I have now tested all my wage monitors, I'm quite happy that they all work and that they are all in phase with each other. I'm now going to go and put them on the stage. Now I've seen a mythical stage plan of my theoretical band. So I kind of know where they're going to be setting up, but I'm going to make no assumptions. At the moment, I don't know if the drummer is going to be right handed or left handed, which makes a significant difference. He I know he's a singing drummer, or it may even be shy, who knows.

But I don't know which side they're going to take the microphone stand from. So I'm going to leave my setting up with the drum fill till the very last. Now, I like to get drum fills off the stage and by off the stage, I don't actually mean necessarily off the surface area, what I mean is I like to decouple the loudspeaker from the stage. So I'd like to put it on flight case box or a lead or beer crates work quite well, actually, in most venues have usually got some of those lying around. Firstly, this gets the wedge to a much more acceptable height as far as the drummer is concerned. And I'm a great believer in getting the wedge as near to the artist is not possibly can.

I'm a big fan of beer crates and orange boxes, any other kind of stands. This has two effects. The first effect is that it means that the musician can hear the wedge more clearly before they hear any reflections from the room that might be being caused by the wedge or by the PA system. The second reason is that it allows me to actually use less electrical energy that I can actually turn the thing Down relative to being on the floor in order to get the same level at the musicians is, and obviously the less energy which we use making our our monitor system work, the cleaner all of the inputs are going to be in terms of the ambient noise on stage, the spillage from the monitors into the microphones, all of these things we're trying to reduce. So I'm very keen to encourage keyboard players, for example, to put their wedges on a little box or a stool or anything I can get my hands on really.

I carry around some little bits of black cloth in my toolbox in order to mask off beer crates so it doesn't look obviously that I'm standing my my drum fill on for tenants super boxes. So yeah, I like to make it look nice, but primarily the deal is getting the wedges in the right place. If you are going to put your monitors on boxes, particularly drum fills, you know, if you're putting them on any reasonably substantial sized case, please do me a favor, put a ratchet strap around the whole thing and strap it down. Because if you rolling it about a stage, all it takes is to hit a cable and the whole thing falls over with the attendant disastrous consequences for the equipment and the people who it might land on. There are lots of other things as well that you need to think about.

If you have a singer who walks around the stage with the microphone as opposed to having it static in a stand, then you need to consider where there might be hotspots. If the vocal is at a similar level in all of the wedges. Then in between them, you're going to have some interesting phase and level differences, which can make for example feedback quite unpredictable. There are a couple of Other things I'd like to talk about side Phil's solid foods. Generally speaking, the dish used an unwanted PA system that was the precursor of the one that they have in the club. Now, that wasn't worth any money and has been deployed as a supplement to the monitor system.

Now, for me side fills are as much of a disadvantage as they are an advantage. If the side fills are on the stage left and right sides of the stage actually on the stage, and they are deployed in a similar way to our PE snacks here are for example today, that is to say that has a couple of subs and then a high mid high pack that brings the thing up to about here. If you are trying to cover a singer, vocally all over the stage, if they are a senior who doesn't stay on the edge position From the amount of time, you'll need the help of some kind of reinforcement to cover them around the stage. But if you get the vocal to a good, clear, decent level for the singer in the middle of the stage, the side effect that this has on the bass player and the guitar is to a stood on the side of them can be really very unpleasant for these musicians, because they get drilled in one ear respectively by vocal at a level that is much louder than they enjoy.

So generally speaking, if I'm dealing with the kind of a band, who's musicians asked for a general mix of everything, what I will try to do is I'll try and give them as near to a front of house mix. Sometimes I've even actually taken the front of house mix as a pair of inputs into the monitor desk and I've sent that to the side fields. So the band can have some approximation of What the hell's engineers doing? But generally speaking, I use them much more like a PA system than I do as a spot monitor. There are ways of getting around this problem. You can fly the side fools if you can get the the shorter wavelength stuff, the mids and the highs, a decent height and that would be maybe more than a couple of meters off the stage.

So they're not obstructed by the musicians who stand on the side of the singer. They'll be much more useful to the singer. I actually favor low profile side fills in factor with one of my clients. Recently I was doing side hustles that consisted of two Alico stick subs with your less than a meter high next to each other on the stage with somatic acoustics, arcs on the top of them, so the whole assembly is just over. meter high. And this makes it much more user friendly as far as the artist is concerned, because they have to get much closer to it before it becomes a nuisance.

But if they do get closer to it, all of the high frequency energy isn't drilling them directly in the face directly in the ears. Because the thing is only just over a meter high, I find it works very well. It can also help enormously in situations where you have sight lines from the stage being obstructed by loudspeakers that one puts on the stage. This is particularly true in arena shows where they sell the seats with your further upside than the downstage edge. I would tend to encourage musicians to try and keep their mixes as simple as possible. Again, you know, if you have a band who say oh, well, I just want to wear a bit of everything.

That's what you use the side feels for really tend to try and keep the number of inputs that I'm trying to get loud into a monitor wedge down to a minimum. Because the more information you try and pack into it, the more difficult is going to be for the musician to pick out the bits they want. So I'll try and keep the wedge mixes simple. And you side fools for that sort of full band reinforcement, if it's necessary, increasingly, bands these days are using in ear monitors. Sadly, it is and not plug and play devices and we will be talking much further about the whole interior thing in the future, but rarely, as a tool, they can be as much of a detriment as an advantage. Some of the Muse radio plan Switch.

Battery powered belt packs driven by a transmitter that's off stage somewhere. other musicians mostly, as an economy measure, use hardwire packs that are driven directly by a cable from a console somewhere. What I like to do is I like to encourage the bands if they do have any issues to put them on the stage rather than to put them at the front of house, and I packed the appropriate auxiliary sentence out of the desk and down lines in return multicore, so I can access them by XLR on the stage, rather than at the front of house. This not only improves the efficiency of the radio transmission between the aerial and the receiver. But it also means that if there are issues with the thing on stage, then it's easier to fix.