Tag Archives: Monitors

Why We Didn’t Use The EAWs

We already had a solution, why waste it?

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.

 
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I have plenty to say about a recent foray into a decidedly NOT small venue. Pigs Over The Horizon got booked into The Depot for a night of Pink Floyd madness, and it was astoundingly fun. (That the place was full certainly helped.) I thought I’d start with an absolutely critical piece of the show’s success: Monitor world.

The captain of monitor beach for Pigs is Jason Knoell, not me. As I’ve said before, my job when it comes to Jason is to provide a good starting point. After that, getting out of the way is my major calling.

Now, The Depot is home to a significant collection of EAW JFX260 monitors. We didn’t use any of them. Instead, we brought in our own solution of Yamaha DBR12s and Alto TS312s for most onstage noises, with a “Frankensteined” drumfill of Turbosound subs and JBL Eon tops.

Why? Why forgo some “pro-touring” grade boxes for units you can buy at Guitar Center for a few hundred smackers a piece? Well, it comes down to two things, really:

1. We had a solution already.

I’ll talk more about the specifics of the solution at a later time, but this was the major driver behind my decision. We had a good two days of tech rehearsal before the show, and for me, the best use of that time was to get an onstage solution dialed up. That way, we would be as far along as possible once we got into the real venue; Not starting from scratch, in other words. Jason could recall his monitor mix, and it would be mostly correct. Some tweaks might be necessary due to a transfer into a different acoustical environment. That’s an inescapable thing…but a 100% escapable thing is changing over to different boxes.

Don’t get me wrong, here. I have tons of confidence that an EAW monitor is a well-behaved, easily tuned loudspeaker enclosure. The point is that I knew that what we already had was working exactly as people wanted. I also knew that we wanted to spend the absolute minimum time in the venue “fiddling.” Moving to a different box would likely be a step backward in both respects. We could certainly have a chance at getting lucky and not having any issues, but luck is not how complex shows end up coming off well.

2. The improvement from the EAWs would only have been marginal.

We’re at a point now where internal powering and processing makes affordable loudspeakers pretty darn good. Would the EAWs have gotten louder? Maybe, but likely only by a couple of dB – and we weren’t running anything into its limiters anyway. As such, more level would have been a moot point. Would a JFX260 have sounded better? Again…maybe? Or maybe not, depending on the preferences of the musicians. The Altos and Yammies are tuned well enough out of the box that running them flat and getting good results isn’t a struggle. I don’t think Jason had to fight their transfer functions at any point. It’s not like we were having trouble with unruly monitors, where an EAW would have made an ocean of difference. The potential upgrade would have been minor, and mostly aesthetic, and nobody was complaining anyway.

When you add it all up, moving to the in-house monitor wedges would have been mostly an “on-paper” upgrade of questionable effectiveness. JFX260 enclosures are certainly classier than what we brought in, but going with what we knew and had dialed up to our precise specifications was (in my mind) the smart play.

 

 


Rusty Halos And Screaming Feedback

Your biases can kick your own butt.

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.

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I am sometimes hired to go in and fix things.

Such was the case with a recent event at a small but classy amphitheater. The show promoters had brought me in because of severe problems they had encountered on the previous attempt. A year earlier, the show had been badly marred by persistent feedback issues, and there was a real (entirely founded) concern that the house crew was simply not up to the task.

“The monitors were SO LOUD,” it was said to me, and I was sure I could make things better. Firstly, I would be sure to run things at a reasonable volume – and the rest would surely be academic.

Thus, I got the gig. Then we had a site visit. At the end of the visit, I made a plan: I would take some of the realtime workload off the house FOH engineer by running monitor world. They had all the loudspeaker hardware we needed, so I’d just bring a console and a split. No problem!

The day came, we patched in, and started line checking. Everything was fine, although I felt like I had to be “on the gas” to get a reasonable amount of SPL from the wedges. Nothing truly weird there.

The first act was a couple of tunes in when the trouble started. Feedback started building up, getting progressively worse until a mic on an acoustic guitar blasted off with a shriek that drove the input into clipping. I quietly rolled my eyes at the FOH engineer, thinking that they were winding things up without any necessity. At the same time, the lead performer got on the mic and asked for the gains on everything to be dropped. I did so, not believing that anything was wrong with monitor world, but definitely wanting to make an audible change for the purposes of keeping everybody calm. I mean, hey, FOH was not to be trusted. (This is a general rule. If you’re on monitor duty, FOH is the problem. If you’re on FOH, monitor beach is at fault. If everything is fine for audio, look out! Somebody in lighting is about to screw up.)

Anyway.

Things did indeed settle down, so I thought, “Now we can get monitor world back to where it’s supposed to be. The performers will be happy to hear themselves again.”

*Screeech!*

“Geeze, FOH…” I thought.

The stage manager asked me if there was anything I wanted to relay up to the FOH mix position. “Yeah, let’s pull the whole mix back 6 dB.” Everything seemed okay. I tried to get things back to normal in monitor world, and *Screech!*

Holy crap. The problem was on MY SIDE of the equation! As realization dawned, my brain actually started to work. There was no way that FOH would feed back in that frequency range, unless they were running at a ludicrous volume. It was monitor world. It couldn’t be anything else than monitor world. FOH was just fine…I was the idiot for the day! I had given FOH a “rusty halo,” which is the assumption of continuing inadequacy after a bad experience. Sometimes people deserve a rusty halo, and sometimes not. This was a definite case of “not.”

I’m still not sure quite what happened. The only explanation that seems at all reasonable to me is that the powered wedges we were using somehow underwent an unexpected increase in onboard gain. How that was precipitated, I can’t really guess, though the monitors that seemed to be giving me trouble were exposed to heat and sun until shortly before the trouble began. (A general cooldown of the components in the boxes seems like a farfetched reason to me, but that variable does correlate with the problem appearing. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but still.)

It was revealed later that the monitor wedges we used almost always seem to do something strange to the house crew. We say that it’s a poor craftsman who blames their tools, but if your tool is inadequate or dangerous then you can’t possibly do your best work. My guess is that the personnel at the venue are perfectly adequate to their tasks, and faulty equipment is their downfall. The same thing happened to me as what I imagine happened to them: They had things working perfectly well at soundcheck time, and then the wedges launched themselves into orbit. “The monitors were SO LOUD” had just become part of my own reality, which leads me to believe that I encountered the same issue as they did the previous year.

In the end, though, the important lesson was that I didn’t take the appropriate actions at an appropriate speed, because I was assuming that my side of the mix could not possibly be at fault. No! Your side of the show can ALWAYS be the problem. Look. Listen. Consider. Act.


Gig Log: Muralfest (May 19, 2018)

Expected and unexpected coolness all around.

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.

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Job Type: Annual community event.

Venue: The South Salt Lake Art Factory parking lot.

Load-in: Art Factory events are great, because you can drive a van-o-gear right up to the very spot the stage will be in. I can’t think of any reasonable way that a load-in could be easier.

Load-out: Especially quick because of Patrick Chase, the A2 on the show. He knows the rig, knows how to stay organized, knows the pack order in the van…I’m not opposed to training people and explaining things, but when the hour is late, an audio human wants the process to go fast. That’s what I got! Oh, and just like load-in, being able to pull the vehicle right up to where all the bits and pieces are sitting is fantasteriffic.

What Went Well

  • Unexpected FOH: The staging company, J&S Productions, wanted to use the show as an opportunity to demo their custom-built PA. I figured that giving it a try wouldn’t hurt, and thankfully, the J&S guys were very happy to have their system tuned flat. Patrick and I got to work half as hard, leave a bunch of gear in the vehicle, and got paid the same. No complaints there.
  • Whistle A Tune: As I mentioned, we got to tune the FOH PA extensively. I also got to tune monitor world to a flat target, which is a rare treat that makes my life much easier when the band is on deck.
  • Pixie And The Partygrass Boys: Working with fun bands is the best. Everybody is there to have a good time, from the stage on out.
  • Bear Shark Duck Snake: Apparently, the key to getting hilarious songs out of bands is to stick them in a van for five hours while denying them access to the radio.
  • Unexpected Job Offers: Jon, the venue manager from OP Rockwell, was on hand to sit in and play some washboard. After load-in, he lays a question on me: Would I want a residency at the very venue that I just mentioned? Well…YEAH! We decide to talk through my scheduling issues to ascertain if all the craziness will be navigable. (Spoiler Alert: I took the job.)
  • Weather: It clouded up at one point, but didn’t rain in any real way. Winds were light. That’s a recipe for a very pleasant outdoor gig.

What Could Have Been Better

  • Whoops, Wrong Knob: Midway through the show, Jon needs some more of the upright bass for better “groove lock-in.” I get on the gas until Jon gives me an approving look. There’s just one problem: I’m SLEDGEHAMMERING Andy (the guitar player) with bass, because I’m confused about my very own monitor layout. Duh. Hold on, let me fix that…

Conclusion

I love it when a plan comes together. I also love it when the plan gets halfway thrown out, and comes together even better than I expected.


The POTH Commentaries – Monitor Engineers Are An FOH Engineer’s Best Friends

A good monitor engineer makes life so much easier.

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.

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Let me tell you about a sound craftsperson called Jason Knoell. Jason Knoell runs H2 Audio out of Provo Utah, and he was the monitor engineer on Pigs Over The Horizon. He made my life so much easier, it was almost too easy.

Jason works with Advent Horizon (the core of the POTH lineup) on a regular basis. With that being the case, he was a natural choice for me to bend my rule that monitor world is not a junior-level position. Let’s be honest, I was also being selfish; I wanted to SEE THE SHOW, DANGIT! In any case, Jason knows what he’s doing. While he’s technically junior to me, industry-wise, he’s not “the new guy” by any means. He’s built a reputation with Advent by doing good work, and I knew that I needed an extra pair of hands on the gig. If I was going to pull off both an FOH mix and the run of the lighting computer, someone else would have to be on point with taking care of the band and FX cues.

Thus, Jason.

(I should also clarify, if I haven’t already, that the only way for junior-level audio humans to become senior-level is for them to take on additional responsibility. At some point, a newer engineer has to run monitor world, or they will never learn how.)

Anyway…

The first major consequence of having someone else running monitors is that my role shifted. For Jason, my job was to be his system tech until everyone was settled in on deck. This meant that, as much as possible, everything was set up, tuned, and “pre-dialed.” The functional goal was that Jason would be able to walk up to the console and get the players what they wanted in a fast, frictionless manner. You better believe that, long before Jason arrived, I spent time trying to get the monitors to have a laser-flat magnitude curve, and also that I wound up the vocals in those wedges to find and correct any problem areas – if the engineer is fighting with the system, the system tech hasn’t executed properly.

The second outcome was that my life at FOH was bliss. I barely had to think about the sound on deck at all. I didn’t have to keep an eye out for players with mix changes. I just had to get the FOH PA to comport with what monitor world was doing. Being able to pour my entire attention into that task was a dream come true. In fact, I might go so far as to say it was one of the easiest, “full production” rock-band mixes I’ve ever done. Sharing the mental workload with another person meant that the “struggle factor” I usually associate with a complex gig simply wasn’t there.

The experience also highlighted that I need to make sure to remember to spend significant time in monitor world myself. I also need to keep some “both sides at once” experience in my toolbox. Mixing for the folks on stage is a perishable skill, and it’s imperative that I maintain a good grasp on it. When life gets too easy, an audio human is liable to get soft – and I don’t want that.

But anytime Jason wants to mix monitors for me, he’ll be very welcome.


Gig Log: IAMA LCS (May 4, 2018)

What matters is if other people enjoy the show.

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.

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Job Type: Recurring concert series.

Venue: The South Valley Unitarian Universalist Society

Load-in: I couldn’t get my regular spot, because I was very early and a bunch of folks were there for another event. I did remember that using the stairs is a terrible option, and so I walked the gear around on the sidewalk instead. I felt much less tired afterwards – no data on any time differential, though. As happened for the previous LCS, I had setup help come in at exactly the right moment to cap things off.

Load-out: Many hands continue to make light work, and my new technique (which is to pack and load out progressively, rather than to pack everything first and then load everything out) feels pretty good. It might be faster, or it might not – although I’m pretty sure we set a load-out record on this go-around. I’m learning that LCS teardown is more about me managing the process than being hands-on with gear all the time.

What Went Well

  • Working with old friends: The first act, Pat And Roy, were folks I remembered well from my Fats days. They know me, I know them, and both parties are aware of what the other party needs. Shows with people you’re acquainted with are like a good open-house gathering with a jam session attached; You get to be comfortable and enjoy yourself.
  • Making new friends: Whenever an act says, “that was some of the best sound we ever had,” that’s a great feeling. It’s an especially great feeling when it’s your first day with that group. I will also say that it’s quite amazing how just getting the basics right (showing up, having your monitor rig tuned somewhat sanely, generally giving a hoot about the goings on) will get you a long way towards getting the “best sound ever” nod.
  • Yes, you can do a big, bluegrass band unplugged: There were a LOT of instruments and open mics up on the deck for the second act, but there weren’t any real problems. We had a couple of short feedback chirps at one point, but nothing that had to be battled with over the course of the set. The key, of course, is a great band that knows how to be a band before a PA system gets added. All they needed was a bit of “fill” from monitor world, where the foldback blends gently with the acoustic output of the instruments. Screaming-hot monitor gain is the gateway to many problems, so not needing that kind of setup fixes lots of issues by way of prevention. The same goes for FOH, of course. There was no call to be ear-splittingly loud, especially because the basic blend was already there from the performers themselves.

What Could Have Been Better

  • Why doesn’t this feel better than it does?: For all the good points of the show, I must admit that I spent my entire time at FOH with the sensation that I was struggling with it. In hindsight, I think that my real worry was how the overall sound of the show wouldn’t “clean up” to my liking. I was really keyed into all the room reflections I was hearing, while trying to be ginger with both volume and EQ. I eventually got to a pretty good place, but it took me a long time to get there – and even then, I didn’t feel that I had a truly crisp, defined mix going. (To be fair, I think the only person who was even a little bit unhappy was me, so…)

Conclusion

This was the close of my second season with the IAMA LCS, and I’m glad to be coming back on for a third round.


EQ Propagation

The question of where to EQ is, of course, tied inextricably to what to EQ.

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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.

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On occasion, I get the opportunity to guest-lecture to live-sound students. When things go the way I want them to, the students get a chance to experience the dialing up of monitor world (or part of it). One of the inevitable and important questions that arises is, “Why did you reach for the channel EQ when you were solving that one problem, but then use the EQ across the bus for this other problem?”

I’ve been able to give good answers to those questions, but I’ve also wanted to offer better explanations. I think I’ve finally hit upon an elegant way to describe my decision making process in regards to which EQ I use to solve different problems. It turns out that everything comes down to the primary “propagation direction” that I want for a given EQ change:

Effectively speaking, equalization on an input propagates downstream to all outputs. Equalization on an output effectively propagates upstream to all inputs.


What I’ve just said is, admittedly, rather abstract. That being so, let’s take a look at it concretely.

Let’s say we’re in the process of dialing up monitor world. It’s one of those all-too-rare occasions where we get the chance to measure the output of our wedges and apply an appropriate tuning. That equalization is applied across the appropriate bus. What we’re trying to do is equalize the box itself, so we can get acoustical output that follows a “reference curve.” (I advocate for a flat reference curve, myself.)

It might seem counter-intuitive, but if we’re going to tune the wedge electronically, what we actually have to do is transform all of the INPUTS to the box. Changing the loudspeaker itself to get our preferred reference curve would be ideal, but also very difficult. So, we use an EQ across a system output to change all the signals traveling to the wedge, counteracting the filtering that the drivers and enclosure impose on whatever makes it to them. If the monitor is making everything too crisp (for example), the “output” EQ lets us effectively dial high-frequency information out of every input traveling to the wedge.

Now, we put the signal from a microphone into one of our wedges. It starts off sounding generally good, although the channel in question is a vocal and we can tell there’s too much energy in the deep, low-frequency area. To fix the problem, we apply equalization to the microphone’s channel – the input. We want the exact change we’ve made to apply to every monitor that the channel might be sent to, and EQ across an input effectively transforms all the outputs that signal might arrive at.

There’s certainly nothing to stop us from going to each output EQ and pulling down the LF, but:

1) If we have a lot of mixes to work with, that’s pretty tedious, even with copy and paste, and…

2) We’ve now pushed away from our desired reference curve for the wedges, potentially robbing desired low-end information from inputs that would benefit from it. A ton of bottom isn’t necessary for vocals on deck, but what if somebody wants bass guitar? Or kick?

It makes much more sense to make the change at the channel if we can.

This also applies to the mud and midrange feedback weirdness that tends to pile up as one channel gets routed to multiple monitors. The problems aren’t necessarily the result of individual wedges being tuned badly. Rather, they are the result of multiple tunings interacting in a way that’s “wrong” for one particular mic at one particular location. What we need, then, is to EQ our input. The change then propagates to all the outputs, creating an overall solution with relative ease (and, again, we haven’t carved up each individual monitor’s curve into something that sounds weird in the process).

The same idea applies to FOH. If the whole mix seems “out of whack,” then a change to the main EQ effectively tweaks all the inputs to fix the offending frequency range.

So, when it’s time to grab an EQ, think about which way you want your changes to flow. Changes to inputs flow to all the connected outputs. Changes to outputs flow to all connected inputs.


The Power Of The Solo Bus

It’s very handy to be able to pick part of a signal path and route that sound directly to your head.

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.

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The Video

The Summary

Need to figure out which channel is making that weird noise in the midst of the chaos of a show? Wondering whether your drum mics have been switched around? Wish you could directly hear the signal running to the monitor mix that’s giving people fits? Your solo bus is here to save the day!


Case Study: FX When FOH Is Also Monitor World

Two reverbs can help you square certain circles.

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.

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The Video

The Script

Let’s say that a band has a new mixing console – one of those “digital rigs in a box” that have come on the scene. The musicians call you in because they need some help getting their monitors dialed up. At some point, the players ask for effects in the monitors: The vocals are too dry, and some reverb would be nice.

So, you crank up an FX send with a reverb inserted on the appropriate bus – and nothing happens.

You then remember that this is meant to be a basic setup, with one console handling both FOH and monitors. Your inputs from the band use pre-fader sends for monitor world, but post-fader sends for FX. Since you weren’t building a mix for FOH, all your faders were all the way down. You don’t know where they would be for a real FOH mix, anyway. If the faders are down, a post-fader send can’t get any signal to an FX bus.

Now, you typically don’t want the monitors to track every level tweak made for FOH, but you DO want the FX sends to be dependent on fader position – otherwise, the “wet-to-dry” ratio would change with every fader adjustment.

So, what do you do?

You can square the circle if you can change the pre/ post send configuration to the FX buses, AND if you can also have two reverbs.

Reverb One becomes the monitor reverb. The sends to that reverb are configured to be pre-fader, so that you don’t have to guess at a fader level. The sends from the reverb return channel should also be pre-fader, so that the monitor reverb doesn’t end up in the main mix.

Reverb Two is then setup to be the FOH reverb. The sends to this reverb from the channels are configured as post-fader. Reverb Two, unlike Reberb One, should have output that’s dependent on the channel fader position. Reverb Two is, of course, kept out of the monitor mixes.

With a setup like this, you don’t need to know the FOH mix in advance in order to dial up FX in the monitors. There is the small downside of having to chew up two FX processors, but that’s not a huge problem if it means getting the players what they need for the best performance.


Monitor World – Is “More” Better?

Often, the answer is “nope.”

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.

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Monitor world is a PA system, just like FOH is a PA system. The only difference is that monitor world handles a few very small audiences, and FOH usually deals with one comparatively large audience. All the helpful AND problematic physics considerations are the same.

This being the case, the stage is yet another place where simply piling up more and more boxes (all doing the same thing) to get “more” can be counterproductive. A vocalist wants more vocal, but their monitor is already doing everything it can, so you add another box. Does it look impressive? Yes! Is it louder? Yes! Is it better?

Yea- er…well…wait a second…

What you very well might end up with is a different set of issues. If the singer isn’t precisely situated between the wedges, the wedge outputs arrive at different times. This means that all kinds of destructive phase weirdness might be happening, and that can lead to intelligibility issues. The vocal range is very easy to louse up with time-arrival differences, and a sensation of “garble” can lead to a player wanting even MORE monitor level in compensation. In that instance, you haven’t actually gotten anywhere; Monitor world is louder, but it’s not any easier to hear in the information-processing sense. You also have greater effective loop-gain with that extra volume rocketing around, which destabilizes your system.

Plus, the low-frequency information still does combine well, which can lead to a troublesome buildup of mud. This goes double for everybody who’s off-axis (and that’s probably just about everybody who isn’t the intended audience of those wedges). That makes them want their own mixes to be hotter, which compounds all your problems even more.

And, of course, there’s even more bleed into FOH.

The brutal reality is that, for any single sound that a given player needs to hear, that signal will always sound better coming from a single box that “can get loud enough.” More wedges (all producing the same output) can only combine less and less coherently as you add more of them.

“But, Danny,” you protest, “you’ve done dual wedges for people. You’ve even rolled out some really excessive deployments, like the one in the article picture. Who are you to tell folks not to do that kind of thing?”

Fair point! In response:

1) It’s because I’ve tried some strange monitor solutions that I can say they weren’t necessarily improvements over simpler approaches.

2) Sometimes you do things that look cool, accepting that you’ll have to deal with some sonic downsides as a result.

3) Just because you’ve piled up a bunch of wedges, it doesn’t require you to put the exact same thing through each enclosure. Somebody might have two boxes in front of them, but one might be for vocals only and the other for instruments only.

With some bands, especially those who are naturally well balanced and don’t need a ton of monitor gain, the extra fun-factor and volume bump can trade off favorably with the coherence foibles. As the rest of this article indicates, yes, I am in the camp that says that a single box will always “measure better.” However, there’s more to life than just “measuring better.” If you have some room to compromise, you can be a little weird without hurting anything too badly.

Audio is an exercise in compromise. If you know what the compromise factors are, you can make an informed judgement. If you know that throwing a bunch of boxes at a problem might cause you other problems, then you’ve got more knowledge available to help you make the right decision for a fix.


Monitor-World Is Not A Junior-Level Position

Mixing monitors is a mission-critical task, not an “add-on” to FOH.

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.

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Worrying about Front Of House (FOH) doesn’t keep me up at night. Monitor-world, on the other hand…

It’s not just because an issue at FOH is much easier to hear, and thus much easier to correct swiftly and in detail. (Although that’s part of it.) It’s not just because midstream communication regarding monitor needs is difficult – exponentially so as the detail-level of a request rises. (Although that’s part of it, too.)

It’s because getting the monitors right is absolutely crucial to a successful show. If monitor-world isn’t doing its best, the musicians won’t be able to do their best, and if they can’t do their best, the most stupenfuciously awesome-sauce FOH mix will be a mix of musicians WHO ARE STRUGGLING. I don’t want to be forced to choose, but if I am compelled, I will take incredible monitors and mediocre FOH without hesitation.

Every day of the week.

And twice on Sunday.

Yet, for some reason, there has been a tendency to elevate the FOH audio human’s position above that of the monitor engineer. It’s as if there are two species of noise louderizer in the world, Homo Sapiens Mixus Audienceus and Homo Sapiens Musicius Keepem-Happyus, with the latter being an underdeveloped version of the former. Well, that’s a load of droppings from an angry, male cow if ever there was such a thing.

For FOH, you basically mix one show, a show that, as I mentioned, you yourself hear in detail. You generally get to make decisions unilaterally, and your path to those decisions is through your own interpretation of your hearing.

In contrast, monitor-world is the mixing of many shows to multiple audiences of one (sometimes eight or more). Those shows may have wildly different needs, and with wedges, each show bleeds into and heavily influences all the other shows. There may be a subtle detail that’s driving somebody crazy which is difficult for the operator to hear. Every significant choice has to filtered through the interpretation of another person, and nuanced communication is anywhere from challenging to outright impossible. At any given moment, you have to keep some sort of mental map about what’s going where, and also about what was recently changed (in case a problem suddenly crops up). Modifications have to be made swiftly and smoothly, and if you make a mistake, you have to be able to backtrack surgically. Panic is lethal.

To crib from The Barking Road Dog, mixing rock-and-roll monitors in realtime is not a skill possessed by a large number of people involved in the noise louderization profession.

…and then, there’s the gear side. It’s not uncommon to hear of a smaller audio provider upgrading a “point-and-shoot” FOH rig, with the old boxes being “demoted” to monitor duty. This sometimes happens by default or necessity. It’s certainly the reality in my case. But to do that intentionally doesn’t make sense to me. The boxes where being laser-flat across the audible spectrum helps stave off disaster? The boxes that have to stay “hospital clean” at high volume? The boxes that have to be able to produce large, uncompressed peaks, so that performers can “track” their own output? Those boxes are needed in monitor-land! (Seriously, if I ever get my hands on a bunch of disposable income, I’m going to bring my monitor rig UP to parity with my FOH system.)

So, no. Monitor-world is not for the intern or second-banana. The person running it is not a “junior” or “second” engineer. The gear is not the stuff that couldn’t cut the mustard at FOH.

What happens on deck is the bedrock, THE crucial and critical foundation for the show as a whole. It should be treated as such at all times.