IEM TRICKS - From Email requests.

[KingRazor]

Originally Posted by steve_rolfeca

Your pastor's position still seems a little bizarre to me (not for wanting separate drum channels, just for his all-or nothing approach). How many wedge mixes do you have currently?

We have two wedges. One for the background vocals and one for the acoustic guitarist.

The drummer and two keyboardists have IEMs with AUX mixes from the board.

The guitarists use their amps to monitor.

The bassist just listens to himself through the sub.

And the two lead vocalists just listen to their voices from the mains and don't use monitors.

The band leader's all or nothing approach comes from the poor experience he had with IEMs. Bad sound quality, frequently changing levels, and no control over his own mix. He doesn't want any of the musicians to have to deal with any of that. A system where each musician had control over their own mix would prevent a lot of that (although so would just having a competent engineer and quality gear...). Honestly, I never hear complaints from our drummer or our keyboardists, so I don't know why he doesn't want to just go with the AUX route. He's the only member of the band (to my knowledge) that even cares about having control over his mix. But, he's also the decision maker, so there ya go.

[steve_rolfeca]

Originally Posted by KingRazor

...The band leader's all or nothing approach comes from the poor experience he had with IEMs. Bad sound quality, frequently changing levels, and no control over his own mix. He doesn't want any of the musicians to have to deal with any of that.

...Honestly, I never hear complaints from our drummer or our keyboardists, so I don't know why he doesn't want to just go with the AUX route. He's the only member of the band (to my knowledge) that even cares about having control over his mix. But, he's also the decision maker, so there ya go.

Yikes. If I understand correctly, you've got 10 or more people on stage. 3 have fixed monitor mixes through IEMs, 2 more get the same thing from floor wedges, and the rest of the group simply wing it off stage bleed. All of this with acoustic drums, and two guitar amplifiers on stage.

It's not surprising that you don't get any complaints from the drums and keys- compared to the rest of the band, they're in heaven!

Even worse, 5 monitor mixes would normally represent 2 people per wedge, which is still pretty do-able. In this case, 3 people have been allowed to have IEM's, making their monitor feeds inaccessible to the rest of the band. So, the ratio is really 7 people to 2 floor wedges. On top of that, it sounds like the remaining performers aren't clustered in groups around the 2 wedges, as they would have been back in the 1990's.

That's pretty ghetto, even for a conventional analog PA. To be in that state when the church has already spent an unholy amount of money on a bleeding-edge sound system with digital snakes, etc., is beyond belief.

I currently work with a 7-piece band church band that's limited to 6 IEM feeds by an under-sized wireless setup. Even so, with the exception of one backup singer, we all have individual control of our monitor mixes. The total investment in monitoring (including the digital FOH mixer), was about $10,000.

Meanwhile, the only answer for a poorly-deployed 5-buss monitor system at your church, is to keep all 10 people on stage and spend another gazillion bucks on a 20-mix IEM system? And an affordable expansion from 5 to 16 feeds is rejected because it couldn't possibly be an improvement?

Please understand that I mean no disrespect to your team, or your worship leader. I realize that they're all trying to do the best with the resources at their disposal.

That said, the only place I could ever imagine that kind of logic gaining traction, especially if it was mostly driven by the fears and concerns of one person, would be within the confines of a church. No secular concert venue would spend that kind of money on a sound system without outside advice, and any audio consultant could have drawn up a better stage plot on the back of a cocktail napkin.

[Bakkster_Man]

If you mix down the toms and overheads that should be more than enough versatility on the drums (will anyone honestly want to tweak the amount of low tom compared to high tom?). Then mix the pastor and speaker mics to one channel (they aren't going to be in use at the same time anyway) and there are your 16 channels.

But yeah, if you can't convince the worship leader that this is better than your current system and 20 channels isn't a noticable improvement over this setup, then you're kinda stuck.

[KingRazor]

Originally Posted by steve_rolfeca

Yikes. If I understand correctly, you've got 10 or more people on stage. 3 have fixed monitor mixes through IEMs, 2 more get the same thing from floor wedges, and the rest of the group simply wing it off stage bleed. All of this with acoustic drums, and two guitar amplifiers on stage.

It's not surprising that you don't get any complaints from the drums and keys- compared to the rest of the band, they're in heaven!

Even worse, 5 monitor mixes would normally represent 2 people per wedge, which is still pretty do-able. In this case, 3 people have been allowed to have IEM's, making their monitor feeds inaccessible to the rest of the band. So, the ratio is really 7 people to 2 floor wedges. On top of that, it sounds like the remaining performers aren't clustered in groups around the 2 wedges, as they would have been back in the 1990's.

That's pretty ghetto, even for a conventional analog PA. To be in that state when the church has already spent an unholy amount of money on a bleeding-edge sound system with digital snakes, etc., is beyond belief.

I currently work with a 7-piece band church band that's limited to 6 IEM feeds by an under-sized wireless setup. Even so, with the exception of one backup singer, we all have individual control of our monitor mixes. The total investment in monitoring (including the digital FOH mixer), was about $10,000.

Meanwhile, the only answer for a poorly-deployed 5-buss monitor system at your church, is to keep all 10 people on stage and spend another gazillion bucks on a 20-mix IEM system? And an affordable expansion from 5 to 16 feeds is rejected because it couldn't possibly be an improvement?

Please understand that I mean no disrespect to your team, or your worship leader. I realize that they're all trying to do the best with the resources at their disposal.

That said, the only place I could ever imagine that kind of logic gaining traction, especially if it was mostly driven by the fears and concerns of one person, would be within the confines of a church. No secular concert venue would spend that kind of money on a sound system without outside advice, and any audio consultant could have drawn up a better stage plot on the back of a cocktail napkin.

Yep, you pretty much hit the nail on the head there. Before I joined the team our setup was even more convoluted if you can imagine. We had been using a mix of AUX sends and direct outs going to an old analog board on stage and plugging cables part of the way in to make use of the inserts as monitoring points. This allowed them to have some control of their monitor mixes on stage, but it only gave 4 monitor mixes anyway because the headphone amp only had 4 channels. That's one of the first things I got rid of.

That said, to answer the last point as well as Bakkster_Man's post, an Aviom system would cost just as much to implement as a Movek MyMix system, and the Movek would allow us to have that "pool" of 20 channels to choose from. So really the Behringer is the only system that's any cheaper than what I'm already looking at, unless we could get the channel count way down to like 8 and use the Hearback system.

By far the easiest system to integrate would be Roland's own M-48 personal mixer system. But that system costs $12,000 retail. Which is why I've been looking at products like MyMix.

[KingRazor]

The Movek MyMix system allows you to plug in two audio sources directly to it and they are networked so they can share channels. If, say, the vocalist plugs his mic into his myMix, everyone else on the network can add that channel to their mix.

The mixers are $679 and an ethernet switch with power over ethernet is about $700 (I'm sure it's possible to find cheaper ones, though).

For $1000, you can get the 16 channel expander which allows you to add 16 outputs from the FOH board to the MyMix network.

The MyMix system allows each musician to pick any combination of channels from the network as long as the total number in their individual mix does not exceed 16. This would allows to have a "pool" of 20+ channels to choose from for each band member, but they'd only be able to use 16 of those 20 (which should be more than enough for any of the musicians).

What this would allow us to do is take a few channels from the direct outs on the board or AUX mixes from the board and then the rest of the inputs could go directly into the myMix units. The cost of this system, for our application (including 10 personal mixers) would be approximately $9190.

Aviom mixers are $620 each and require an A-16D Pro A-Net Distributor ($1365) as well as an input module ($1195), plus, since there isn't any local I/O on the Aviom personal mixers, we would need to buy another REAC stage unit in order to have enough physical outputs. Which adds another $2095 to the total. An Aviom system with 8 mixers would run us $9615, which is about the same as the cost of the MyMix (actually almost $500 more).

The Behringer unit would obviously be much cheaper than either of them at only $250 per mixer and only $299 for the input module. So that's the way to go if you want Aviom capabilities and don't mind the name Behringer.

Hear Back is another affordable IEM system but it's limited to 8 inputs.

[KingRazor]

Originally Posted by steve_rolfeca

That's pretty ghetto, even for a conventional analog PA. To be in that state when the church has already spent an unholy amount of money on a bleeding-edge sound system with digital snakes, etc., is beyond belief.

That said, the only place I could ever imagine that kind of logic gaining traction, especially if it was mostly driven by the fears and concerns of one person, would be within the confines of a church. No secular concert venue would spend that kind of money on a sound system without outside advice, and any audio consultant could have drawn up a better stage plot on the back of a cocktail napkin.

The board and snakes would total about $15,000 retail. We got a deal from a systems integrator on the system and spent a total of $7000 on it. I think it was just too good of a deal for the leadership to pass up.

That said, for $6000 we could have bought two Presonus StudioLive 24.4.2 mixers and we would have had 40 inputs and 10 AUXes with iPhone control for monitoring plus capture for multi-track recording...

[bertbassplayer]

From what I'm reading plugging into the local mymix doesn't actually go to the FOH. You have to split to do what you want to do, won't that still require an extra snake to do what you want?

Plus you would probably still have to do find some way to do submixing as well. Most instrumentalists and vocalists won't want to deal with 6 drum mics, and most won't want to deal with 9 seperate mic feeds either... especially if they want room for other things.

I'm not knocking the system, in fact I'm pretty impressed with it and might bring it up to my church... I'm just trying to figure out if it'll work the way you think it will or want it to.

Edit: Also for any computer nerd people, I think it's funny that it runs Linux.

[KingRazor]

Originally Posted by bertbassplayer

From what I'm reading plugging into the local mymix doesn't actually go to the FOH. You have to split to do what you want to do, won't that still require an extra snake to do what you want?

Plus you would probably still have to do find some way to do submixing as well. Most instrumentalists and vocalists won't want to deal with 6 drum mics, and most won't want to deal with 9 seperate mic feeds either... especially if they want room for other things.

I'm not knocking the system, in fact I'm pretty impressed with it and might bring it up to my church... I'm just trying to figure out if it'll work the way you think it will or want it to.

Edit: Also for any computer nerd people, I think it's funny that it runs Linux.

No one is going to put all 6 drum mics in their ears except the drummer I don't imagine. Most people would probably grab just the snare or kick or both.

As for splits we could use y cables or something like this: http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/Split1x2/

And like I've said before, it's the band leader pushing the individual control thing. If they wanted stuff sub-mixed I would do it.

[bertbassplayer]

Originally Posted by KingRazor

No one is going to put all 6 drum mics in their ears except the drummer I don't imagine. Most people would probably grab just the snare or kick or both.

That is better on paper than it is in practice. If you only have kick and snare you really don't hear much especially if your isolated in ear.

[KingRazor]

Originally Posted by bertbassplayer

That is better on paper than it is in practice. If you only have kick and snare you really don't hear much especially if your isolated in ear.

Well currently no one has any drums in their monitors other than the drummer, so it'd be a pretty big step-up from what we have currently I imagine.

I know the band leader only likes having kick, snare, and maybe hi-hat in his ears.

That said, the drummer can create a sub-mix of their drums and share it on the MyMix network.

[steve_rolfeca]

Originally Posted by KingRazor

...Aviom system would cost just as much to implement as a Movek MyMix system, and the Movek would allow us to have that "pool" of 20 channels to choose from. So really the Behringer is the only system that's any cheaper than what I'm already looking at, unless we could get the channel count way down to like 8 and use the Hearback system.

By far the easiest system to integrate would be Roland's own M-48 personal mixer system. But that system costs $12,000 retail. Which is why I've been looking at products like MyMix.

This is a terrific time to be involved with live sound. Gear seems to be getting cheaper/smaller/more powerful by the minute.

I would hate to be on a budget committee these days, though.

For about $5 grand, a cheap analog splitter, a macbook and a Presonus 24.4.2 at side stage could already give you 24 channels of personal mixing over iPad/iPhone to 10 aux sends. Plus, you'd have a pretty capable portable FOH mixer that you could take to smaller events.

Meanwhile, even that is bound to be superseded by something newer and cooler at NAMM this year...

[KingRazor]

Originally Posted by steve_rolfeca

This is a terrific time to be involved with live sound. Gear seems to be getting cheaper/smaller/more powerful by the minute.

I would hate to be on a budget committee these days, though.

For about $5 grand, a cheap analog splitter, a macbook and a Presonus 24.4.2 at side stage could already give you 24 channels of personal mixing over iPad/iPhone to 10 aux sends. Plus, you'd have a pretty capable portable FOH mixer that you could take to smaller events.

Meanwhile, even that is bound to be superseded by something newer and cooler at NAMM this year...

You know actually now that I've thought about it, throwing a StudioLive on stage would give us most if not all of the IEM capability we're looking for, at about 1/3rd the cost...I'm going to suggest that.

[steve_rolfeca]

Originally Posted by KingRazor

You know actually now that I've thought about it, throwing a StudioLive on stage would give us most if not all of the IEM capability we're looking for, at about 1/3rd the cost...I'm going to suggest that.

I'm kind of proud of this idea.

Muting, limiting, gating, EQ and effects on every input, under the control of the sound guy from anywhere in the room via iPad, along with recallable scenes. 8 assignable 31-channel EQ's for wedges or oddball headphones. With the latest firmware, SMART is available for ringing out the wedges, if you decide to have any. Your choice of wired or wireless distribution for the monitor mixes, with the radio gear down front for good reception. If you go wired, you can drive the headphones with any standard headphone amp or mini mixer. Terrific audio quality for the musicians.

About the only real limitations, are that everyone has to bring an iDevice, and the headphone mixes are in mono. Although if you trained a dedicated side-stage monitor engineer, you could even ditch the MacBook and the iPads/iPhones...

Short sub-snakes, with the splitter underneath the Studio live, would keep the audio connections tidy and simple. If the monitor mixer goes down, FOH is unaffected.

If the MD's and/or WL's are trained on the Presonus and given their own scene memory assignments, then the sound people don't have to attend rehearsals, and the band doesn't have to be given access to the FOH system.

Awfully complicated for a gigging environment, but perfect for a permanent installation. Aviom seems primitive in comparison. I don't think it gets more flexible, or much better, than this!

[S6I6X]

I have been thinking about it a lot more and I decided I want to get the Rolls pm50s and trying to get an IEM setup going for me unless you can think of a reason besides extra inputs to get the pm351. If all else fails I can always just use the wedges again anyway.
I am thinking of just having the pm50s on my pedal board and using a wired IEM for right now. I just need to make sure I can plug the thing in though. What kinds of cables and stuff should I bring to ensure I can get a feed from the FOH? Should I get an extension 1/4" (male to female) to make sure I can get their send to my pedal board?

[MNAirHead]

Originally Posted by KingRazor

1. Kick
2. Snare
3. High Tom
4. Floor Tom
5. Overhead left
6. Overhead right
7. Electric Guitar 1
8. Electric Guitar 2
9. Acoustic Guitar
10. Keys
11. Synth
12-17. Vocal Mics
18. Pastor's mic (the band often plays while he's praying and they need to be able to hear him)
19. Spoken word mic (Same reason)
20. Click track

Once again, the reason we wouldn't have the drums sub-mixed is to give individual control of each drum. This is something the band leader wants.

We still have less than 16 physical outputs to spare, so for the Behringer or Aviom system we need to tack on $2000 just for an additional REAC stage box.

Your real problem is solving how to fix and "sell" the solution.... As long as you're the volunteer victim at a church, - you won't be able to fix it.

I'm hard core into this stiff - it's leadership (and your selling) not iem or sound

Please listen and not defend

[guy n. cognito]

I'm trying to come up with a solution to use one ears at clubs with installed sound and a "soundman". My thought was to use a 8 channel TRS to XLR snake, run out of a pre-fade aux on the house Board into my Mackie DL1608, then out to my IEMs. The 1608 would be at the desk, and I would control it from the wireless iPad from on stage as normal. Anyone see any kinks in that plan?

[bertbassplayer]

Originally Posted by guy n. cognito

I'm trying to come up with a solution to use one ears at clubs with installed sound and a "soundman". My thought was to use a 8 channel TRS to XLR snake, run out of a pre-fade aux on the house Board into my Mackie DL1608, then out to my IEMs. The 1608 would be at the desk, and I would control it from the wireless iPad from on stage as normal. Anyone see any kinks in that plan?

Might be easier to keep your monitor mixer on the stage and run a split or take the FOH feed out of your stuff. Sound guys can be pretty picky and some might not want you running things out of their boards.

[KingRazor]

Originally Posted by MNAirHead

Your real problem is solving how to fix and "sell" the solution.... As long as you're the volunteer victim at a church, - you won't be able to fix it.

I'm hard core into this stiff - it's leadership (and your selling) not iem or sound

Please listen and not defend

I'm not sure I understand?

[derrico1]

Originally Posted by bertbassplayer

Might be easier to keep your monitor mixer on the stage and run a split or take the FOH feed out of your stuff. Sound guys can be pretty picky and some might not want you running things out of their boards.

...and some just won't have a spare aux.

[steve_rolfeca]

Originally Posted by guy n. cognito

I'm trying to come up with a solution to use one ears at clubs with installed sound and a "soundman". My thought was to use a 8 channel TRS to XLR snake, run out of a pre-fade aux on the house Board into my Mackie DL1608, then out to my IEMs. The 1608 would be at the desk, and I would control it from the wireless iPad from on stage as normal. Anyone see any kinks in that plan?

This approach has some problems:
1. At some gigs (especially if there's more than one band on the bill), you're not going to be given access to connections on-stage, OR at the FOH board.

2. Not every venue is going to have a spare, unused Aux out. Or room for your mixer on the desk.

3. Not sure what the 8-channel snake is for, if you're only picking up one aux out. A single aux out, means that you'll all be sharing the same monitor feed.

4. If you're taking an aux out from the FOH board, you're still dependent on the house guy for your monitor mixes.

I would think that you'd have more luck with inserting a splitter on-stage, keeping the channel assignments one-for-one. This would also make better use of the 1608's capabilities, since your band members could all have individual monitor control via iPad.

Still, you're interrupting all of the soundguy's connections at the snake. Some places will be fine with it, but it will need some mad negotiating skills to get the job done at a lot of venues.