Band practice - In ear solution possible?

[Colonel_Claypoo]

hello

my band and i just can't get a great sound in our practice and so we started to think:

is it possible to run the amps, vocals, kicks and snare into a mixer and connect earphones via bluetooth?
that way we could quit using cabs.
i know that we all would get the same mix but we suppose that the result would still be quite good.

now, i'm a total noob regarding in ear monitoring and i suspect that it sounds almost to easy to do.

what would you guys suggest i should do?

thanks for your help.

[Nick Kay]

I'd suggest you focus on improving the sound of your natural mix and practice space, rather than trying to patch over it with monitoring.

1) Is your volume reasonable? Be honest. It's a lot easier to hear what you're doing if everyone just turns down.

2) Plan out where you're putting your instruments and amps. Drums in a corner are a heck of a lot louder than drums away from the walls, and bass amps in corners can turn a fine room into a swamp of mud and sludge.

3) Get your cabs off the floor. Mostly for the guitars, but applies to the bass as well. Your knees can't hear anything, you need to get the speakers pointed at your ears.

4) A little bit of acoustic treatment goes a long way, especially in a concrete-floored basement. It's pretty cheap to get decent results with DIY treatment, if any of you know something about wood-working and have access to a few tools. Blankets or egg carton will just make the room even murkier - go for some bass traps and a few broadband panels instead.

5) EQ according to the band's sound, not what you like to hear when it's just you playing. This is probably going to mean less bottom in the guitars, and more mids for everyone.

All of that will cost you less than $250, depending on the size of your room and how much treatment it needs. If you want to go with an in-ear monitor system regardless, be prepared to spend at least $250 per person for bottom-of-the-barrel wireless systems and earbuds, and another grand for mixers, mics and cables. If you go with wired headphones, you can spend $30 for a decent pair, but you've still gotta get mics, a mixer, cables, and a multi-channel headphone amp.

[Fred19137]

You would not think this would make a difference but oh my God it does. When the cabs are tilted straight they passed under your ears when you hear the sound it is coming from bouncing off the surroundings. This creates a muffling and ruins the sound. Try it.

[musicman7722]

Wel in my exp. practice usually stinks anyway and for many reasons. Here is my solution and it worked well for my current band for a few years now. First off you need a mixer prefferable powered with enough channels to hold all the instruments etc. I used a 12 channel carvin mixer with 4 Eq's and 2 Effects. In our case we needed 12 channels. 5 vox, sax, 2 gtr, keys bass and kick/snare. The secret is indivudal volume control and matching headphones. I feel you don't need sealed IEM for rehersal. Now first off all the headphones need to be the same make. They don't need to be exp. studio quality but they must be able to hold the bass guitar and kick. Second you need individuaa volume control devices. I chose a device from Furman that connects to your powered mixer or amp and uses XLR cables to connect to the amp/mixer and the contorller. Then the controller can connect to other such controler. Each controller has 2 volume controls and can "power" 2 headphone units.

Next it is important to use small amps and if possible run them direct intom the board. My guys just brought their floor boxes and left their amps at home as did I on bass, I used my SABDI.

Sure this isn't going to sound like stage, but we found we could hear all of our parts and sounded great. Hmm soumetimes the truth was tough to take as well.

The setup worked out very well and we were able to hear ourselves and vox very well. Read this over and experiment.

CP