The Short Guide to Mixing Monitors

The Short Guide to Mixing Monitors: "Doing monitors the past few weeks I thought I'd share how I mix monitors.


1. Don't Sit at the Monitor Board and wait for the musicians to shout what they need to you. In fact, I spend very little time at the monitor position unless I'm fixing levels, EQ, or listening to the drummers in-ear mix to adjust levels. I spend almost all night of rehearsal on stage standing next to or behind the musicians so I can hear what they are hearing from their monitors.

2. Be Proactive Rather than Reactive. This is the most important thing to me. What I'll do is spend about 60-90 seconds standing right next to or behind a musician or vocalist just listening to their wedge mix, and also the ambient noise around them they would use as reference. After those 90 seconds I'll say 'how you doing? you need anything?' at which point they'll say, 'I'm good, thanks' and I'll move to the next musician, or they'll say 'I could use a little… ', and I'll go work on it for them, then come back listen and repeat the process until they are content. More and more, I'm getting into a habit of hearing that a musician has a ton of snare or electric guitar and not much else and I will recommend that I adjust their mix.

Many times musicians can't quite put into words what they need or have too much of and we can help out. Some musicians don't want to be seen as being needy and constantly asking for changes in their mix, in spite of being unhappy with what their hearing. If you ask them rather than waiting for them telling you, it disarms that needy, self-consciousness that many musicians try and avoid. I'll do this process about 2-3 times during the night because different songs with different instruments starting and vocalists leading it means you have to build them a mix that works for 5 different songs.

3. Listen to What the Musicians Are listening To. Believe it or not, soloing the monitor mix on headphones sounds way different than what the wedge sounds like in front of the musician. Last week we had a different bass player and the electric guitarist needed some bass so I went and stood next to the guitar player and realized that he had bass – sort of. I went back and added a bit of 200Hz to the bass EQ and the guitar player thought I had brought the volume way up. Which brings me to…

4. Small Changes Make a Big Difference. We have Ashly Protea monitor controllers, with the Remote Control (pictured here). It's a digital HPF, LPF, compressor/limiter, 31 band EQ all in one. And it's smoking awesome. I've set it to EQ the monitors to a flat frequency response and compress only about 2-4dB to glue their mix together, but when we had a big vocal group I had a hard time getting a good tonal balance from the eight singers, EQ'ing their channels didn't really help get a good tonal balance. After listening to their monitor I tried boosting every frequency 1dB between 100Hz and 1000Hz on their monitor EQ through the Ashly and it made a huge difference. Lifting those midrange frequencies by only 1dB had a multiplying effect, and they could hear themselves and their pitch much better.

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