I consider myself to be a music technology nerd! I spend countless hours each day engrossed in music software and hardware and for the past several years I have dedicated my life and time to both studying and educating people on music tech via several mediums. I have a ever-growing youtube channel with thousands of subscribers and well over 100 videos. I started a successful online “Question and Answer” Facebook forum through another company I co-founded called Gospelmultitracks.com that has several thousand members. I teach one on one Skype lessons weekly to people from all over the world. And I answer dozens of questions a week via all of my message accounts and emails, which is where I draw a lot of my inspiration for my youtube videos. I get asked a lot of great questions from people from everywhere So I figured I would start sharing some of these question and answer sessions in the form of an weekly “Ask John Mike” segment. (To protect the identity and privacy of the person asking the questions all names besides mines will be anonymized) This Week’s Question comes from Max:
Max Asks:
Max
“Hey John Mike, hope you are okay! I’ve got a small band, and we trying to get in ears for our live performances. How would this exactly work? My band is comprised of 4 people btw, 2 keys, bass and drums.”
John Mike
“Hey Bro! I’m Great! Thanks for asking! If you don’t have an expensive sound system and don’t use
Avioms or any other hearback system and depending on where everyone is located on the stage you might can maybe get a couple of small baby mixers…like a
Behringer Xenyx 502. But it really depends on how complex or how simple you want the routing to be…it can be really simple with everybody hearing the same mix…which really simply you can just run extensions from the one output source…or it can be really complex with multiple outputs carrying multiple sub mixes with everyone having control over their own mix or multi-output with you controlling everyone’s mix. That again all depends on what all you are trying to do…wether it’s send click tracks and or stems to everyone and or having one or multiple talkback mics…that will determine wether you need one to two pieces of equipment or 6-7. Maybe Explain a bit deeper the end result of what you are trying to accomplish totally and then I can advise you further from there.”
Max
“Ok, Gotcha! So when we go out and play we usually play songs on top of tracks or clicks that we made.. And often we struggle to hear them, even though there might be enough monitors on stage because of the overall noise. So mainly, being able to hear the tracks, and other instruments.”
John Mike
“Gotcha! There are many ways to go about setting this up…What I would do in your situation is get a multi-output audio interface…like a PreSonus FireStudio….a PreSonus AudioBox 44VSL or a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 or 6i6…and create submixes for everyone inside of the software you use and route them to their perspective outputs (it will vary from program to program on how to do this) and then utilize the multiple outs on the interface to send those sub mixes to those respective band members. Additionally, to give each band member control over their own mix you could give them each a personal headphone mixer like the Behringer HA400(costs about $15 bucks on eBay-Amazon) and run the multiouts to the headphone mixers and allow them to control the volume on their personal mix that you send them so you don’t have to always control it unless they need more volume. Hope this helps!”
Max
“Right. I’ll look into that then. Thank you so much brother!”
