My church moved into a new auditorium a little over a year ago, and with that move came some new equipment at FOH, including a Yamaha PM5D and an Aviom Personal Monitoring system. Up until that point I had been mixing monitors from the FOH position for the band by watching each member for their up and down movements with one hand, while their other hand pointed at the instrument or vocal they needed adjusted.
Not the most efficient way to mix monitors, but it worked.
Ever since getting the Avioms I haven’t had to worry about the monitor mix of the band anymore. It has made rehearsals more stress free, and allows me to concentrate on the mix and the band to concentrate on their music. We still use front wedges for the background vocalists, but once those are set there usually isn’t much adjustment that is needed.
Recently though I was called upon by our student ministries worship pastor to help sound check a local band that was going to be playing during the youth service. He plugged in all their inputs for me and when I got to the board it was time to do a monitor check, without the convenience of personal monitors. They have an analog Allen and Heath board and four monitor mixes being sent to wedges on the stage.
Here is the process I went through to get the band the best monitor mix possible in the shortest amount of time.
1. Set Gain Levels
I went through each instrument, one by one, starting with the kick drum. I brought down the channel fader and aux sends, and then had the drummer hit the kick drum. I adjusted the gain until I had a good signal (hitting the yellow every once in a while), but made sure it never clipped into the red. With an analog board there is a little more forgiveness for clipping, but I didn’t want to take any chances.
Once I finished each drum channel I moved on to the other instruments, doing exactly the same thing on each channel. Bring down the fader and aux sends, and adjust the gain until I had a good input level. Once I was finished with all the instruments, I moved on to the next step.
2. Set Basic Monitor Levels
We started back at the kick drum and I put a little in everyone’s monitor mix. I then had each musician point up or down to tell me if they wanted more or less. I didn’t spend a lot of time here, since we were just setting basic levels. As soon as one instrument was set, I moved on to the next one.
This step isn’t about getting the perfect mix, just about setting a starting point to work with later. Quickly moving through each instrument, each musician had a rough monitor mix by the end. Now it was time to start mixing.
3. Set a Rough House Mix
Before fine tuning the monitor mix, I like to have the band play about 30 seconds of a song so that I can set a rough house mix. The house mix almost always adds some fullness to the musician’s ears if they are using wedges. This could be different for those of you who use in ear monitoring.
Most in ears work well at blocking out outside noise, so setting a house mix wouldn’t be too beneficial for you. As the band plays try to mix as close as possible to what it could sound like in regards to volume in the house. It doesn’t have to be a great mix, it just helps fill in the sound for the band on the stage.
The goal here is to be able to keep our stage volume low. By mixing the house before fine tuning the monitor mix, hopefully the musicians won’t need quite as much of themselves as they thought. I always try and keep the stage volume as low as possible. This helps the FOH mix to be easier to control and also cuts down on feedback issues on stage.
4. Fine Tune the Monitor Mix
Now that you have set a basic monitor mix and adjusted the house mix to the appropriate volume, it’s time to fine tune the monitor mix. I have the band play through a song, watching as each member indicates an instrument and then points up or down. Since the rough mix has already been set, there shouldn’t be any huge adjustments that are necessary, just small tweeks here and there.
By the end of the song, all of the mixes should be pretty close to where they need to be. If there are still some minor adjustments that need to be made, change the level of the instrument while the band isn’t playing, and then have them run a few bars of the song to see if the adjustment fixed the problem.
You don’t have to set up your monitor mixes exactly the way I do it, but I’ve found by doing it this way I am able to get the musicians a quality mix in a fairly short amount of time. And that leaves more time for the fun stuff, like mixing FOH.
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