IEMs - sometimes too good?!

[Al Krow]

Have been really enjoying the combination of IEMs plus personalised monitor feeds we've now got via our digital desk (A&H CQ18T in our case).

 

By way of background, in case of help to anyone (and apologies for those of you who are already familiar!), it's been a bit of a journey for me: switching to KZ ZAR IEMs a year back from the more budget KZ ZS10s which I had tried out for about 18 months prior was a game changer in providing a fuller more rounded sound vs something that I found a little toppy/harsh in the case of the more budget option and which had almost made me want to give up on IEMs. The better preamps in the A&H desk plus the personalised feeds was yet another step up and I was finally getting an experience that was comparably good to using a backline amp. And with a line-up change six months back and the new guitarist being very happy not to have a stage amp (he doesn't have a car so is able to get to gigs with pedal board and guitar on public transport) was the icing on the cake in terms of not having to deal with an overloud guitar amp on stage, which I'm sure we have all had to suffer from from time to time! Our singers seem to particularly love IEMs, in general guitarists I work with the least keen; they miss the harmonic richness they get from their amps.

 

But the thing that I've had to wake up to is going from an overall sound where the non-IEM stage monitoring was sometimes meh (and that was on us for not wanting to invest in and lug separate stage monitors for each band member) but where our FoH sound generally pretty good to my ears, to a few gigs over the past six months where the band have had a really good gigging experience with IEMs, but me wandering out into the audience mid-set and discovering that the FoH was far from decent and punters getting a drum heavy mix, which didn't seem to be the case at initial soundcheck. Has been particularly the case with new venues and/or if they have an in-house PA. It's rare that the venues we play at have sound engineers on site and we certainly can't justify having one ourselves.

 

So I guess the key learning point I wanted to share is that if you are getting a good IEM mix from your desk, don't let that lull you into a false sense of security about the FoH sound! If anyone else has similar stories, please do share!