Silence on stage: In-ear monitors and modeling guitar rigs

TL;DR:
Modern technology offers more and more musicians more and more options…with some new unforeseen issues, and a chance to re-use those monitor wedges.

The Story:
Years ago, my band Talking to Walls made a huge leap to what felt like the next level. We spent a lot of money to work with people bigger than us, to make a big record. It sounded fantastic.

Unfortunately, our live show did not. To help protect our hearing and help us all hear better – especially our new vocal harmonies – we made the leap to in-ear monitors. We debuted their use one snowy night in Boston. It was the best show we’d played in our career at that point, and we only moved upwards from there.

An added benefit was that the audience was not getting the muffled vocals coming from the back of the monitor wedges. Overall our shows sounded cleaner and cleaner, especially as we learned to mix our instruments better (I, for one, had way to much low end in my guitar amp before that record). And we said goodbye to the noise hangovers and ear ringing!

This was back in 2008 or 2009. Little unsigned bands like ours having an in-ear rigs – especially without an engineer on our touring staff – seemed risky and unheard of. The standing order to FoH was “turn off the wedges completely” – cleaned up the mix, and saved us from engineers who didn’t know how to mix ears and avoid the dreaded “vocals in the monitor and in the in-ears” crisis of feedback.

We learned a lot about monitors in our run. As we got to bigger venues and even amphitheaters,, we started adding kick and bass to the wedges, things that the tiny drivers ear buds could not reproduce and so that we could “feel” the music more.

Nowadays, many more bands are showing up to venues with in-ear monitors. What’s more, the carefully cultivated backline of tube amps like we lugged in roadcases from city to city are getting increasingly replaced by modeling rigs. Even I, a snobby amp purist, can appreciate the ease and reduced luggage/dryage fees that result in your guitar only needing a pedal board or rack unit, with even more flexibility than my oversized board filled with analog pedals could give me.

But there’s a problem, and the audience can suffer.

The Esoteric Bit:
Here’s the simple problem that bands are starting to face – and may not even know it. Since the beginning of amplified music, what the band hears (and might consider sounding good) is COMPLETELY different from the audience. We know this and accept it. However, with the growth of in-ear monitors in the small-to-medium clubs, it means that more and more bands are getting more isolated from the audience experience, sonically. (Which is why the bigger tours run crowd mics to the monitor mixes.)

But once you start putting everything but the drummer and horns through a DI-only chain, the empassioned punters down front row start to suffer.

The band is happy – they hear guitars pouring through computer-emulated vintage-era Marshall stacks. The engineer is happy – now, only the drummer is playing too loud on stage. (As always.)

The people who rushed the stage so they could see and hear the band – the ones who really get the band vibed up and excited? All they get is drums and horns. The monitor wedges aren’t pushing much, if anything – maybe some of that kick and bass mentioned above. But these passionate fans are standing along along the same line as the FoH stacks/arrays – possibly even behind them. So they can’t hear much of anything going on.

Here is a quick an easy solution to this. Lots of rock clubs do not have front fills – those low-profile speakers dotting the edge of a stage. This would be where you would send these missing signals, to help the people down front, at a level appropriate for people so close.

If the band doesn’t mind, try taking that line of downstage monitors and FLIP THEM OVER, or otherwise turn them towards the audience. Create a new submix of whatever the people down in front are missing, and send it to these speakers!

Should the band need foldback of the above-mentioned kick and bass, then only flip over as many wedges as you can get away with, depending on how many mixes you have available.

Everyone’s happy.

Let’s hear more of that awesome guitar tone that you spent hours programming!

Cheers!
-brian