Reply To: Live Sound Engineering Tutor?

[Anonymous]

I try to get all my feedback out of the way in the soundcheck – I’m not always successful – something normally changes when you get a large number of meatsacks into a venue… But ringing out in the soundcheck is still useful.

I now have more than half of the band on IEMs, and all of them trusting me for volume (which is often difficult for a band to concede). The others have personal monitor mixes, but through wedges. That gives a good balance between stage volume and everyone being able to hear – it also makes setup easier (since a headphone amp takes less setup than a set of wedges, and much less room!)
Personal monitors can feed more guitar back to the lead guitarist – this does two things:
– Lowers the required output volume of the amp for the guitarist to still get thumped in the chest…
– Points half of the remaining on stage volume AWAY from the audience, and the vocal mics (although the drum mics get it of course)

Similar thing apply to other sources…

The positioning of the FOH speakers is also key, and it just an experience thing…

Off Topic – I’d love to have seen a headphone amp built into the QU outputs, probably selectable via a dipswitch over each mix output. I *know* it’s added cost for a limited audience, but it would make shifting to IEMs really easy…