It’s important to adopt strategies for remaining sane while mixing monitors in churches.
I touched upon some of those strategies in a previous article, where the focus was on how to group multiple musicians together to obtain positive results, how to stay organized, and how to run a sound check.
All of the above assumes you’re mixing monitor wedges for the stage.
Wedges work well in some circumstances, but have many downsides. Being loudspeakers, they obviously add to the mix in the house, whether we like those additions or not. With a small mixer, musicians are always compromising on their mix because typically, they’re sharing.
For these and other reasons, many churches are looking to go to in-ears for their musicians.
This route means one of two paths; a dedicated monitor console and/or a personal mix system, such as those from Roland, Aviom, MyMix, Pro Co, and others.
Done Well
A dedicated monitor position is required once you get past a couple of in-ear mixes, mainly because smaller analog boards have limited aux sends. A monitor console might have 12 to 16 (or more) mixes available, which enable the building of individual mixes for each musician. This board has to be fed the same inputs as house console, and that means a microphone split.
It also (and obviously) requires another operator, which can be challenging for churches with a limited volunteer pool. The monitor board is often located on stage left or right so the band can easily communicate with the engineer; this requires stage space. Done well, however, this can be an excellent approach. But it does need to be done well.
Typically when taking this route, the musicians will be using wireless in-ear monitors (IEM), at least for the front line. There’s nothing wrong with using wired IEMs for the backline, because they don’t typically move that much.
In either case, it’s best if the IEM mix can be stereo. This obviously eats up aux sends at double the rate of mono, but with stereo mixes, the overall levels can be lowered as instruments get panned out. Mixing in stereo can be tricky, depending on your console, so experiment with it beforehand.
One thing that tends to get overlooked in a dedicated monitor position is the ability of the monitor engineer to hear what the musicians are hearing. Whenever possible, I like to standardize on one type of IEM for the whole band – and monitor engineer.
