monitor mix signal flow

[dljordaneku]

I was wanting to find out what everyone is using to provide a seperate monitor mix for their band. We are currently trying to mix it from FOH and that is just not working at all. In fact, we have have several problems and it really came to a head on Sunday. I think I have a solution, but want to research it more first so I was wondering if some of you that are having good results with a seperate montor mix, meaning a seperate mixing board, can post a signal flow on it. We are currently using a Yamaha MX32/12 board. Thanks
dj

[Allan Lester]

First, I am curious what types of problems you are having running monitors from FOH. I have done this exclusively for years now and have never had complaints. Perhaps we could help solve your problems in a less expensive way than dedicating another console to mixing monitors.

Of course, if you have the space, money, and personnel to have a dedicated monitor mixer that is ideal.

The basic requirement to have a dedicated monitor mixer is to have some way to split the input signals so they go to both the FOH console and the monitor console. There are various ways to accomplish this. The right way to do this will depend on the distance between the two consoles and the amount of money you have to spend on this.

The best way to do this is to have a transformer isolated split of the signal to send to the monitor console. This is fairly expensive since good quality audio transformers are not cheap.

If the two consoles are very close together you MIGHT be able to get away with a passive split of the signals between the two consoles. In this scheme the inputs are hardwired to both consoles.

If you go with either of these two approaches you will probably have to purchase a "splitter snake" to have two sets of connections on the console side.

Another option to consider if you are not using any of the insert jacks on your console is to run the insert send from one console (typically FOH) to the line input on the other console. You will have to use a special cable to do this that will tie the insert send and return together. This cable will have a 1/4" TRS cable on the insert side with the TIP and RING tied together. The other end of the cable will have a 1/4" TS connection with the TIP/RING from the other end going to the TIP of this end. This is an unbalanced connection so it should only be done if the consoles are very close together.

[dljordaneku]

Originally posted by Allan Lester
First, I am curious what types of problems you are having running monitors from FOH.

The big problem is we can barely hear the house so mixing the monitors is pretty tough We don't get good feedback from the band so that makes it even harder. This in itself is not enogh to spend the money on a seperate board and I realize that. The biggest problems are 1. a balance between the house and monitors. The band keeps telling us that they can't hear themselves or the keyboard. (I know, typical and that leads to problem 2 which caused the problems this weekend)
2. We have no worship leader right now so the band sometimes takes it upon themselves to do what ever they want to up on stage. One of the members decided to to bring in a amplified mixer and fix it himself. Well, he didn't hook it up correctly, from what I understand. I haven't had time to go up there and physically look at it. The sound yesterday was horrible and there wasn't anything my sound tech could do because he wasn't being fed the signal from the instruments correctly.

My goal is to find a way to send them just a line level signal to his mixer and let them mix their monitor mix, but leave my mix alone until we get a worship leader in place which hopefully will be the first of the year.

I don't how feasable this is, but is worth a shot if I can releive some stress off of me and some of the band right now.

dj

[Scott]

Those are good questions. Let's summarize:

• how much do you want to spend?
• how far is the FOH board from the stage?
• what do you have on stage for monitors now?
• does the FOH engineer attend band practices?
• has the FOH engineer stood in a band member's place during practice to hear what they hear?
• what instruments are on stage?
• what about vocals?
• what about sound tracks, click tracks, etc., ever use those?
• did it ever sound good, if so, what changed?

[dljordaneku]

Originally posted by ScottGS
Those are good questions. Let's summarize:

• 1 how much do you want to spend?
  2 how far is the FOH board from the stage?
  3 what do you have on stage for monitors now?
  4 does the FOH engineer attend band practices?
  5 ]has the FOH engineer stood in a band member's place during practice to hear what they hear?
  6 what instruments are on stage?
  7 what about vocals?
  8 what about sound tracks, click tracks, etc., ever use those?
  9 did it ever sound good, if so, what changed?

I numbered your questions so I can answer them here.
1. Don't know. This is just something that came to me yesterday as I was leaving church and not knowing where to start, don't know where to start pricing.
2 to far back in a hole. FOH is aobut 70 feet from the stage upstairs in a hole in the wall. We are in the process of moving this down to the floor.
3. We have 5 floor wedges. I think they are Peveys, but not 100%sure.
4. Sometimes. With no Worship leader, the band has no set pratice time right now so I can't schedule them to attend.
5. One of my eng. has and I have, but I am not musical like they are so to me it sounds fine. I think the setup was wrong and I think that is causing our balance between the two sounds to be off.
6. Keyboard, digital drum set, bass and an electric guitar.
7. We tend to have three voclist up front and the bass and guitar playes will sometimes sing.
8. Not really. The band has sometimes sung to the Iworship DVDs, but that is about the extent of that.
9. Has it ever sounded good? maybe, the biggest problem we had before our worship leaders left was the balance between the two mixes. The band was always complaining that they couldn't hear and this was with the monitor mix up almost all the way. If we took it up any more, then the monitor mix would spill over into the house mix. The problem now is the band does what they want to up there with no accountablity. The hosue mix is now messed up and for some reason, I am to blame. At least that is the way one band member put it yesterday and I will just leave it at that.
dj

[Allan Lester]

Warning: Long post.

Thanks for providing more details on your situation. I do believe that there is a solution to your problem. I do not believe that a dedicated monitor mixer is this solution. If the musicians on stage are just doing whatever they want, having them control the monitors is just asking for trouble. They will have no concept of what the monitor levels are doing to the house mix. (Actually it sounds like you are already at this level and they don't care.)

From your description I see great promise for good sound. Here is what I would recommend:

a) give the drummer headphones instead of a floor wedge (or two. You don't describe the layout of the monitors and who has what.) This will require you to run a line level signal to the stage and get a small mixer just to provide a headphone amplifier. You can get one for around $60 if you don't already have something. This should get its own mix from a dedicated aux send on the FOH console.

b) give the keyboard player their own monitor and make sure they do not have their own amp on stage. This monitor should probably have its own mix from a dedicated aux send on the FOH console. If you run out of aux sends/amplifier channels, the keyboard player could probably easily share the same mix as the vocalists.

c) Give the bass and electric guitar players each their own monitor. They can probably share the same mix. Giving them their own monitor will allow them to put the monitor close to them thereby allowing the volume to be turned down.

d) Use the last two monitors on the vocalists. Ideally this would be on its own aux send but in a pinch could share the mix with the keyboard player.

e) Turn down the guitar amplifiers on stage to the point where everyone can hear everything and not much more. If the amps are too low the musicians will lose the feel. If they are too loud you get nothing but mush in the congregation.

f) Make sure you have a graphic equalizer patched into each unique monitor mix. Poorly EQed monitors sound horrible and lead to many of the problems you describe.

Now, if you go with what I described, you should be using 3-4 aux sends on the FOH console, 3-4 channels of 31-band graphic EQ, and 2-3 amplifier channels. This should cover the equipment side.

If you are willing to spend a little money, replace the stage monitors for the bass, guitar, and keyboard players with headpones or in ear monitors. We just purchased a NADY PEM-500 wireless in ear monitor for $269 for one of our guitar players and he loves it. One less amp on stage and one less monitor on stage. It really cleaned up the sound!

On the personnel side, whoever is running sound for the day should make sure to take a walk around the stage at least a couple of times during the warmup time before service. (I assume you have a warmup/sound check before the service.) This will let them hear exactly what the musicians hear and gives them a time to interact with the musicians and find out what they want without yelling across the auditorium. This goes a long way towards team building. After all, the sound people really are part of the worship team.

Also, once the house mix is established, the FOH engineer should put on their headphones and solo each of the aux sends for the monitors to make sure the musicians are getting a good mix. The aux sends used for monitors should be pre-fade so the monitor mix does not change during the service unless asked for.

It is obvious from your posts that you understand the need for a good worship leader so I won't cover the leadership aspects of all of this. If you or any member of your team would like to talk in more detail, PM me and we can set up a time to talk.

I appologize for the long post. I hope this is helpful.

Hi Darrell,

Let us all pray for Darrell to get out of the box.
Nothing worse than being in one of those hole in the wall soundbooths. I feel for you guys. We gotta get you out in the
room.

I need some more info.

How many separate monitor mixes are you running.
You said you have 5 wedges, but are you running them off
separate amp channels ?

We use a MC 32/12 like you have, it's a great board.

We are currently running 5 separate wedge mixes and
1 IEM mix to the stage. Total of six monitor mixes from
FOH. Everybody has an EQ on their mix but the bass
player. We add bass at his monitor channel ( as you know
the MC 32/12 has 3-band parametric EQ on each of it's 10 Auxes.)

Fortunately , I have won the war of stage amps. None of our
musicians have an amplifier on stage, they all use guitar processors ( etc. ) and Direct boxes to inject to the P.A.
The drummer and (soon to be) bass player are on IEM's.
I should also mention we have use electronic drums, we
have the Roland V-drums ( best kit , the Pro's I think )
All players are encouraged to keep volume as low as possible.
Point the wedges right at their ears also. Proper wedge placement is very important. Also, use a good set of headphones
and solo all the monitor mixes one at a time. If it sounds good to you , it is probably close, but of course everybody wants
( MORE OF ME ) in their mix.

When running monitors from FOH, I have learned that
you must have a " TAKE CHARGE " approach with the players.
They MUST understand that if they change their levels, it
changes everyone's mix. I stress to them to find a comfortable
level, remember where it is, and use it everytime they plug-in.
I am the boss... if they dont like it, I can always turn them off.
HA...HA... I encourage the other guys on the sound crew to
stay in charge of the Mix and the players. Teach them to turn thigs down instead of up when possible. Pay attention to input gain structure also in comparison to channel strip monitor levels.
( leave yourself room, and keep it clean )

Another important thing to do is have frequent organized
soundchecks. Everyone plays and everyone gets a turn to tweak.
Then when you get it right, have everyone remember the way
things are set and keep it that way. The rule at our church is if you dont come to practice, you dont play Sunday morning.

We should have 2 more IEM's in service within a few days when
the order arrives. My goal is to have everyone on IEM's asap.
Some will be wired, some wireless.

In regard to the NADY PEM-500 wireless IEM's, be careful !!!
We purchased 7 of them a couple years ago and 1 or 2 sets
worked fine together, but more than two and we could not
use them due to them interfering with each other.
We sent them back !!!

My future plans are to put our 2 Worship leaders on
Sennheiser EW- 100 IEM systems as budget allows.
These are available for about $600. from Full Compass.
All other players will be hardwired and Praise singers will have the only wedges, keeping stage volume at a bare minimum.

Let me know if I can help.

Steve M

[Scott]

If you can afford a couple thousand dollars to throw at the situation, I'd highly suggest taking a look at personal monitor mixing solutions such as Aviom. We use this system and everyone except the worship leader wears headphones.

Piece of cake to install, easy to adapt to last-minute changes, flexible for the musicians. Quite a wonderful tool.

There are other systems out there similar to this one. This is just the one we've found works best for us. Hearback has been getting some attention lately. Furman has a couple solutions. (We just moved from their HDS-6/HR-6 system.)

[dljordaneku]

Hey guys. Thanks for the advice. I think the IEM's maybe be the best way to go. I just have to see what I can pull off once we hire a Worship Leader, which hopefully will be at the start of the year. Right now our plan is to move the sound board down to the floor during the expansion of our room. We are in a building that is only 2 years old and are holding worship in a multi-purpose room. We built that first over a sancutary so we can use it for several things.

We are going to expand the size of that room and hopefully have that done by Sept. or Oct. of 2004. I think the IEM's would be best as the stage area is kind of small. I think we will play around with the eq settings of the monitors. We are currently running the five wedges off of two aux outputs from the board going to one amp and eq. I know we need to add more, and I am trying to find a way to increase that. I think I haven an idea, but will have to look over all of the equipment.

Thanks for all of the input and ideas. If you have any more, please send them my way as this is the biggest source of my frustration right now. Thanks and God bless.

dj

[Allan Lester]

Having a small stage is a problem, especially if the musicians like it loud. Since you mixing console has many more aux sends available I know that is not a problem. Do you have extra lines in your snake? If you do send another aux send feed to the stage and get the drummer on headphones ASAP. Having too much drums in the monitors can be a real problem.

If you are out of returns on the snake, you can take a normal mic channel and run it backwards. It will take an adapter or two on each end but I have used this quite effectively in the past (in fact until just last week when I got a second snake.)

Then put the guitar and bass on one of your existing aux sends and the keyboard and vocals on the other.

Probably the biggest and often hardest thing to do is to convince the musicians that they are there to lead people into worship, not to perform for them. Leading worship often requires personal sacrifices. In this case sacrificing what you would like to hear for only what you absolutely need to hear. If you absolutely can't hear something then by all means something needs to be done.

As Steve mentioned in his very good post, teach your sound team to turn things down rather than turn things up. It is easy to say "I can't hear the keyboard so I will turn it up" when instead you should be thinking, "wow, I can't hear anything but drums so I should turn them down." Learning when to turn things up vs. when to turn things down is an art but needs to be learned.

Personal monitor mixers like Scott suggested are great tools if the musicians really know what they are doing, know how to get the sound they want, and are disciplined enough to leave things alone once they are set. Having musicians continually fiddle with knobs on stage is very distracting during worship. Also, if someone does not know how to build a good mix, personal monitor mixers can be very frustrating.

In our church I run all monitor feeds, both floor wedges and in-ear, from the FOH console. However in my personal recording studio I use the Furman HDS-6 system quite effectively. Either way works. You just need to determine which system will work best for your situation.

[Ron J.]

Hi Darrell
I have had some of the same problem with to much monitor volume. You have been given some great advice. The only thing I would seggest the inturm until you get the IEM's is where are the monitor faceing? I had a problem a few week ago where the singers got to practice before me and moved the monitors around so they could hear them. They put them faceing the wall insted of at an angle. We were getting to much bleed over from the monitors. The singers were not hearing themselves. So we turned them at an angle and the could still here and we would actually turn the monitors down. The only problem I have now is the bass player want to add more speakers, we already have a 18" sub woofer.
The other thing is yes you need a leader. But for now you might want to get with one of the church pastors and sit down with the band to discus some to the problem. Don't get real tecnical with them but try to get some unity. The last thing you want is the team to get frustrated and loose some. You also don't want to hand the new worship leader a problem right off. You need unity in the worship team or it makes in hard to worship. Satan wants the confusion so cut it of now and thing will go better. Lord bless this team and use them for your glory. God Bless You.

[Nathan J]

Originally posted by Steve McCloud
In regard to the NADY PEM-500 wireless IEM's, be careful !!!
We purchased 7 of them a couple years ago and 1 or 2 sets
worked fine together, but more than two and we could not
use them due to them interfering with each other.
We sent them back !!!

Cheap IEMs don't have good enough protection in them from interference and noise coming in. Lets say your drummer has a cheap IEM turned up pretty loudly because it's a fast song and interference comes along... serious hearing damage could result. I would not trust anything that's less than a Sennheiser EW 300-IEM or Shure PSM 200.

There is TONS of information on IEMs available at the ChurchSoundCheck message board if you're interested. On that board I've read about sound techs who wouldn't allow people to play if they try to use a really inexpensive IEM, because they don't want to be responsible for hearing damage if the unit acts up.

Remember, a compressor is recommended for all IEMs - regardless of how much "protection" they have in them or who they were made by.

Please nobody take this the wrong way, I am just EXTREMELY careful with ears because it's so easy to mess up once and have permanent damage.