My band has decided to start using IEMs for rehearsals - partly to save our hearing and partly so that we can actually hear what we need.
We're a 6-piece band - drums, bass, 2 guitars, 3 vocals. My aim is for everyone to have their own stereo IEM mix, and for setup/teardown to be quick and easy. Here's what I'm thinking.
A&H QU-SB mixer
6x wired IEM monitoring amp - Behringer P2/LD Systems HPA1/something else?
Mic guitar amps with Sennheiser e609 or e906s (saves faffing with more mic stands)
Mic drums with a single Sennheiser e901 boundary mic (again, quick setup)
I'd appreciate views/suggestions/alternatives
Cheers!
Comments
Rather than have trailing IEM feeds to P2 belt packs it's easier and neater for guitar and bass player to send the stereo IEM feed up a 5 core cable along with the guitar signal and have a breakout box for the IEM 3.5 stereo connector.
Like this
This is my design but Designacable now make a version you can order ... such an obvious idea I'm surprised you can't just buy it in the shops.
Regarding the 5 core cable approach I assume we still need something like a P2 each, but you're saying you keep that on the floor, and plug the P2 output into the breakout box?
My of the guys I work with and I use a headphone amp on the pedal board ... the Behringer MA400 is popular as it has a mic through so you can mix your own vocal on the pot without getting your phone out .... so aux sends on desk feed headphone amp on pedal board and then 5 core cable carries guitar signal one way and IEM signal the other way. My own design of headphone amp has built in ambient mics as well but that's not essential.
https://www.designacable.com/combo-cable-for-iem-systems-in-ear-monitoring-instrument-and-stereo-headphone.html?gclid=Cj0KCQjwhY-aBhCUARIsALNIC05EUEZcTlic1aZkUZdKBhkkjY25OeHZOhPoFMG2ulbekji12o_RiykaAs0GEALw_wcB
We recently moved to silent stage all on helices of various flavours as even with IEMs running our amps ticking over was kinda loud and was ending up in the drum mics.
I reckon you'll want at least kick and snare on the kit though, theres an awesome behringer clone of a shure 91B that sounds great on the kick and we jsut use whatever dynamic mic is on hand for the snare.
We do run overheads sometimes but especially if you have amps involved any kind of condensor is going to pick up a ton of the other instruments so the drummer actually found they made things worse for his moniroting.
it’s actually the best bang for the buck mixer out there although it’s not the quality of the Allen & Heath build wise
So in a rack with 2 X 1U and 2 home made splits at the back is quite compact and it looks like this
The Ui is interesting as it doesn't use an ap for control. Any device that can run a browser can control it so even gen 1 iPads are fine with it. It has HDMI to output to large screens too if needed.
It can in multitrack direct to a USB pen key and via ASIO multitrack to a laptop at the same time.
Mine went faulty, the chip that creates the rails for the channel opamps and the phantom power went faulty, not an easy chip to change or get but I did do it once I got a good chip.
Other people I know have had no issues though so maybe I was unlucky.
Do you run tracks on yours? If so do you run the PA as an interface plugged into the laptop running the tracks or do you usea separate audio interface and just plumb it in to the inputs?