Tuesday, October 16, 2007

2 reasons not to use In-Ears...

O.K., so here's the deal. We won a 4 pack of AVIOM In-Ears last year at NAMM (yeah, can you believe it?). So some of the musicians are having trouble with the system. I love them, our drummers all love them, our sound guys swear by them, but some of the other musicians are not so hot on them yet. Have you guys experienced any of this? What have you done to help them out?

Here's my theory. I believe that there are only 2 major reasons not to use the in-ear systems. #1, you are so in love with the live sound that you have trouble playing to the processed, stereo sound. And #2 you don't know how to work the system.

I believe that a lot of musicians have spent so much time depending on the sound guys to dial in their mix that they struggle with figuring out just what they want in their monitors. Another issue is when a sound engineer changes the gain on a channel, it affects the monitor mix so if your sound guy is adjusting gains (for hopefully valid reasons), it can get very frustrating.

I think it all boils down to training your musicians to use them, and we've done... uh... well... let me see... pretty much... uh... no training at all! Dough!

What about you???

4 comments:

Jeff T. said...

Dude,

Avioms and in-ears are the single greatest thing to happen to personal monitoring... EVER!

We use a full in-ear setup and I can share a couple of pointers with you...

Make sure you set up a condenser mic, like an AKG C451, on the middle front edge of your stage, pointed towards the audience. Feed this signal into one of your Aviom channels and use it to hear the room. This will stop you feeling sonically isolated from the congregation.

Even with $550 earphones (I use Shure E5's), you still can't get great bass. This is why bass players and drummers hate in-ears. Buy them Buttkickers and Buttkicker platforms (or make your own platforms).

Buttkickers + in-ears + Avioms = sonic heaven.

Matthew said...

We don't have in-ears here, but back at home we used in-ears and it was a tough transition. Most of our worship team members were also older. We had moved them over the course of a year from using amps, to monitors, to in-ears. Personally when I played Sax or keys, I didn't mind in-ears, but when I led, I always took one ear out to be able to hear the interaction from the people in the congregation.

We also had a time of transition where the audio engineers learned to quit adjusting the gain all the time and the musicians learned that just because you can adjust your mix, you don't have to do it all of the time.

bobby said...

Dude,

I'm lovin em. However...

The biggest complaint I'm getting is about the E2s. People can't seem to find the earbuds they like. Several of them consistently complain that they won't stay in their ears.

That's been my biggest challenge. I'm using a pair of E3s myself, and I like those significantly better than the E2s, but the price reflects that!

bnkrlyn said...

love the pics