IEM/PMM with house sound - Methods and recommendations?

[Liko]

I'm interested in IEMs, and my main band has mentioned them, primarily to save our drummer's hearing (he's the oldest member and has been around the bar circuit long before this band). I like the idea as well, especially layered over the personal monitor mixer concept that gives you, not the sound guy, control over what you hear. I've dealt with enough sound checks that relied on guesswork as to the final stage volume/mix to know the ability to tweak your own mix on the fly is invaluable even when you have career pros running your sound.

The last time I looked at PMMs, the state of the art was systems like Aviom, which plugged into almost any PA, but added $1500 of gear and a ton more wires everywhere. Not worth it at the time. Nowadays, if you go for a tablet-controlled digital mixer, among the many advantages is that you get PMM for free, using your smartphones or the tablets running your songbooks to control the "sends-on-faders" for each person's monitor feeds.

The remaining obstacle is that on most of our gigs these days, we're using house sound. We have a sizable PA of our own when needed, but house sound makes our load-in that much lighter, our set-up that much faster, and we usually have a sound guy (or even a whole team) who knows their system and space inside-out and can make us sound great. The tradeoff is going to be that we will need to hook our IEMs, and ideally our mixer, into their system, often sight-unseen with hours if not minutes to make it work.

For you guys who use IEMs, what setups do you typically see/use when interfacing with house sound? I'm thinking there are basically three setups for PMM and a fourth that still allows your IEMs:

1. Use the house board's direct outs feeding your mixer's ins. House guy runs his system, for mains, band runs theirs for IEMs. Ideal when possible, but many quality digital rigs just don't have the outs needed to replicate a good analog board's direct-outs. Inserting a patchbay as a splitter quickly makes this a much more intrusive option for the house guy.
2. Piggyback, plugging inputs into your mixer and feeding their system with your mains. Best if "house sound" is primitive anyway, you do you and the "sound guy" can spend the gig bar-backing like he was probably going to do after sound check anyway.
3. Submix house monitor feeds. If the house guy and system are good but the gear just won't let you run each channel to the IEMs, the sound guy gets some control over your monitors. A mixer scene in your system set up to take the house board's auxes would at least allow the house guy to create submixes on each aux, grouped by input type or by band member (for the all important "more me" option), that the band members can mix in their ears to taste.
4. Forget PMM. If you just can't get house feeds into your mixer for any reason, just plug the house auxes into your IEM transmitters and have a really good sound check to ensure you have what you need to get through the gig.

There are probably issues I'm not even thinking about here. Just trying to cover inevitable scenarios when looking at the true cost of the rig and how often we're likely to make due with less than it's capable of giving us in ideal situations.

 

[SoCal80s]

The best way is to use a splitter snake (one that has one input box for the stage and 2 output "tail" sets at the other end), then you connect one tail end to your IEM mixer and the other tail end to the house snake. You can also use a splitter like this splitter which does the same thing in a rack mount.

 

[s0c9]

I've posted this before, but this is what we have done for the last 5 yrs.. it works in EVERY scenario we've come across.
X32 Rack - used as IEM (and house as needed) mixer.
!6-ch splitter snake used as needed - when house snake does NOT have a splitter leg to feed us.
WE also have an SD8 in the back of the rack so we can have more than 4 STEREO IEM mixes and give us 24-inputs should we need them (we don't).
We have a router that sits on top of the rack so we can connect to the X32R and run our own IEM mixes and the 2 wedge mixes you see in the diagram.
Our mixes don't change much, so soundchecks are mostly about getting FOH happy.

 

[Bonecat]

Can you provide info on the 16 channel splitter you’re using? We’re starting to get more gigs where FOH is provided but really want to keep using our IEMs as the venues/ commercial sound operations we’ve seen really aren’t doing more than a few wedges.

 

[SoCal80s]

Can you provide info on the 16 channel splitter ...

Here's one for $220.

 

[s0c9]

Can you provide info on the 16 channel splitter you’re using? We’re starting to get more gigs where FOH is provided but really want to keep using our IEMs as the venues/ commercial sound operations we’ve seen really aren’t doing more than a few wedges.

Here's one for $220.

I have the rackmount version of that. This one is/was on eBay!

 

[drpepper]

Not really adding anything of the main substance that hasn't been said about which way to go. In that, I'd just join in recommending some tablet/phone controlled mixer for IEM and splitter snake.

I put a rig together recently using a Mackie DL1608 that was being used for rehearsals, and it's been great. Wireless units are in a separate rack. I wanted to go as compact and light as possible and saw separate racks as the way for me; this isn't situation with a trailer or even a van...if need be, it may have to travel on the back seat of my car. Funny thing, the mounting tray for the mixer is probably the heaviest thing in there. I think it's made of lead, doh!

Some details I came across/learned in putting mine together and starting to use it that you may want to consider as you say you're working more often with house sound.

1. There's a standard input order that's helpful to observe with the splitter channel order. You can do whatever channel order you want in your mixer (e.g., the splitter channel 1 can be in channel 9 in your mixer), and as long as things are labeled, I think the worst that would happen is there could be some grumbling about your rig, but it can make things go more quickly and smoothly if the splitter channel order generally follows the standard so sound crew are no forced to hunt for things so much. Don't take what I say as gospel or garbage; I'd suggest checking with people you might work with regularly and searching "mixer input order", but the roughly ordered groups are 1. Drums (starting with kick, snare then hi-hat) 2. Bass 3. Guitars 4. Keys 5. Vocals. 6. Other. I say check and research because there is some variation in practices and preferences and there are other instruments...some have keys placed differently, some order within the guitar and vocal groups differently, some lead/center first, some go stage left to right without regard lead or up/dowstage, some consider up/downstage in order, etc. Ultimately, you have to go with something, but it's doubtful that you'll be able to make things perfect for everyone you work with.

2. We only need kick and snare in our ear mix, the splitter and mixer have 4 channels used, kick, snare, hi-hat and overhead. This regularly leaves sound techs having to bypass the splitter with other drum mics. It's not the end of the world or even a big deal, but if I was doing it again, I might consider getting a 24 channel splitter and having 8 on the splitter available for drums, still only having the 4 go to the mixer just to make things a bit more smooth.

3. If I were planning out separate rack cases again, I think I'd want more modular and consider stackabilty in choices.

4. I haven't had an issue and I don't know if I ever will, but rather than just surge protection, I might look into what the extra expense for power conditioning gets you.

5. I went with a 15' output tail. Again, it's not been a problem and I don't know if it will be, but the space is there and the rig is already heavier than I had hoped, so a 30' tail might have been good. A nice spot for it has been where hi-hat side drum monitors usually go. That hasn't always been possible. Also not a big deal, but at 30' tail offers some flexibility at the cost of some weight and bulk.

 

[s0c9]

This is one incarnation of our IEM rack... front and back.. Thumbnail.. so click to see.. they're fairly large!

 

[newwavefrank]

I will repeat what everyone else has said. A splitter snake IMO is the easiest way to go. I have a Presonus which has two outputs like shown here (8 channels each cable). We plug these in the back of the mixer and hand the ends to the sound engineer. all our stuff plugs into the mixer like always and he gets a clean input for each channel.

 

[s0c9]

Not really adding anything of the main substance that hasn't been said about which way to go. In that, I'd just join in recommending some tablet/phone controlled mixer for IEM and splitter snake.

I put a rig together recently using a Mackie DL1608 that was being used for rehearsals, and it's been great. Wireless units are in a separate rack. I wanted to go as compact and light as possible and saw separate racks as the way for me; this isn't situation with a trailer or even a van...if need be, it may have to travel on the back seat of my car. Funny thing, the mounting tray for the mixer is probably the heaviest thing in there. I think it's made of lead, doh!

Some details I came across/learned in putting mine together and starting to use it that you may want to consider as you say you're working more often with house sound.

1. There's a standard input order that's helpful to observe with the splitter channel order. You can do whatever channel order you want in your mixer (e.g., the splitter channel 1 can be in channel 9 in your mixer), and as long as things are labeled, I think the worst that would happen is there could be some grumbling about your rig, but it can make things go more quickly and smoothly if the splitter channel order generally follows the standard so sound crew are no forced to hunt for things so much. Don't take what I say as gospel or garbage; I'd suggest checking with people you might work with regularly and searching "mixer input order", but the roughly ordered groups are 1. Drums (starting with kick, snare then hi-hat) 2. Bass 3. Guitars 4. Keys 5. Vocals. 6. Other. I say check and research because there is some variation in practices and preferences and there are other instruments...some have keys placed differently, some order within the guitar and vocal groups differently, some lead/center first, some go stage left to right without regard lead or up/dowstage, some consider up/downstage in order, etc. Ultimately, you have to go with something, but it's doubtful that you'll be able to make things perfect for everyone you work with.

2. We only need kick and snare in our ear mix, the splitter and mixer have 4 channels used, kick, snare, hi-hat and overhead. This regularly leaves sound techs having to bypass the splitter with other drum mics. It's not the end of the world or even a big deal, but if I was doing it again, I might consider getting a 24 channel splitter and having 8 on the splitter available for drums, still only having the 4 go to the mixer just to make things a bit more smooth.

3. If I were planning out separate rack cases again, I think I'd want more modular and consider stackabilty in choices.

4. I haven't had an issue and I don't know if I ever will, but rather than just surge protection, I might look into what the extra expense for power conditioning gets you.

5. I went with a 15' output tail. Again, it's not been a problem and I don't know if it will be, but the space is there and the rig is already heavier than I had hoped, so a 30' tail might have been good. A nice spot for it has been where hi-hat side drum monitors usually go. That hasn't always been possible. Also not a big deal, but at 30' tail offers some flexibility at the cost of some weight and bulk.

adding some of my experiences.

1. As long as you label the XLR’s on the splitter box inputs…and always connect the kick to the slot labeled kick…it really doesn’t matter if ch-1 on the splitter box is kick and maps to ch-9 on YOUR mixer and ch-16 on the FOH input. Same signal, different end points.
To be sure, you’ll need a doc to track all those mappings, which CAN become a PITA if you do that for too many/multiple venues.

2. We initially mounted the splitter in the mixer rack with the short (5ft) leg permanently connected to the mixer. Splitter Ch-1 connected to mixer Ch-1, and so on up thru Ch-16. Kick happened to be Ch-1 which was Ch-1 at one venue but Ch-9 at another. We simply took Ch-1 on the long (15ft) leg and plugged it into,whatever channel the House used for kick.

3. We used 1-6 for drums, but that could vary at each venue. Same for vocals, guitars and key. You just map each of your channels to theirs, then keep a record of what those are for each venue. Minimizes hookup time.