Exclusive solo follows selection = much happiness.
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Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.When it comes to mixing in-ears, I’m very average. Workmanlike. I get the job done, but I’m not inspiring at the task. I’ve gotten better lately though, due to a breakthrough I had while running ears for a one-off with a Beatles tribute.
It was one of those moments where necessity was the doting mama of invention. Well, not really invention. Discovery. Thinking about a problem and then working through it.
The group we were working with didn’t have personal remotes for their mixes, and soundcheck hadn’t been particularly detailed for monitor-world. I really wanted to have my finger on the pulse of what the band was listening to, in hopes that I could make changes very quickly and intelligently when asked. With a regular solo setup – the solo setup being how the engineer manages what they listen to in their own ears – I felt like getting around to different mixes was clumsy.
I started asking myself, “What do I want my console to do?” What I came up with was:
- I wanted the console to only solo one thing at a time.
- I wanted the console to solo what I had selected.
Why?
In my case, it boils down to sends-on-fader behavior. On an X32, you can select a channel, and see the various bus-send levels laid out in the group/ bus section. What you can also do is select a bus, and see the channel-send levels in the channel section. My “IEMs on the fly in a panic” workflow is, overwhelmingly, the latter. I want to “work on” a bus, not channels. That being the case, what I desire to listen to is the bus I’m addressing, and only that bus. Then, if the console will automatically move my active solo to the bus I just pressed “select” on, that saves me some work.
Thankfully, solo configurations as I’ve just described are available on X32s and other consoles. (The nomenclature can vary a good bit, so you’ll need to look up specifics for yourself.) I enabled the settings I wanted, and “boom!” everything was better. Operating the console felt much more fluid, and I was confident that I was listening to the right thing at the right time. I didn’t have to constantly manage my solos, because the console was doing that for me.
Of course, easily listening to the bus you’re working on has limitations. The biggest one is that you don’t know exactly what the performer is hearing. The in-ears or phones you’re using may have wildly different sealing/ isolation characteristics from what the player uses. Plus, you don’t necessarily know how much SPL is pouring out of their drivers vs. yours. You can’t assume that what your ears are getting is exactly what they’ve got. Still, having some sort of immediate reference is very helpful, as it takes some of the mystery out of what’s happening in their mix.