So rehearsal tomorrow,  We are going to try out the new tech set up as well as try out using in-ear-monitoring.

For those of who don’t know, in-ear-monitoring is where you use earphones to be able to hear what you are playing or singing rather than floor wedges.  You will have seen many top pop and rock acts with custom ear pieces, and wireless links.  The reason for us choosing this is due to the following

  1. Consistent sound for the band whatever the venue – we are controlling the sound not the sound engineer so, while sometimes when you have a great engineer the sound can be really balanced, most of the time it is not so good…..
  2. We can all have a metronome track to keep us in sync if we want it which wont be heard by the audience, this is perfect when using backing tracks, but is also really useful when using electronic music DAWs like ableton which work in loops.
  3. Hearing loss – As a semi-professional music I personally play on average 2 gigs a week, the sound level exposure that this gives me is actually dangerous and I expect to have some level of hearing loss already, but in a few years this will certainly increase, be using sealed in-ear-headphones, I hope to be able to reduce the overall levels that I am exposing myself to and allow me to continue doing what I love for a number of years to come:
So we are running everything through my saffire pro40 sound card.
This is dead clever cos it allows us to create up to 16 sepearte mixes and route them to any output.  We we can set up an individual mix for every person, then either output to one of the two headphone outputs, the other two headphone mixes will be outputted to the line outputs and routed to a headphone amplifier.  Then currently we are just going to run a headphone extension cable to each person.  Wireless iem is expensive and there is limited bandwidth as the UK gov has just sold off loads of the bandwidth to the mobile phone operators.  I am hoping that a 2.4 digital system may arrive soon, there is one but it has a terrible 17ms latency, (delay) which makes it pointless!
So all the instruments will go into the sound card
  1. Guitar (Pod xIII)
  2. Bass (Berhinger synth pedal)
  3. Keys 1 (ultranova)
  4. Keys 2  (Microkorg)
  5. Jay vox (Boss VE-50)
  6. Paul Vox (voice live)
  7. Craig Vox ( just a mic!)
  8. MPC – (akai mpc10000)
  9. Ambient stereo drum mic 1
  10. Ambient stereo drum mic 2
To produce the following outputs:
  1. Jay left iem
  2. Jay Right iem
  3. Paul left iem
  4. Paul Right iem
  5. Craig left iem
  6. Craig left iem
  7. Danny left iem
  8. Danny right iem
  9. Synths output 
  10. Wubs output 
  11. Beats output 
  12. Effects output 
  13. Main output 1
  14. Main  output 2
Which is currently more channels than the saffire can cope with so, I think I need to expand it.  I can increase the number of inputs and outputs by 8 each by adding a 8 in 8 oout d/a converter to the set up.  So thats what I ll do in the future, for now though I`ll just mix everything using the main outputs on the laptop software, and link up the keyboards before putting them into the soud card.
Right thats more information that most people are interested in….. but like…. whatever,,
P.k.