“I Can’t Hear Anything” 5 ways to improve your monitor mix.

When it comes to mixing monitors especially in ears it seems like it’s a constant battle and there can be a lot of frustration. For a variety of reasons, many houses of worship have gone with a system that requires the musicians to mix their own monitors in one way or another. The problem is that the musicians get to a point of either pulling out an ear or just “accepting” the lie that they won’t ever be able to hear what they want/need. In this post Im going to give you 5 ways to improve your Monitor experience.

1. Safety

In following the phrase, we’ll start with the safety aspects. What I’m primarily referring to hear is protecting your hearing. The primary goal is to keep levels as quiet as possible. First off, you may have heard that it’s bad for you to only use one in ear, but if you haven’t it can in fact be very harmful to your hearing. The reason is that we were made to hear sources in real spaces with both ears together. When we receive different info from each ear we end up turning the closed side up louder to try and get what we are hearing up louder to get more intelligibility so our brain can decipher the needed info through all the noise. You likely won’t realize it in the moment but the volume from that side will often get turned up to levels that can cause hearing loss over shorter periods of time in that ear. So please for your own safety, wear both ears. 

The second thing to watch out for is loud pops like when a cable is connected or disconnected while people have ears in. You want to be sure to give everyone a heads up before making a patching change. A quick “ Watch your ears” can save a lot of literal pain, and you don’t want to be the one that causes that. 

2. Communication

Communication seems like something that should be obvious but is often overlooked. I tend to find myself saying quite often that “I can’t fix a problem I don’t know about”. If you haven’t let someone know there is an issue with your ears and you need help, then it not getting addressed is on you. You’re often the only one that is hearing your mix. So be willing to take the time to ask for help. We all want everyone to have the tools they need working optimally to allow all of us to preform at our best. Having an ineffective in ear mix effects everyone. If you can’t hear well, you won’t play or sing well and the engineer won’t be able to set level properly, others won’t be able to hear you in order to play together as a team, and ultimately it won’t sound good to the audience. It is always worth the time to address monitor issues and it makes everyone better.

3. Expectations

Monitors exist to allow the musicians to hear the things they NEED to preform well. They are not made to give you the sound of the record that you sing along to in the car in your monitor. Realistically you wouldn’t want them to. Live music is meant to be far more dynamic than the studio recording and you take the life out of it when you try to replicate that live. You can read more about why it is that live mixes don’t sound like the record here.

Its usually best to take a “less is more” approach with how many things are in your ears. 

4. Setup

I’ve said before that the Basics Matter. Getting good sound in your monitors follows the same principals as getting good sound anywhere. Good sources, captured well, and gain set correctly is most of the battle. It also helps to use the stereo functionality when it’s an option, but it is not required. 

When setting up your mix, You want to just start with the essentials in your ears. If you can hear something (and its turned on and up some), try bringing other things down to make room for it. Most of the time when I hear “I can’t hear anything” I find a mix where everything it turned up all the way. The other thing to check is any master volume points where everything could be turned up or down. this will increase the maximum volume of the loudest thing in your mix if things are already turned all the way up and you need more. 

5. What you actually need.

Finally we come to the big question: What do you actually need to hear? I like to base this around 4 things: Self, Direction, Time, and Pitch.

Self- you need to hear yourself and what you’re doing. This is probably pretty obvious but its hard to know how you sound and if you’re on pitch if you can’t actually hear what you’re doing. 

Time - You need a sense of time to know that you are all playing together. This could be the metronome or the drummer, or anything that everyone is keeping time based on. Ive seen some cases where this is a piano player or acoustic guitar. 

Pitch - You need a singular pitch reference, personally I like the bass because it gives the foundation of the chard, things like piano or acoustic work well too, you just need to pick the one thing that gives you your pitch reference.  Often for singers, this is the piano. 

Direction - You need to know where you’re going on the roadmap of the song. This often comes from the lead vocal or a music director mic if you have one. 

Personally this plays out for me (primarily an electric guitar player) as drums, bass, myself, and the lead vocal in my ears. I can get all 4 things from those sources. 

The Key

The key to getting this minimalist approach to work is that you really need to know your part. This means showing up to rehearsal having spent time on your own learning how your part goes. 

If you’d like to discuss further how to get the best out of your teams monitors, Reach out here, I’d love to talk to you.