Tips for Mono IEM's (AKA the death of guitar tone)

Hmmm, while I love Joe B, it's certainly rather easy to get a great guitar and ensemble mix in IEM's, even in mono, and even with inexpensive IEM's as long as you have perfectly fitted memory foam tips. Also importantly, a proper ambience that provides some early reflections that your brain expects to hear in normal playing environments is required, like when you're off-set to your cab (or your cabs are behind plexiglass like Joe's...), and of course a decent tone to begin with.

The advantages of controlled stage sound sans directional/beamy guitar cabs killing a few seats, and/or blasting wedges off the back wall arriving out of phase while overpowering FOH, plus a perfectly consistent mix in all venues is a God send to modern concert production, and modern stage monitoring.
 
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TheloniusJ said:
One thing I will objectively disagree with is Joe's point about ear health and IEMs, which I think is nonsense. Sure, if you are someone who is trying to recreate the auditory experience of a loud rock concert with your IEMs and have them blaring loud, then yeah, that is going to be bad for your hearing. But most IEMs are actually designed to allow you to get a good mix at reasonable auditory levels. Most of these will offer in the range of 40dB attenuation which is pretty substantial and allows you to bring in a good mix at relatively low levels.
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Honest question - which ones give 40db of attenuation? I'm trying to find IEMs with the most isolation for the exact reasons mentioned. I don't want my IEM volume to compete with stage volumes....so I need isolation.
Custom molds seem to have ~20db reduction (being looking at 64 Audio specificially)
 
GuyJames said:
Enjoyable and REALISTIC is the goal. When everyone is using monitors on stage even if you turn someone down in the floor monitor you will likely still hear a bit or even most of them on stage whereas with IEM's you can totally block out people in the ears. This for me is horrible because why the hell are you playing music with people you don't want to hear... I get that situationally IEM's make sense sometimes but for me they make sense way less than not using and everybody listening to each other.
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I'm never turning anyone down because I don't want to hear (well, maybe the keyboards in the rock band) and it really depends on the band. With the rock band, we are mostly doing very straight ahead covers so I'm pretty much playing "parts". As such, I'm mostly focused on hearing the cues I need and making sure I can hear myself enough to make sure I am playing accurately what I need to play. I love the other guitar player, but I have him fairly low in the mix because I really need to hear myself. I generally don't find this kind of thing terribly enjoyable to start with, so I am prioritizing accurate performance over my enjoyment.

With the fusion band I play in, it is a very different story. With this I really do want to hear what everyone else is playing so I can interact with them in an improvisational manner. Definitely more focused on interaction and enjoyment with this band. I do have myself a bit higher in the mix than we are putting out to FOH mainly, but this is honestly more due to the fact that I use a mostly clean tone that gets gritty with my volume knob all the way up. I find if I'm too far down in the mix, I have the tendency to push my volume knob up higher than I might want it and be grittier than I would prefer.

FWIW: I use mono IEMs with the rock band (though we are going to push to move to stereo) and stereo with the fusion band. Stereo (and higher quality IEMs) does make the realism and enjoyability factor much better.
 
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BBN said:
Honest question - which ones give 40db of attenuation? I'm trying to find IEMs with the most isolation for the exact reasons mentioned. I don't want my IEM volume to compete with stage volumes....so I need isolation.
Custom molds seem to have ~20db reduction (being looking at 64 Audio specificially)
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These are what I am currently using.

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/de...ic-triple-driver-professional-in-ear-monitors

At least according to the Sweetwater specs you get 40dB of attenuation (unless I am totally misreading this). I will say that even before we were using IEMs, we were playing REALLY loud during rehearsals and I started wearing these with just a little of my FM3 mix piped in purely to bring the overall levels down to safe levels, though this made the rest of the band pretty muffled. Not ideal, but it does speak to the attenuation.

Using them with an actual stereo IEM mix sounds pretty damn good in my opinion.
 
I truly want to love IEM’s I swear… but even in stereo and with some iem effects like early reflections/room mics, it just does t have the sag you get from and amp/monitor on stage. You’ll also never get controlled feedback unless you have a digitech freqout…

we have to decide for ourselves what the priority is, the audience experience and trusting the sound engineer with everything or… the band sounds the way they want to on stage (assuming they all want no IEM’s) and the engineer delivers their product.

I’m more on the side of the sound engineer works for us not we work for them. The audience is there to see us and FEEL us. If the musician themselves can feel their performance because it’s all coming through little earbuds how will the audience feel it.

Honestly though it just comes down to situational things like who’s calling the shots. If I have to wear them then I can only pray I’ll have a good stereo set up and still be allowing a monitor on stage for a little rumble. If it’s totally direct then I pray the sound engineer is good.
 
GuyJames said:
I truly want to love IEM’s I swear… but even in stereo and with some iem effects like early reflections/room mics, it just does t have the sag you get from and amp/monitor on stage. You’ll also never get controlled feedback unless you have a digitech freqout…

we have to decide for ourselves what the priority is, the audience experience and trusting the sound engineer with everything or… the band sounds the way they want to on stage (assuming they all want no IEM’s) and the engineer delivers their product.

I’m more on the side of the sound engineer works for us not we work for them. The audience is there to see us and FEEL us. If the musician themselves can feel their performance because it’s all coming through little earbuds how will the audience feel it.

Honestly though it just comes down to situational things like who’s calling the shots. If I have to wear them then I can only pray I’ll have a good stereo set up and still be allowing a monitor on stage for a little rumble. If it’s totally direct then I pray the sound engineer is good.
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All totally makes sense, and for what it is worth, I totally understand and love the live experience. Believe me if I am just going to have a jam, I'm not gonna want to be wearing IEMs. Even in rehearsal, I'd much prefer to play in a live room, but we have started rehearsing with IEMs just so everyone is used to it and we can really dial our individual mixes in. For the rock band, I'm also doing this for my ear health. Our drummer hits hard so we end up being damn loud if we are doing a live room.

Also, I totally agree with the speaker/guitar interaction. This is a noticeable difference and, to be honest, even with IEMs I'll have one of my EV PXMs going if the engineer is on OK with it.

For the fusion band, our IEM set up is the same as our FOH system (we have always just hired someone to mix FOH for us). With the rock band, we play a lot of different venues so decided to do our own dedicated IEM system with XLR splits for FOH. This has worked out really well because everyone gets to dial in their own mixes in rehearsal and then tweak as the venue demands if necessary. So we run everything to our board and then give labeled XLR tails to FOH. They seem to really like it and we get to keep control of our own sound.

Our system cost us about $6K to start. It is based around a Behringer X32 Rack with a stage box as an expander (we currently have 24 in and 16 out). This does allow us to run our own FOH if we need, but we haven't done this yet. Below is a picture of the initial build. We have since added some external antennas to reduce dropouts. As you can see, we only have three stereo transmitters. There are six of us, so you everyone gets a mono feed to their receiver. We plan to add more until everyone get's a stereo mix, but haven't done that yet. We have plenty of I/O for it.


IEM Sys.jpg
 
TheloniusJ said:
All totally makes sense, and for what it is worth, I totally understand and love the live experience. Believe me if I am just going to have a jam, I'm not gonna want to be wearing IEMs. Even in rehearsal, I'd much prefer to play in a live room, but we have started rehearsing with IEMs just so everyone is used to it and we can really dial our individual mixes in. For the rock band, I'm also doing this for my ear health. Our drummer hits hard so we end up being damn loud if we are doing a live room.

Also, I totally agree with the speaker/guitar interaction. This is a noticeable difference and, to be honest, even with IEMs I'll have one of my EV PXMs going if the engineer is on OK with it.

For the fusion band, our IEM set up is the same as our FOH system (we have always just hired someone to mix FOH for us). With the rock band, we play a lot of different venues so decided to do our own dedicated IEM system with XLR splits for FOH. This has worked out really well because everyone gets to dial in their own mixes in rehearsal and then tweak as the venue demands if necessary. So we run everything to our board and then give labeled XLR tails to FOH. They seem to really like it and we get to keep control of our own sound.

Our system cost us about $6K to start. It is based around a Behringer X32 Rack with a stage box as an expander (we currently have 24 in and 16 out). This does allow us to run our own FOH if we need, but we haven't done this yet. Below is a picture of the initial build. We have since added some external antennas to reduce dropouts. As you can see, we only have three stereo transmitters. There are six of us, so you everyone gets a mono feed to their receiver. We plan to add more until everyone get's a stereo mix, but haven't done that yet. We have plenty of I/O for it.


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Christmas is right around the corner! Get those stereo modules and rock into 2024 the way you deserve.
 
After a bit of thought on this the past couple of days, I'm set on getting a stereo mix to my IEMs, to enhance the experience.
I'm going to try 2 options. Posting this because I think it's possible for anyone to get a stereo mix with my 'option 2'.

Option 1 - put my vocals and guitar (currently Axe3 or FM3 in mono) into our X32 Rack and apply a Stereo Enhancer (from the X32 effects engines) to my IEM mix. Stereo out of the X32 into my IEM base.

Option 2 - Plug my Axe3 stereo output 1 into my IEM base. Send a mono signal from Axe (output 2) to X32. Send a mono Aux from my X32 into Input 2 on my Axe 3. Have my vocals (and other band instruments) in that Aux send from the X32...but no guitar. Merge that Aux into my signal path so they are both coming out of the just Ouput 1 (stereo). Add effects to taste within the Axe to make that Aux channel sound stereo (maybe enhancer block). You can control the mix of Axe 3 guitar vs. Aux Send (vocals and other instruments) simply by increasing/decreasing the Aux send on the X32. I'm liking this method best because I could also do it when I have a gig with house sound.
 
BBN said:
After a bit of thought on this the past couple of days, I'm set on getting a stereo mix to my IEMs, to enhance the experience.
I'm going to try 2 options. Posting this because I think it's possible for anyone to get a stereo mix with my 'option 2'.

Option 1 - put my vocals and guitar (currently Axe3 or FM3 in mono) into our X32 Rack and apply a Stereo Enhancer (from the X32 effects engines) to my IEM mix. Stereo out of the X32 into my IEM base.

Option 2 - Plug my Axe3 stereo output 1 into my IEM base. Send a mono signal from Axe (output 2) to X32. Send a mono Aux from my X32 into Input 2 on my Axe 3. Have my vocals (and other band instruments) in that Aux send from the X32...but no guitar. Merge that Aux into my signal path so they are both coming out of the just Ouput 1 (stereo). Add effects to taste within the Axe to make that Aux channel sound stereo (maybe enhancer block). You can control the mix of Axe 3 guitar vs. Aux Send (vocals and other instruments) simply by increasing/decreasing the Aux send on the X32. I'm liking this method best because I could also do it when I have a gig with house sound.
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Man that’s a lot you lost me but I hope it works for you.
 
Yes, not easy to describe with words. Something like this.
Input 1 - your guitar
Input 2 - Aux feed from Mixer (for me, this will be just my vocals usually)
Output 1 - FOH (which is mono)
Output 2 - IEMs

I jump from Row 3 to Row 4 to create a guitar chain just for my IEMs (I did it after the Cab, but before Delay/Verb, because I may add a stereo Delay/Verb after the Enhancer)

I use Input 2 to inject my Aux mix from board. I added a Verb/Enhancer because for me, it will be just my vocals (using the Axe effects to sweeten my vocal going to my IEM).

I use the Mixer block so I can balance my Guitar signal to the IEM vs. my Aux (vocal) going to the IEM.

And thanks to the brilliant feature of 'Performance' page on the front panel of the Axe, I have the Mixer block controls there for making the adjustment to balance my Guitar vs. Aux signals.

This gives me full stereo IEMs wherever I go. Venue hands me an XLR for the feed to my IEMs, I plug into my Axe Input 2....I balance that feed with my Guitar with a single knob.

AXE with IEM.jpg
 
BBN said:
Yes, not easy to describe with words. Something like this.
Input 1 - your guitar
Input 2 - Aux feed from Mixer (for me, this will be just my vocals usually)
Output 1 - FOH (which is mono)
Output 2 - IEMs

I jump from Row 3 to Row 4 to create a guitar chain just for my IEMs (I did it after the Cab, but before Delay/Verb, because I may add a stereo Delay/Verb after the Enhancer)

I use Input 2 to inject my Aux mix from board. I added a Verb/Enhancer because for me, it will be just my vocals (using the Axe effects to sweeten my vocal going to my IEM).

I use the Mixer block so I can balance my Guitar signal to the IEM vs. my Aux (vocal) going to the IEM.

And thanks to the brilliant feature of 'Performance' page on the front panel of the Axe, I have the Mixer block controls there for making the adjustment to balance my Guitar vs. Aux signals.

This gives me full stereo IEMs wherever I go. Venue hands me an XLR for the feed to my IEMs, I plug into my Axe Input 2....I balance that feed with my Guitar with a single knob.

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That is a pretty interesting approach. Thanks for sharing.

This may be a bit more than I’d be willing to do but it does make sense.
 
TheloniusJ said:
That is a pretty interesting approach. Thanks for sharing.

This may be a bit more than I’d be willing to do but it does make sense.
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Yeah, it's a bit much, I agree.
But I will say - I set it all up this morning and it works/sounds excellent!
Being that the IEM base case sit in the rack with my Axe, the set up time is quick.
Tell the house sound person to hand me an XLR for my IEM feed....just give me vocals....I'll mix it appropriately with the Axe mixer block.
'Should' be idiot proof. (but I'm a special kind of idiot, so let's see what kind of disasters I can create)

I'm REALLY appreciating the flexibility that Fractal gives us here (that are not always standard options on other products)
- multiple inputs/outputs and the flexibility to route them wherever we'd like
- Axe is a 6 channel mixer!
- 4 XLR outputs
- customizable front panel (performance mode) controls - underrated feature!
 
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