IEM's just arrived!!!

I took the plunge and upgraded my westone WD30's to Ultimate Ears UE7......

They arrived today, not used them yet ( and gig on Sat cancelled....arghh!) so will have to wait to see how they peformed....

But I'm a bit excited!!!!!!

So...had our first gig on Sat where we ran a silent stage!

We are only a Pub band and used the in house PA, but we ran a splitter between the in house PA and instruments so we could use our virtual desk to control our own IEM mixes. It was the first time the drummer used a fully electric kit as well.

It went better than expected, we had some tech issues but ironically nothing to do with the set up ( my remote disconnected as I have a dodgy port in the back of my power rack and it caused an error so had to reboot mid gig...argh...got to get that fixed).

It was the first outing with my Ultimate ears UE7's....sound was excellent, totally recommend them, although the other guitarist used ACS's and he loves those as well.

Most of our gigs are with our own PA so we expect that to be even easier. Its bizzare not needing a cab on stage of any type, but the sound was so clear and we made less mistakes as a band.

Quote from Frikeer

Would be interesting to learn more about the rest of your setup. What did you use for splitter? What's the setup like to give y'all individual mixes?

I think this is the way to go for me as well eventually. I already have the UEs for music listening, just need to get the rest of the stuff!

Our PA is based around the Soundcraft Ui24R which is the same as any other virtual desk, all controlled via a tablet. This gives anyone in the band the ability to connect wirelessly via tablet or phone, crucially to control the AUX mixes and therefore the IEM mixes.

We all have 4 IEM systems ( 2 are mine) and the drummer has a wired connection into the Soundcraft.

So when we run our PA, we will each have our own IEM and be able to control our own mix.

We also were aware that some gigs we use an in house PA which then causes us a problem. I had a spare 8 channel ( because with digital drums we only need 8 channels now - only 2 for drums rather than 5 or 6) hardwired XLR splitter , so we mounted that in our rack.

So this means we have to take our rack, we plug our instruments into the splitter, one signal goes to the Soundcraft ( for which we are only using the Aux element) and the other split output to the PA. As a by product we can also record each channel at any venue now.

Saturday was the first time to try this properly ( we had of course done a number of rehearsals) and it worked much better than I had expected! As an added bonus, the sound guy LOVED us because we had a silent stage so he could easily control the sound. The only down side was that he had no subs and so the kick drum was lacking from the pre configured drum mix ( we only send a stereo mix). The drummer upped the kick drum volume which helped..

Let me know if you need anymore info.

Quote from musicmad

Interesting that you only send a premixed drum bus to FOH. Some sound men would hate that, but it worked for you. The electronic drums helped I'm sure. With a live kit an alternative would be to split everything like you have done, but I've also seen people bypass the splitter for the drum mics and only send a separate onstage mic facing the drums to their in ear mixes.

TBH it was only our first outing and I do worry about not having separate feeds for each drum - not my personal choice

As I said most gigs (prob 90%) will be our own PA anyway. The drummer can adjust the balance at his end, its just a faff for the sound engineer not to be able to do it himself.

With a live kit, we would ( and previously) definitely have separate channels for each drum