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While it's not yet proven to be the holy grail, this below is nevertheless the closest that I've personally - after years of trying different things - found to something that:
Yes - I know, being Behringer, this is probably a copy of someone elses concept (Mackie, etc, etc), but personally I'm a fan of Behringer products. Their products have never yet let me down and pretty much everyone elses have.
And this is it (the Xbox controller is just for scale! :
It cost me £130 new and it weighs just 7lb. It comes with a mic stand adapter and comfortably sits on that at just the right angle for its intended use as personal monitor.
I won't go through all the features - there are plenty of ads and clips around - but will show these two shots to refer to in terms of the configurations we've been able to successfully use in our particular live scenarios, and thoughts for more in the future.
Before I cover the scenarios tried so far, the key aspects that have given us the flexibility are:
There is one more factor that has been used in some of the scenarios we've tried. For some of the scenarios, basically those where we are creating an individual 'more me and less of him, him and her!' mix, we have used various send feeds from the mixer. Some of those, because one of our mixers is small basic, have needed a bit of thinking and ingenuity.
Scenario One
The dreaded 'Open Mic Night'
OK - maybe all your venues are well equipped with someone who cares about the challenges of the performers as well as the audience, providing balanced monitors and tweaking the mix during the performance. Yeah, right
Tried solution 1: Vocalist, Electric Guitarist - mic into the B205; electric guitar into B205; B205 on stand between vocalist and guitarist with mix and master volume fully audible to, in control of, performers. Resulting mix sent from Thru at back to venue's PA
Tried solution 2: Vocalist, Electric Guitarist, Backing track on Jamman pedal - mic into B205; Jamman output into phono input on B205, guitar into B205; B205 on stand between vocalist and guitarist with mix and master volume fully audible to, in control of, performers. Resulting mix sent from Thru at back to venue's PA.
Both duo bands I am in had given up doing open mic nights. We now do them again - and enjoy them!
Oh...and isn't it a lot of extra gear to take?
Other than the optional mic stand (a cupboard, bar counter or bar stool would do), it all fits into this - including cables, power leads, extension cable, Jamman and mic! :
Scenario Two
Small Band; small to large venue
Equipment: band's mixer; own or venue's FOH PA
When Pete and I play or blues electric / sax stuff, we use this cheapo mixer (below) and send it to a small but adequate band PA, good enough for medium venues:
The mixer above is cheapo but carefully chosen because, unusually for a cheapo mixer, it has a couple of 'Send' channels as well as Mon Send and FX Send adjustment on each channel.
First time round, we tried my B205 instead of our normal wired in-ear buds. Just sent the 'Phones' output from the mixer to the B205 and it worked a treat. MUCH better than the poor-man's earphone set up we had been using. So much so that Pete went out and immediately bought his own B205D.
And that gave us HUGE opportunities. Because:
So, set up was:
Pete Guitar to mixer; my Mic to mixer; my sax condenser mic to mixer; Jamman backing track to mixer - all panned central
From Mixer - Main Out Right - to my B205, giving me full mix personal monitor; Main Out Left to FOH PA. Additionally, I made up a small three cable snake - two of them with the 'stereo jack shorted across ring and tip' mod to allow me to use the Send/IO as outputs without cutting the signal to the main mix.
So into Pete's B205 is: Mic send (jack); Electric send (jack); mon send turned on at the mixer for the Jamman channel and Mon Send output to a couple of phono plugs and into Pete's B205
Result: My 205 gives me the full FOH mix at any volume I need to hear myself and other inputs; Pete has individual volume control of the backing track, his guitar and my vocals, also with full master volume of that mix. Trust me - he can hear the sax without a channel feed needed!
So - for us - live playing has been transformed.
Further thoughts - we are going to try it with the full 5 piece band next time we practice. Every channel we use on the big mixer has a send / IO on it, plus two Mon Send outputs - and with a bit of ingenuity.......
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Comments
I'm not anti-Behringer either. I have to admit I find some of their blatant ripping-off of other people's designs a bit cheeky, and it's true that they haven't *always* been that well-made or perfectly reliable, but what I have noticed is that they seem to be quite good at updating products to fix known issues, so the later versions then don't break - their overall failure rates now seem very low. Some of their copies are also better-made than the originals!
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
For most of our gigs, the main external noise is just the trundle of people desperately trying to get out of the main or fire exits
So, with the 205's being this close, so far we've found that the volume doesn't have to be that high and is probably going to be much lower than the floor wedges that we would normally use Interestingly, the main feedback issues with the wedges have been where the sound from them has bounced off a wall behind us and into the mics. BUT we only have two wedges for the whole band so they do tend to have to be turned up more than they normally should be. And the use of the 205's in the full band is, as yet, unproven. What we'll start off with is just mine sitting right next to the drummer and with the overally FOH mix and maybe with a second feed from the bassist's channel. That alone would mean the floor wedges could be much lower volume.
And hence the disclaimers about this not necessarily working for everyone. As the full band,we use PA and wedge monitors and a mic'd up low-volume guitar valve amp for the lead guitarist. I think the audio dynamics of a back line would be quite different and would then need those excessive volumes.
Anyway - I'll let you know how we get on. It'll be a while before we can try the above with the full band - drummer's just had a heart bypass - we've got to that 'certain age'
Our drummer has her own, with vocals on one channel and my guitar on another, and we have one with just the vocals sat on a stand for anyone in the band who wants to grab it or just point it at themselves.
We've yet to kill them despite some quite incredible abuse, but the speaker will fart out dangerously if you put too much electro acoustic in it (though you could obviously trim the lows) and apparently the mic stand adaptor is unavailable separately, so don't throw the mic stand in the van!
They work very well, as long as they're pretty close to you.
Trouble is i I feel it should t be a band purchase as it surely is a vocalists instrument? But I'm side tracking a bit and is another posting I reckon sorry
Backlines are usually quite different because it's often the only the vocal going through the PA and the vocalist can't hear their own voice because of the volume behind them.
So what you need - and whether these are of any help or not - really does depend on your setup
It's funny how they didn't produce any sound until someone (ie,me) had magically appeared with 38 quid's worth of cables though...
btw, Aldi when they do their fishing special buys, do a a fishing bag that fits these perfectly, and are well padded.