Tag Archives: Listening

Personal Monitoring Is Just That…Personal

Successfully deploying in-ears takes time, patience, and a willingness to experiment.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

IEM (In Ear Monitoring) systems have an undeserved reputation:

They are supposed to fix everything in an instant.

That’s baloney, but it’s easy to believe – and it’s also got a kernel of truth embedded in it.

The true thing about in-ears is that they do solve one particular problem in an instant. That problem is audible “wash” from on-stage monitor loudspeakers. Yank the wedges off the stage, hand the artist a receiver and a set of earbuds, and *Bamf!* Life is a lot quieter, and feedback stops being an issue for monitor world – well, in the usual sense, anyway.

“Bamf,” by the way, is the sound made when something magical happens, and that magical something is accompanied by a good-sized puff of grey or black smoke. Magical events accompanied by white smoke go “Poof!”

The false notion about in-ears is that, right out of the box, you are assured of superior monitoring. That’s a lie. If you buy an IEM rig and get a perfect solution on the first day, you are one lucky dog. I’m not bagging on in-ears! I think they’re great, but you have to be realistic about ’em.

IEM systems also describe themselves as “personal monitoring systems,” and the word “personal” is very key. One size doesn’t fit all (literally, in point of fact). When you take the leap into using IEMs, you can save yourself a ton of disappointment and consternation by embracing this idea:

Getting personal monitoring to work for you is going to take more work than just opening the box and connecting the cables.

They Are The Driver, And You Are The Horn

In a certain sense, an IEM earpiece is like a compression driver that a loudspeaker manufacturer would mate to a horn.

It might not be obvious from first glance, but the high-frequency section of most pro-audio loudspeakers is actually two components. The part that’s easy to see from the outside is the horn/ waveguide/ lens/ etc. It’s a carefully designed device (albeit a passive one) that helps the HF driver couple efficiently with the air in the room. Any horn you run into will have a certain subset of HF drivers that it can mate with properly. If the HF driver doesn’t properly mate with a given horn, you can end up with a loss of efficiency, poor frequency response, or both.

Now, manufacturers usually want to sell a good number of horns and/ or drivers. With that in mind, some defacto standards have appeared for HF driver exit diameters, general compatibility, and attachment methods. There are almost certainly some horns and drivers that are made specifically for each other, and won’t work in any other combination, but there are a lot of interchangeable parts out there as well. If you’re a builder of HF drivers, you can pick an overall horn spec and build a bunch of drivers that will fit nicely.

Things aren’t quite that nice for IEM earbud designers.

Sure, most human ears are within a certain percentage of an average canal shape and canal opening diameter, but even folks in the +/- 1 standard deviation range can have a lot of variation. An IEM manufacturer has to figure out how far they’re willing to go to get a workable fit for most users, while keeping their costs at a sane level.

Usually, this means including a few different-sized “sleeves” for the system’s included earbuds.

Even so, you may have trouble getting a good fit. If you don’t get a really good fit with your in-ears, you’re going to have a crappy time. If the driver isn’t right for the “horn” (actually, your ear canal), all the upstream components – the receiver and transmitter – effectively lose the ability to do their job well. A bad fit means less usable level, along with more stage-volume leakage (a double whammy). A bad fit means sound that’s tinny, bizarre, or downright painful.

A bad fit makes the best IEM system seem like a bad investment.

Personal Monitoring Means Working On A Personal Solution

There’s good news here, though. The reality is that, by purchasing a good in-ear transmitter and receiver, your investment is on a great footing. All you have to do is complete that investment properly.

In general, I would urge anyone buying an IEM rig to view the supplied earbuds as a “starter kit” only. Also, I would urge you to view the expense of the system in the box as only about 1/2 to 2/3 of the total cost necessary for a good solution. If the “starter kit” gets you great results without having to buy any additional pieces, then that’s killer. However, you shouldn’t expect this outcome.

What you should expect is to use the in-box phones to verify that the system can transmit and receive audio that has interference and harmonic distortion at, or below, the threshold you are willing to accept. At that point, you need to make the rig yours.

If the drivers in the buds that came with the system are what you need, great. If not, go hunting for an earset that can handle what you want. (Not every set of IEM drivers will be great for low-frequency content at high-volume. I you’ve got to have that, you may need to do some more shopping.) Once you’re sure that the drivers can do what you need, you can start experimenting in earnest.

Get yourself a bunch of compatible sleeves in different sizes and materials. Get some “flanged” sleeves, too. Try to get maximum comfort, along with a bud-to-canal seal that you have to work hard to break. Try using different sleeve sizes in different ears – I’m willing to bet that your ear canals are not exactly the same size on both sides of your head. (Mine aren’t.) Experiment with letting the cable for the buds hang, and putting the cable around the top and back of your ear. Really “go for it” in rehearsals to see how well the fit holds up in response to movement, sweat, and jaw opening.

If you can’t get quite what you want, then you should spring for custom molds. (This is the ultimate in terms of making an in-ear rig yours. Custom molds fit you exactly, and nobody else.) I’m not an IEM user myself, because I’m not a musician and I usually mix wedges, but I do have custom-molded earplugs. I’ll just say this – when I occasionally forget my customs and have to use a set of “generic fit” musician’s plugs, the difference in comfort and ease of use is NOT subtle.

The bottom line?

Just getting an in-ear rig is the beginning of the personal monitoring journey. To get to the end of the journey, you’re going to have to do some work and take some wrong turns. However, when you do finally get your system properly personalized, it will be a thing of beauty.

You just have to be willing to actually go on the adventure.


Classic Professionalism Is Always In Style

“Everything having a proper place” and “making room for each other” are old-school techniques that never wear out.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

Nathan Spenser and The Low Keys

Triggers & Slips

I’m what might be termed as a “Nashville Poser.” I don’t actually have any real idea about what Nashville is like, or what it used to be like. All I have is this sort of romanticized notion about:

  • Killer session players who stop by the studio for about half an hour, hammer out a perfect track in a take or two, and then run off to the next session.
  • Studio engineers who can hear the motion of air molecules in the room, and patch preamps directly to a vintage tape machine because the million dollar console “doesn’t sound right.”
  • A world that is generally populated by old pros who can do anything blindfolded, while comatose. Wearing gun-muffs. In another county.

I’m barely exaggerating those two latter points, by the way.

These perceptions of “that old-school Nashville professionalism” tend to stay with me because of one main reason – a reason that I’m not always aware of how fortunate I am to have:

People actually live out “that old-school Nashville professionalism” where I can see and hear it. Like this past Thursday.

Hey wait – aren’t you kinda against “old school?”

I’m going to talk about Thursday in a bit, but I should probably clear up some things first.

I have to admit, I can often come across as being against “old school.” I have this inordinate fondness for audio gear and tactics that push the boundaries. I’m one of the few people crazy enough to run a digital console (sane), in a live environment (also sane), on general-purpose computing hardware (totally nuts), without a control surface (kinda insane). I don’t care about tape. At all. Especially not analog, but also digital. (Sequential-access media? Really?) When someone says, “vintage analog,” what I actually hear is “heavy, hot, fragile, and generally impractical for live sound.”

I totally stole that last idea from Dave Rat, by the way.

This isn’t actually being “anti old-school,” though. It’s anti-“they did this stuff in the past and we should always keep doing it that way because everything sounded better in [insert decade where you fell in love with music].” I chafe very badly at doing things a certain way for only the reason that they’ve always been done that way. My hair stands on end when people come to the conclusion that going some route from decades past will magically solve all their problems. But…

I love, love, LOVE doings things in a certain way, a way that’s been around since shortly after the dinosaurs were hit by an asteroid, because that certain way is a bedrock technique that “the art” rests on. To me, that’s 100% legitimate – and actually, a no-brainer.

So…Thursday

This past Thursday, Nathan Spenser and The Low Keys put on an EP release party at Fats. The entire night was a display of how classic professionalism and “old-school techniques that actually work” are always, always, always in style.

The first band, Triggers & Slips, heavily used the classic technique of actually listening to each other while on stage. There was no “ball hogging” that I could hear, and even more importantly, when somebody took the lead, everybody else got out of the way.

This ability to know who has the musical spotlight, and to alter one’s volume, tone, and note choice to allow the current leader to actually be in front? That’s one of the numero uno hallmarks of a great, professional group of players.

Next up was The Low Keys. Along with listening to each other, they are a brilliant example of another technique used by old pros: Everything having its proper place.

You can actually tell this is the case before they start playing.

See, when the drummer (Bobby Clark) tells you, “I don’t need drums in the monitors. I just need the vocals, plus a bit of bass and Spenser’s guitar,” this is a good indicator of a volume war not being imminent. It’s a sign that the band’s sonics fit together into a nicely shaped whole, where the kit doesn’t have to be cranked in the fill for the drummer to have a hope of hearing what he’s doing with his own instrument.

(It can also be a sign that the drummer has just given up, and is going for whatever they think they can get to survive the gig, but that’s not the case with these guys.)

Also, I should definitely point out that asking for drums in the upstage fill because you like the way they sound in the upstage fill is totally legitimate – there’s a big difference between just wanting a bit of sweetening and having no choice but to out-shout someone else on stage.

Then, there’s the case of Mike Hunter’s bass. We didn’t have much of a soundcheck, because we were just putting things together on the fly. As such, a guess had to be made about where to put the bass amp’s level.

That guess was high – but here’s the beauty of bands where every instrument has its own space to live and breathe:

The bass wasn’t “too loud” in the usual sense. Because the bass wasn’t competing for the same space as the guitars and drums, a volume guess that was a bit high merely meant that the bass was “more pronounced than planned” instead of “way too !@#$ loud.” The mix at those first few moments still worked just fine. I just had to pull the bass fader back, and get on the gas with the guitars.

…and with everybody having their own space, and not being in a loudness competition, I could give the guitars a push without flattening the audience.

Then, the next bit of “old-school professionalism” came out. Actually, two bits. “Listening to each other” combined with that old standby, generosity. Even with me having pulled the bass back in the PA, Mike still felt like he was too far in front.

“Should I turn the bass amp down a little?” Mike asked.

“Yeah, I’m on the gas pretty hard with the guitars,” I said over the talkback.

So, the bass came down – and it didn’t get lost in the mix because (again, not to belabor the point), everything naturally had a spot in the mix.

Naturally.

As in, I didn’t have to manufacture the placement at FOH.

As I see it, another way of describing the old-school virtues of “listening to each other,” “everything having its own space,” and “generosity,” is this:

When they get on stage, they already sound like a band.

When you work with bands like The Low Keys and Triggers & Slips, you don’t have to do much. All that’s required is to take something that already sounds good, put it into the PA, allow the PA to do only as much sweetening as is necessary for that already good sound to translate well in the audience, and then…

…you stand back and enjoy the show.