter box send one of the signals to the main desk as normal send the second signal to my little desk and now i have a main mix from the sound engineer a kick drum which i can control and a snare drum which i can control eureka you're thinking all of a sudden now i can just split everything and if i have a desk big enough then i can just control every single signal and the sound guy can just do what he wants and it won't affect me yes well yeah technically you can what's the problem well typically as i said earlier you might have six or upwards of 16 channels or 16 microphones on a stage if you want to hear everything you're buying 16 splitter boxes this is not only expensive but it's hopelessly inefficient you're going to have splitter boxes all over the floor so if you had a need to have individual control over every instrument in your band in addition to what the sound guy is doing what do you do okay so if that is something that is important to you then we now move to what we call a closed system and before we get to a closed system i want to talk a little bit about what you can do with these splitters if you're having a scenario where you need to split multiple signals because you want to have control over it obviously as we've seen you have to duplicate the signal you have to take each microphone split it into two give one to the sound guy then you take that second feed but when you have a lot of these things it doesn't make sense to buy individual splitter boxes you can actually buy them in a rack unit which can split multiple microphones at once and two of those are actually sitting right over my shoulder here so what you're looking at here is the art s8 in my case it's a two channel splitter so you have eight instances or eight channels that you can plug microphones into and for each channel you can split to two separate equivalent channels which means i could plug in this example i could plug eight microphones into here another eight into here and provided i have a means of dealing with it i could actually take 16 channels for myself and still continue those 16 channels onto the sound engineer advantages of doing this well i think you already know you're going to get a lot more control over your sound in your monitors disadvantages of doing this if you turn up and you start taking all of the sound engineers microphone leads and plugging them into your splitters he's going to split you so you need to again you need to plan ahead and you need to let him know that this is what's going to happen so when i go to a gig now and i'm using this stuff what happens usually is that rather than the microphones being plugged into the main mixing desk or into a stage box the mixing engineer knows that i'm bringing my gear so what will happen is he will actually plug all the microphones directly into my splitters and then from the back of that i will give him what they call a loom or a snake which has all of those 16 channels coming out the back for him to carry on and plug into his desk as normal what he doesn't see is that the the duplicate splits of these so that the the second channel of each microphone that he's not getting is actually plugging into this thing here which is a behringer x32 rack it is a mixing desk equivalent to what he's using but just in a rack version which makes it a lot more portable and easier for me to use and i bring this with me to the gigs that i need it at and this is now getting into the realm of what we call the closed system what makes it a closed system well what makes it a closed system is if i'm taking a split of everybody all of the vocals all of the drums all of the guitars bass etc and i'm sending them into this mixing desk then i can actually give myself an in-ear mix from this mixing desk because each signal is is being sent here just the same as it's being sent to the sound engineers mixing desk so cut a long story short he's taken out of the equation and doesn't need to do any mixing for any of the instruments on stage no speakers required on stage no mixing of any of those in-ear monitors for any of the musicians we turn up as musicians we have control over all of it in fact if the sound guy was to cut out the front of house speakers and turn his desk off completely we'll still hear ourselves so the advantages are many firstly it doesn't matter what system you turn up to a venue and see whether there's monitors on stage whether they're good monitors poor monitors whether the front of house system is working properly or not whether the sound engineer has enough channels to send back studio none of that matters your in-ear mix is coming from your closed system okay so now you have total control over who gets what and how it sounds other advantages are that this is a digital system and we're going to talk a little bit about a network in a moment but because it's a digital system each member of my band can actually control their mix themselves using an app on their phone don't even need to know how to use this thing all that has to happen is all is the microphones that we are using need to be plugged into this and split first so we can get a send of everything that's going to that sound guy or a separate send of everything okay now if we get to a different venue and there are all different microphones set up on stage then the sound that we had set from our last gig may not be applicable or may need a tweak but essentially everywhere we go every different venue we go to irrespective of the system they have in-house we are getting a consistent mix in our ears night after night if you go the extra step and you actually bring your own microphones which i'm looking at doing next then that will be consistent every night right and it actually saves the sound guy a lot of work too because of course you're bringing and setting all this stuff up ahead ahead of time and it's all coming from you so all he really needs to do is worry about the front of house mix and let the band do what they do sounds good right so the obvious question would be well why don't we all just buy closed in-ear systems obviously it's the better way we get full control i think you understand why the first problem of course is cost it gets very very expensive to build a closed in ear monitoring system to give you some comparison if you were to buy an open system you're just getting into the game and you wanted to purchase an in-ear monitoring open system you would need as i said before a body pack which would consist of something like the behringer p1 or you could actually get the behringer p2 which is like a single channel version of this and you can get that for around about 65 australian you would then need some earpieces like the shore se215s which i think right now you can get for probably about 120 so you could get into an open in-ear monitoring system and be ready to go and get that speaker off stage for under 200 all right could be a very very good way to go to get yourself into the monitoring game and start playing around with with you know the advantages that that's going to offer you if you wanted to move to a semi-open system of course it would then depend on how many extra devices you want to have control over if you're running things like a click track from a digital metronome then obviously the digital digital metronome itself there's a cost involved in purchasing that piece of equipment maybe you want to run a laptop through it for yourself as well where you've got to buy the laptop so it's hard to say exactly how much an open system will a semi-open system will cost you but you still need the ear pieces so there's 129 dollars you still need a little mixing desk so you're going to need something like the behringer xenx 502 which you can get for about 65 but you're probably not getting into a semi-open system for anything less than 200 so it's 200 and up but by comparison a closed system like the one that i'm building behind you and it's incomplete by the way you're not getting any change out of about two thousand dollars and often it's a hell of a lot more than that depending on your need okay now the behringer x32 is about two thousand dollars the splitters are about five hundred and fifty dollars each so you can see straight away even just to get signals into a mixer you're looking at that's nearly three thousand dollars so uh and we haven't even talked about the extra things that you can do once you've got your closed system ready to go so if you don't think that there's any value in spending that much money well you simply don't but you can get into monitoring for 200 or more i just want to go back to the closed system because uh there are a couple of advantages extra advantages that come with a closed system so we've talked a little bit about being able to now reduce the stage volume because we've got rid of all those speakers on stage now an open and a semi-open monitoring system will already provide you that so you don't need to go up to a closed system to get that but we've got now with a closed system full control control over the sound of every instrument in our ineos every band member can get their own mix we can save those mixers and take them with us to every gig that we go to which is really really cool and of course that doesn't change but there are some disadvantages even still obviously this starts to get quite large and bulky you may not have the room to put this on stage or to fit this in your car you may not be on stage long enough to warrant the time that it takes to set something like this up when you get to a venue okay you may not be the kind of person that plans well enough to be able to let the sound guy know or maybe you just don't want to have all that preparation if you're only getting up for a half hour gig with your original band once every four to six weeks okay so uh it's not for everybody but for those in the professional circuit that want full control it's really is a great way to go now here's how you can actually expand the closed system to do what all the touring bands are doing we talked a little bit about having a send for each or having an output for each musician to hear what they want to hear with the case of the behringer p1 like i'm using a sound engineer or myself now will send an xlr cable into this in order to hear what it is that i want to hear but it's a cable it's a cord for me as a drummer that's not a problem because i'm sitting down i'm not moving anyway but you can't really imagine that a guitarist or a vocalist is going to be too happy to have a big box on the back of their butt with a cable dragging along the floor back to my mixing desk while they want to jump around and cross over on stage so cables are a bad thing for people that require are required to move and so what they tend to do then is they want to move to a wireless in-ear monitoring system all right and what typically happens is a wireless system will sit in your rack like you can see behind me uh and it sort of fits most rack gear and i'm going to use the example of the sennheiser g4 in-air monitoring it's quite an expensive way to go when we start looking at wireless in-ear monitoring what we're talking about predominantly is radio frequency digital radio frequencies so rather than having a box with a pre-amplifier you know stuck on my butt what i actually do is i look at something like the g4 system which bolts into my rack and sends off a digital signal out into the field the musicians who are using this system will then have a smaller version of a belt pack which acts as a wireless receiver so the g4 transmits the signal it is a transmitter and it transmits the signal as in the mix wireless wirelessly via digital radio frequency to a receiver which is on the musician's belt and then they can hear that mix on certain frequencies and they then have their own mix with the advantage of not having any cables attached to them now as i said this is an expensive way to go but if you're touring professionally it's really the only way to go if you have a band that's moving around on stage okay so something like the g4 you can actually buy a version of the g4 which includes two belt packs because it's actually a stereo transmitter which means you can actually have two inputs and you can either use that for one musician and give him a left and a right so a stereo signal or more often than not use those two inputs independently send one input through the g4 to one musician and then one to another and they both get a mono signal so you can buy a unit like that the g4 which has two belt packs but it's going to cost you 1700 in one of my bands where we have five musicians four of them of whom are up front moving around i need to have four wireless packs in other words two g4 units which is three and a half thousand dollars straight off the pop so it's not cheap okay but the advantage of a wireless system wow that's it's great you run around with a small belt pack smaller than a calculator and you're free to move around and do what you want still having full control over everything you can also then incorporate a network and i touched on this earlier but what i can do is i can actually get a router and it could be any everyday old router you can see that i've got one here that i bought on gumtree for about fifty dollars uh preferably you want a dual band router so that is 2.4 gigahertz and five gigahertz so two bands uh and then using wi-fi your musicians can actually connect to this thing the same as you would connecting to your wi-fi at home but everything in my in-ear rig is now connected to that same network and it's a private network so people in the audience can't even see it but everybody's phone connects to it and the behringer x32 also connects to this network so they can now see this x32 and with the help of an app they can actually bring up and control their own mix by using their phone and we're all connected to the same network okay so you can see here for example that i've brought up the little app and i have full control over all of the channels behind me using now this is actually for my send too so this is specific to me as the drummer this is the drummer's mix the guitarist will have one for himself but i'm not having to do his mix for him okay he can do that himself now in addition i can run an ipad or some other device and as i said before i can actually control the main desk remotely as well and so that means that you might be able to see this when i change the fader level on here you can see that the lights behind me this particular channel volume is moving up and down so i can not only control the desk remotely but everyone can control their own auxiliary output or send or their own mix from themselves using the phone so wow right now we've taken it to another level but it can actually go one level again and this is the real exciting part for me remember we're taking a split of every microphone that's being used on stage the sound guy is doing his thing don't care what he's doing we've got our own mix but what i can actually do from our own mixing console here for example the x32 is to take a usb and output that signal into a laptop okay because this is actually an interface as well as just a mixing disk and so by plugging in via usb and having the drivers i can actually load up a daw a workstation in this case i've got reaper open but it could be pro tools it could be anything and what i can do now by bringing this in-ear mixing rack with me is i can also now record multi-track or multi-channel real time and then i can take that recording home mix it make it sound pretty add all my effects after the fact and then i can release this as audio so i can start doing live mixes on the fly using the rig that i have with me in fact if i was smart enough to bring a couple of microphones sorry a couple of cameras with me i could even film the event and superimpose that mixed sound later on so i've actually got some really really good video content with proper multi-channel mix sound that i could upload to youtube my channel to use for promotional content all right so the benefits of the in-ear rack also extend to the ability to be able to record multi-channel and to be able to manipulate that sound after the gig all right so a lot can be done with a closed in-ear monitoring rig as we've said there's a lot of cost involved in doing so but you decide whether that's relevant to you do you just need to bring a body pack and a set of earpieces do you want to plug other devices in and move towards a semi-open system do you want to remove the sound engineer altogether or record your show's multi-channel or move to a more professional environment where you can take your sound with you night after night these are primarily what will determine whether you go an open system a semi-open system or a fully closed system or indeed no system at all as i said before if you have a sound engineer who knows what they're doing or you are in control of your stage volume or you do have good hearing protection and you don't have an issue hearing what you need to hear or if you're only on for half an hour every three weeks maybe even spending two hundred dollars on an e monitoring system is money that you don't need to spend so hopefully you learned something about in-ear monitoring please like and subscribe if you're interested in the content that i'm that i'm creating um please come back and do the next uh clips and stay in touch and all that sort of stuff hope to see you on the next video and until then keep playing and see you then you

Channel: Damien Petrilli

Views: 14,984

Keywords: in ear monitor, iems, iem, stage monitor, damien petrilli, perth drummers, how to, in-ears, in ears, in-ear monitoring, in-ear, iem's, which iem, best in ear, best iem, tutorial, open system, closed system, stage volume, monitor, speaker, foldback, wedge, pa system, sound engineer, sound guy, better stage sound, wireless iem, wireless system, sennheiser, g4, ewiem, art s8, mic splitter, microphone splitter, in ear rack, touring rig, x32, x32 rack, reaper, behringer, powerplay, p1

Id: WASVODlaCi4

Length: 35min 18sec (2118 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021