Organization, Communication, Anticipation: Working The Monitor Scene At A Large Festival

We always line check bands during the previous band’s set, which saves loads of time on changeovers. We ensure we have enough length on the split tails to get to desks on risers backstage, and line check with FOH, monitors and the truck all listening in. There’s a strict communication system for line checks to keep it efficient and avoid people talking over each other – the patch tech will say where they are going next, and then we confirm each line in turn: ‘house, mons, truck.’

A lot of practical preparation can be done off-site. Besides the obvious sorting of equipment and cable, I load up any session files that are sent to me by engineers who are using the house boards, and make a note on their stage plot of which wedge and IEM circuits I’m going to patch their outputs to.

There are usually several bands who come along without an engineer, so in my master session file I make a scene for each of them, and dial in some low gains to save time in line check, as well as pre-setting my high-pass filters and programming some reverbs ready to use if required.

An RG Jones vehicle onsite behind the Pyramid during load-in.

The preparation continues on site. Consider how each changeover is going to go, and how you can speed it up. Can you pre-run labeled cables? How can you make it easy to identify wedge mixes? Label everything!

I set a basic EQ on the wedges and side fills, which I then store in the amps or crossovers. This means that any visiting bands can rock up and immediately have plenty of gain before feedback.

Further Preparation

Once the outputs are patched I work with my fellow engineer to ID mixes. We’ll then either hand over to the visiting engineer, or if one of us is mixing, the other one will stay on stage and communicate with the one mixing to get basic mixes dialed up.

It’s quick and efficient to do it this way, and saves a lot of arm waving. Also consider how you’re going to mute amps as you switch between systems – having a master mute saves precious seconds spent muting individual amps.

Then there are the soft skills. Running monitors on a festival is intense. It’s not the time to be partying – get as much sleep as you can to stay on your A game. Make sure you’ve got snacks and water on hand because there’s no time to leave the stage for meal breaks.

It’s vital to know who’s bringing their own monitoring gear, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Be as organized as you possibly can be – I cannot emphasize this enough. Make sure you have a good overview of exactly what’s happening each day, and what you need to do, before the first show day. Get on stage early and go over your paperwork each morning to recap what’s happening each day.

Do you know exactly how you’re going to do each changeover? Sit down with the patch and stage techs well before the festival to figure out logistics. Because this is basically what running monitors on a festival is – logistics. But it’s good logistics, which makes it possible to get all those great bands onstage and which will make you proud to get to the end of the festival knowing that you did a great job of running monitors in a complex, high pressure, but ultimately fantastically rewarding environment.