My name is Justin Grady. I'm a sound engineer from many years standing. And the thing I'm going to talk to you today about is doing monitors from front of house. We're here in the pickle factory in Bethnal Green, which is a small room with a small stage. And what I would consider to be a regular in house monitor system, that is to say, there are four mixes, there's a pair of wedges for the singer, two single mixes for the musicians and another single wedge and a sub for the drummer. And that is not to say that I'm excluding the drummer from the group of musicians, but people often do so what I'm going to talk about today is how we do monitors from front of house and some of the tricks, tips and pitfalls that you will find as a result of doing this.

I have a digital desk here today. But before I talk about that, I'm just going to talk for a minute about analog desks. You will rarely meet analog desks these days they have tend to tend to mostly be retired from the music industry, except for really large format concepts. But you will find the occasional one particularly in small old house gigs. Now the problem with doing monitors from front of house is that if you only have one set of inputs, then each input channel needs to do two different things because the monitor monitoring is a separate job from mixing Front of House very often has different criteria. So as a monitor Adam as a sound engineer, we are required to do two jobs at once unfortunately, We don't get paid for doing two jobs at once.

But nevertheless, that's what we have to do. So, in the case of an analog mixing desk, you will have to use the same mic camp, same gain and the same EQ for both monitors and front of house, because the monitor sons are derived from auxiliary sends off of each channel on the desk. Now, it is possible to mitigate this difficult circumstance in some ways by, for example, using my splits. If you want to split a vocal for example into two channels of an analog desk, you will find that you can use one of the channels exclusively for front of house only use the post fader auxiliary sends for effects and you can use the other channel which has an entirely separate my company cue obviously, for monitors. This means that you can make changes to the front of house channel without affecting the sound on stage.

This is the big difficulty with doing monitors from front of house. Once you've done your Sam Jackson, you're committed to the game structure and the EQ structure that you have, you cannot really make any changes to this during the show without affecting the sound on stage. This is particularly true of gain adjustments. Now, as the sound particularly in small rooms, but generally invariably changes between Sam Jackson show that will be the requirement to make some changes both in the EQ of the PA system and in the EQ and the levels of the monitor mixes. And if you only have shared my camps and shared EQs this can become an issue. So in the case of an analog console, I would want I split at least my vocal channels and I do this physically with a wire split cable.

This of course can cause you problems in terms of it increases the number of input channels you require. And so it's not really possible to do it for a whole band for you know, a bandwidth, maybe 16 inputs, you would obviously need a 32 pair desk and 60 more splits, which is a lot of work. As well as being pretty much undoable, certainly in terms of change overs, all of that kind of thing. But as a basic minimum, you really should want to split your vocals to give you some versatility. an analog mixing desk will usually have some pre fader auxiliary sends usually four or six, which are dedicated to the monitors. This means that the fader movements that you make when you're mixing the front of the house don't affect the monitor levels and there should also be somewhere between there Putting the desk and the actual monitor speaker itself, some means of equalizing the mix.

Traditionally, this would be a 31 band graphic equalizer, ideally inserted on the Insert point of the auxiliary output. But more often than not, they're run in line. Generally speaking with health systems, you get what you're given. And so today really I'm just going to be talking about making the best of it all. We're very fortunate today here in a pickle factory because we have got a lovely minus digital desk we have a pro to see here, which is a smashing console. One of the big advantages that digital desks have over analog desks is that we can soft punch a whole bunch more input so I can in fact duplicate my entire band input on another set of inputs which are almost completely independent.

The only thing that they share is the gain. Because actually, each microphone is plugged into the stage box at one point. So even if I split that point into two channels, there is only one gain control. But most monitor consoles on this one is no exception, give you the facility to trim digitally any inputs that are that you not controllable by the master gain. So if I've split, for example, the lead vocal mic into two different channels on the desk, I use the gain to set up the channel that does front of house and then we'll use the digital trim to change the input level. If I need to do that, in order to make it more usable for the monitor system, this is really a big advantage.

It's one of the great gifts that digital consoles give us and this is exactly what I have done today. On I've also purchased some graphic EQs. And I've allocated four auxiliary sons. For my four mixes. Traditionally, monitor wise I would lay the mixes out our scene from front of house and the same way as we lay microphones out. So that is to say that the stage right single wedge mix, house left, of course, would be mixed one, the center pay would be mixed to the stage left single will be mixed three.

And in this particular case, I've done what I prefer to do with the drum fill which consists of a wedge and a sub, and I've put them on two separate mixes. The reason that I do this is that most often, any feedback that is going to be caused by the drum monitor is likely to be caused by the low frequency aspects of what's going on, especially by the bass drum. Particularly if the drummer favors having a loud bass drum in his monitor. So, it is possible to deal with feedback issues quite severely without actually taking away the without affecting the drummer's whole mix. And you can EQ and change the level of the sub relative to the wedge. So even if he loses sub, he's still got something to go on.

And it is quite a frequent problem because of the proximity of these fancy high powered low frequency enclosures to the drum kit itself. It can be a real challenge to get any decent amount of drum level in a drum wedge, without there being the potential for feedback. There are several other issues that it is very important to consider when thinking about doing monitors from front of house. And particularly, this relates to using noise gates, compressors, or any other kind of signal processing. Because obviously, the channels being shared between the monitors and the front of house. And the compression that you apply, for example, to a keyboard player will be audible in the monitors as well as in the front of house.

And obviously, the criteria, two quite different things. If you compress and particularly if you over compress an instrument, and something like a piano is a very good example of this of a dynamically sensitive instrument. The more you compress it, the more you affect the way that the musician actually plays the instrument because particularly with a piano If you're squashing the dynamic range, if you're reducing the dynamic range, what it does is it makes the musician strike the keys harder in order to get the same kind of dynamic effect. So effectively, it's really easy to make people overplay. I tend to try and avoid using gates and compressors wherever possible in this situation. And in fact, my ideal situation would be not at all.

If you are in a situation where you have to do monitors from front of house with shared channels. If you split your channels again, you have done the choice the option to be able to use dynamics processing on the channels that are dedicated the front of house and not in the monitor channels. As a site in this situation, we have the potential to watch but everything. So essentially what I'm going to do is to completely Separate mixes here, one for the band on stage and one for the front of house pay different faders. The only thing that any of them have in common is the money counts. This gives me a much more versatile starting point.

So, the next thing I'm going to do is to demonstrate how to actually start working in a small system like this by identifying all the components, making sure they all work, listening to all the wedges, face, checking them, positioning them correctly, and setting up the whole EQ and patch thing. So that's the next thing we're going to do.