Why your in-ear mix sounds terrible (and how to fix it)

  Speaker 1 If you want to improve your in-ear monitor mix, I’m going to show you exactly how to do that in this video. Maybe you are struggling to get a clear mix, maybe it sounds overdriven or muddy or just not full enough, or you just can’t hear the separation of all the instruments. I’m going to show you exactly the five phases that you need to apply to improve your in-ear monitor mix in this video. We’re going to start with the source sound. Then we’re going to go to gain staging and signal flow. Then we’re going to look at our sound console, and I’m going to give you some EQing tips to EQ things for your in-ears. Then we’re going to actually talk about your personal mix. And lastly, we’ll talk about the in-ear monitor themselves. And the truth is, every single one of these phases matter to getting a great sounding in your mix. So don’t skip any of the parts of this video. Watch the whole thing and then go apply it to make your in your mix sound better at your church. All right, let’s jump into phase one, which is improving the source sound.

Speaker 1 In all sound, the first thing you should do is not try to tweak settings, but improve your actual source sound. Using high-quality instruments, improving their tone, and properly mic-ing those sources is the fastest way to improve your sound, not just for your in your monitor, ears, but for your broadcast and your front-of-house mixes as well. And so that’s why we want to start with the source. If you’re using cheap mics, it’s probably going to sound cheap. If you’re using a cheap guitar, it’s probably going to sound cheap. But if you want to improve the sound of your in-ears, go to the source and improve your source sound. Spend a week, this week or next week, and go through every single instrument on your stage and try to improve the sound of that instrument. Try different mics, try different mic placement on each source, and get the best source sound you can. After you’ve got a great sounding source and you’ve found the best way to mic each instrument, it’s time to check gain structure. If you’re not sure what gain structure is, I encourage you to take our audio mixing mastery course, which I will link below with a 20% discount applied.

Speaker 1 But gain structure is critical, not just at the console, but all the way through the signal chain, and I’ll talk you through that in just a second. The reason that gain structure is so important is that if your instruments are gain too low, then they’re not going to have enough resolution or quality to the signal. And if they’re gain too high, then they’re going to be overdriven and have that crunchy, distorted sound, which is not something you want. You want clarity. And so the secret to great gain structure is to dip it in the mustard. And what that means is on your metre, when you’re looking at your signal coming in, you want it to be mostly green, but dipped a little bit in the yellow at the top of the signal. So that’s why it’s called dip it in the mustard, because just the tip of the signal will be a little bit yellow at the highest volume moments. So whenever the signal is the strongest, it should just be showing a little bit yellow. And usually what this translates to in terms of numbers on a console is negative 16db, negative 16 decibels.

Speaker 1 And so what you want to do is you just want all of your channels to be mostly green with a little bit of yellow on top. When you see a little bit of yellow on the loudest moments of a singer or a band playing, that means you have a proper gain structure. The fastest way to do this is either get your band up on stage and have them play and just go through each channel and gain it until you see negative 16db or just you see a little bit of yellow at the top of each channel when they’re at their loudest moments. Or if your sound console has a digital soundcheck capability, you can actually play last week’s files like your band’s recording through your console and just go through and adjust everything to the proper gain structure. That’s the fastest way to properly set the gain. Now, every musician is going to be a little bit different and every instrument is going to be a little bit different. So ideally, you should do this every single week, where when the musicians come in, you are setting the gain at the very beginning of soundcheck or rehearsal.

Speaker 1 So dip it in the mustard at the console. That’s your very first step of getting proper gain structure, but it doesn’t end there. The truth is, there are many links in the chain from your source signal sound to your ears, and you don’t want to overdrive the signal at any one of those steps. So I’m going to quickly show you how to check all of that to make sure you’re not overdriving your signal. And then I’ll come back up here and show you some EQ tips for getting a great sound from your console to your ears. So your audio signal is coming into your console where you’re going to gain it properly the first time. From there, it’s going to an OX send or a monitor send where you’re usually controlling it from an iPad. I’ll show you a few tips about how to not overdrive it there. From the OX send or the monitor send, it’s usually going to a wireless unit, which sends it to your wireless receiver or your body pack, or possibly to a wired headphones amp. And at every single step of the way, you can overdrive the signal, and then your inner mix is going to sound gross.

Speaker 1 So let’s go back through that chain and make sure we’re not driving it anywhere. So on your iPad mix, make sure you’re not turning any channel up too much. You should never be above zero DB on any channel. So you can see on all of my channels, vocals, drums, percussion, all of them are well below zero DB. I’m at negative nine, negative 10, negative eight, negative 11. And you never want to boost it up past zero. So if this is zero and you start to get in the plus category, you potentially are going to be clipping the signal that’s being sent from that fader to your master fader, which is going to clip your overall thing. So you really want to keep your faders well below zero, and don’t turn up your master fader past zero because you’re going to be clipping the signal that’s sent to your wireless transmitter or to your wired headphones amp. If your master fader is clipping, then you’re going to have distorted, crunchy nasty, nasty sound in your ears. So make sure that you are not clipping on your master output there. Then check your wireless transmitters to make sure you’re not clipping there.

Speaker 1 Your signal should be below zero DB. You shouldn’t see any red on the metre, and it should just be mostly green. And if you need to adjust the digital gain to gain it down, go ahead and do that so that the signal that’s actually coming to your transmitter is clean. Now that you’ve checked every step in the signal flow, you know that nothing is overdriving, everything is clean signal, and you can go ahead and turn it up on your body pack knob. That’s where you want to actually adjust your master volume for your ears. We will get to the ears at the end of this video. Now let’s move into phase three, which is some EQ for your ears at the console. All right, phase three. Let’s clean up the sound that’s actually coming to our ears with some subtle EQ. Now, ideally, you have a separate console for mixing your ears, or you are able to digitally split your signal so that you can have one channel for front of house, and that same channel can also be EQed separately, differently for your in your mix. Because what sounds good in the house might not necessarily sound good in your ears.

Speaker 1 Your ear canals are very different than the room, and your in-ear speakers are very different than your PA. And so you ideally want to be able to EQ your ear channels differently than the PA. And so usually, larger churches will have a separate console just for mixing ears. And consoles are getting cheaper and cheaper, so you can actually get one for around $1,200. It’s a little rack mounted unit by Beringer. Or if your console has enough channels, you can actually digitally split your single channel into two different channels. So my vocal mic will have one vocal mic channel for the PA and one vocal mic channel for my ears. And every console is going to be different, so look up how to do that. But you want to take a single input and digitally split it into two different channels, and then you can begin modifying each channel for the ears and for the PA. And one last thing, if you do digitally split all your channels, I would encourage you to put all of your in-ear channels on a separate fader bank. So you have your front house PAs all on one fader bank, and then you change fader banks, and now you have all your in-ear channels on a separate fader bank, and you can manipulate those for the musician’s ears.

Speaker 1 If you don’t have separate consoles or the ability to split your channels, then you’re just going to have to compromise and find an EQ that works both well for the house and is decent enough for your ears. But let’s say you do have the capability and you’ve already split your channels. Let me show you a few tips on how to EQ them. The first thing you’re going to want to do is use a high pass philtre to clean up all the low frequencies on all your microphones and any instruments that don’t need super, super low frequencies. Really, you should use a high pass philtre on basically everything except for the kick drum and the bass. And that’s immediately going to just remove all of this super gross noise and ultra low end that you don’t actually need in your mix. So put a high pass philtre on all your vocal mics up to 120 hertz. It could be more than that if it’s a female, but just high pass philtre everything. And again, if you need help, I encourage you to check out our Mixing Audio Mastery course, which 20% off below if you use the link.

Speaker 1 So high pass everything from 60 hertz to up to 200 hertz, depending on the instrument the bass signal that you need from that. Next, use subtle EQ cuts. We want to cut before we boost. Cut out any ugly frequencies. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to boost, sweep, find, cut. You’re going to cut out any of the ugly frequencies. Usually 200 hertz has a lot of muddiness. 400 hertz can sometimes sound plasticky or boxy. So sweep through all your channels and use subtle. We don’t want to be extreme here. Use very subtle cuts to clean up your instruments and your vocals, and that’s going to create a cleaner mix overall. If you do end Instead of buying our mixing audio mastery course, there is a cheat sheet that you can print out and keep by your sound console to guide you through some good starting points on all the instruments for EQs. Regarding compression, I would not overdo it with compression either. Keep everything subtle and light. You want to lightly compress things. Your ears should be hearing what your band is actually producing because then you don’t know if you’re playing too hard or if you’re playing too harsh or if your guitar sounds harsh.

Speaker 1 You want to produce the most natural sound possible, but you can use a little bit of light compression on certain instruments that have a huge dynamic range just to keep them more in control. Now that we’ve done that, let’s hop up on stage and move into phase four, which is actually building our personal mix. All right, now that our individual channels are sounding better, let’s go ahead and make a mix for our ears. This is where you’re going to get to be creative and make it sound how you want. And that’s the first thing I want to say is every single musician’s mix is going to sound different because the drummer is probably not going to need to hear the same things that the background vocalist is going to need to hear. The drummer is probably going to need to hear a lot of click, a lot of himself, a lot of the bass, the MD, maybe some keys, but he’s probably not going to care too much what the background vocalists are doing. Whereas the vocalists, they’re going to want to hear a lot of the vocals and a lot of the tonal instruments like the keyboard and the lead singer.

Speaker 1 You are going to have different mixes for everyone on your team, and that’s okay. Build a mix that sounds right to you. I’ll show you my mix right now, and you’ll see. My acoustic guitar is loudest. It’s one of the loudest things. Click is very loud because I like to be very in time. My music director is very loud. And then my own voice, if we ungroup this here, my voice is the loudest voice. Of course, it’s going to be loudest. I need to hear myself. And so mix for what you need to hear most, but still be sure that you can hear everything else. You really do need to hear everything else on stage as well so that you can be aware of what’s happening on the team. Never completely turn somebody off, okay? Even if you have to bury them pretty deep, you should at least be aware of what they’re doing. And I encourage you to build your mix during soundcheck. And sometimes it helps, honestly, just to turn all your faders down, like restart Start over, refresh the mix, build from scratch. You don’t have to do that every week, but every so often, maybe do a full reset where you turn all the faders down, you have the ClickUp, and the drummer starts playing with the metronome, you turn up your kick drum first, your snare second, then some toms, overhead, and you get a good drum mix.

Speaker 1 Then you add your bass, have your bass player start playing. You could loop a chorus of a song over and over and over and then add the bass in until you can hear it to a level that you like. Then have the electric guitar player come in and then add that in. Pretty soon you start to hear all the band coming in to where they’re supposed to be and where it sounds good for you. Then have the lead vocalists sing and then have the harmonies come in. And once you do that, now we need to pan everybody. If you’ve never used panning, this is very important. Now, not every single in your system is stereo, but many of them are. So if your system is a stereo mix, meaning it has a right and left channel, then you can pan your band around to different positions in your ears, and that creates separation. So many worship leaders and musicians don’t ever pan anything, and then everything is crowding into one spot. And so what you want to do is you want to fan them out across your ears from right to left. And what I like to do is I like to have it correspond with where people are standing on the stage.

Speaker 1 So if I’m on stage like this and I have the bass player back here, then I’m going to pan him in my right ear. And if the keys player is over here, I’m going to pan him in my left ear. Maybe not all the way left, but maybe somewhere over there. And then for vocals, I like my vocal right down the middle because it sounds like it’s coming out of my face. But if the BGV Girl 1 Background vocal girl one is over on my left, I’ll pan her a little bit to the left. Then BGV vocal girl two is standing a little farther, I’ll pan her a little farther. If there’s a BGV on my right, I’ll pan him a little right. That way I’m spreading out the vocals and we’re not crowding on top of each other. So make sure you’re using panning to spread the band out across both ears, and that’s going to create a lot more clarity for you. And if your board has the ability to run a virtual soundcheck, which we talked about earlier, you can actually use that feature to mix your own ears. And one pro tip that I to give to worship leaders and tech directors is do a mix for every single person on your team, because not everyone on your team knows how to build a good mix.

Speaker 1 So one day in the middle of the week, come in with your tech director, run virtual soundcheck, build a mix for your drummer, for your bass player, build a starting point, save that as a scene, and then recall that scene every week so that every week you have a really close starting point. For those people who don’t know how to build a good mix for themselves, every week you have this fresh reset back to a good starting point for each position. Again, you’re going to want to mix each of those positions slightly differently. But that’s a pro tip, and I encourage you to try it. Now, once you’ve built a great mix, the last thing you want to do is add in a little bit of audience mics. Audience mics are important to create that more spacious feeling in your head. Sometimes it can feel really weird to be plugged up like this and not hear the room. And so using audience mics really helps you feel connected to the people and to the room and to the experience and to feel more natural, have a more natural sound in your ears. Let me give you a couple of tips about audience mics.

Speaker 1 We use these Sennheiser mics for audience mics and notice where they’re placed. Number one, they’re not in front of the PA. Number two, they’re high enough above everyone’s heads so that you’re not just picking up that one lady in the room. You got to have them pretty high so that they’re picking up the overall room. Number three, shotgun mics usually work best. Tip number four, they are behind the PA, so the PA is right there. You do not want your audience mics in front of the PA, or all you’re going to get is a bunch of mud. We have a right one, which we pan to our right ear, and we have way over there, our left one, same spot, way above people’s heads. You can barely see it sticking out over there. And that is picking up that side of the stage pan to our left ear. And you definitely want to EQ your audience mics for your ears as well. There’s a lot of tonal energy in those mics. You want to pull that out by high pass, filtering them away. At at least up to 200 hertz, maybe even more, because all you really care about are the people’s voices, the sibilences of people’s voices, and their clapping.

Speaker 1 You don’t want all the tone from the PA in your audience mic. So use a good high pass philtre way up into the mid frequencies and just clear out all the tonal frequencies and just keep the sibilence. And you can do a little bit more EQ and compression on those as well, but definitely EQ your audience mics. So that’s how you get a great personal mix for your ears. Lastly, let’s talk about the in-ears themselves. There are all sorts of in-ear monitors out there from these cheap 17 dollar Chinese ones, which actually sound really good. We actually buy these for all of our team members when they come on our team because they’re so cheap and they sound so great. I’ll show you where we store these later because we found a really cool storage solution. You’ve got these 17 dollar cheap Chinese ones that do sound good. I’ll link them below. And then we’ve got these very expensive 64 audios. These are A12Ts, ranging up to, I think these are $2,000 if you don’t have a scholarship. By the way, 64 Audio does offer church sponsorships, not full sponsorship, but they reduce the price, so reach out to them.

Speaker 1 But whether you are using cheap ones or good ones, I’m going to encourage you to wear both ears, and I’ll tell you why. Don’t just have one here and one dangling down here. I know it can be weird to plug up both ears. That’s where the audience likes to help. If you can’t stand the feeling of being totally plugged up, then just at least put it in a quarter of the way. And there’s a reason for this. God made your ears in pairs. You have two ears for a reason. And he did this crazy thing. I don’t even know what it’s called. But when you listen to something with both ears, God gives you a six decibel boost of what you’re hearing. So he artificially boosts what you’re hearing by 6db. It sounds more clear, more full, more rich when you use both ears at the same time. If you take one ear out, you lose that artificial sixDB boost that God gave you naturally, and you have to artificially crank up your volume by 6db, which over the long haul, you are just jamming that eardrum and those tiny little hair follicles on your ear that pick up sound.

Speaker 1 You are just blasting them with sound. So I encourage you to wear both ears for the sake of your hearing health. You want to do this for a long time. You don’t want to blow out your ears. So wear both ears. And like I said, if you have to, sometimes I’ll just rest it in the ear canal so I can hear the second channel. But don’t just pull it out all the way. That’s for your hearing health. That’s the first thing about your hearing health. The second thing is gross, but maybe once a year or once every two years, go to an audiologist and have them blow out any wax with some water. Because what happens is your ears naturally seep wax out the sides. But every week, twice a week, you’re jamming these things into your ear canals, and it’s pressing and compacting the wax in there, which actually over a long term can turn into a little ball and rest against your eardrum. And you can actually go deaf, temporarily deaf, because you have wax pressed against your eardrum. So go and pull out your wax. It’s gross, but it’s very helpful, and you will hear more clearly.

Speaker 1 Now, let me show you our little storage solution that we use for our band’s in-ears. And then I’ll tell you one last tip to get a better mix from your ears. So we are in our green room and we found this very cheap little Craftsman nuts and bolts drawer from the hardware store. Actually, Amazon, I can link it for you. And we just labelled everybody to have their own little nuts and bolts drawer, but they don’t use it for nuts and bolts. They use it for their in-ears. And so after service, when they’re done, they just come in here and stick it into here. And then, guess what? They never forget it. Now, even if you don’t buy your team these cheap $17 in-ear monitors, which you should, and you buy the foam tips, if people forget them at home, this solves that. You just have them take the foam tips off and put it in their little special nuts and bolts drawer that they keep at church. And so that will solve that problem for you. Now, let me give you one last tip about improving your in-ear mix, and I’ll do that outside.

Speaker 1 All right, the last thing I’ll say about getting a great in-ear mix is you really do need to train your band to play in parts and to spread their frequencies across the entire frequency spectrum. If all of your band is playing cords in the one position down here on their neck, and they’re all crowding the mid-range, and no one’s really covering the bass frequencies, and no one’s really covering the top frequencies, you’re just going to have mid-range mud. You need to teach your band to play in parts and to spread their parts across the frequency spectrum to use the full range of frequencies that God gave us. When do that, you’re immediately going to see an improvement in what you hear in your ears. So it really does come down to the source and the team and the band. And if you need help training your band how to play this way, we have a musical excellence course in the academy, and I will link that course below also with a 20 % discount applied automatically to that link. So if this video helped you, hit subscribe and the like button. And while you’re down there, check out all the links that I mentioned to help you improve your worship ministry.

Speaker 1 And if you trial this and it helps improve your mix, let me know in the comments. Just say, I did it and it worked. I’d love to hear from you. So see you in one of the I’ll see you in the next video here on YouTube. God bless you. Have a great day.