Anyone who has ever worked in live sound will understand how monitor engineers are something of a special breed. There’s a faintly masochistic streak there. Why stand out in the crowd mixing Front Of House, feeling the crowd’s response and taking the credit having created a single mix when you could be on monitors, dealing with many simultaneous mixes from people who are likely to only notice you if there’s a problem. The answer is that it’s exciting, and it’s exciting because ultimately it’s the most important job.

Returning to the Front Of House mixer. If you’ve ever mixed FOH you’ll know how the best bands kind of mix themselves. If what’s coming off stage is good, the rest of the job tends to work out. If what’s coming off stage isn’t good you can work really hard and never really get the results you need. Rubbish in does, after all, equal rubbish out.

What does this have to do with recording? Well, everything. It doesn’t matter whether your band are on stage or in the studio, if they aren’t comfortable, they won’t play well and if they don’t play well then no amount of work after the fact will ever do more than paper over the cracks. In the studio the most important mix is the first one, and by the first mix I don’t mean the rough mix, the control room mix. I mean the foldback.

Most Important Version Of The Mix Is The First One

So, in much the same way as in live sound, a good monitor mix affects the performance. The performance is where the magic lies so the monitor mix, while not the one being recorded, still indirectly imprints itself on the recording. You can hear its influence. If you can hear yourself clearly, you will be more in tune and in time, but there’s more to a good headphone mix than just that. The context in which a performer’s part sits in the mix, with the other performers clearly audible but with the key information specific to that performer also clearly audible and forming a pleasing, and hopefully inspiring, whole, is what’s needed, and that’s not as simple as ‘can you hear yourself OK?’.

The most important thing is arguably comfort. Comfortable performers play better. They take more risks and more of those risks tend to work out well. Which do you want to capture, a performance where no one makes any mistakes? Or a performance where the players feel confident and inspired enough to push themselves and create something special?

One of the biggest reasons why musicians ‘stiffen up’ when recording is that the process of recording often differs markedly from their familiar experience of performing. Moving performers out of their preferred positions relative to each other, be that who is where or just how far apart they are, can throw some musicians off and so many musicians absolutely need a line of sight with each other. However the wearing of headphones can also be a source of discomfort and a great tip is to ask musicians who are unused to wearing studio headphones to bring their own pair. While they might not be a regulation pair of Beyers, if they are used to them, their fit and their sound, it probably doesn’t matter if they are wildly bassy Beats, as long as they are closed back and aren’t spilling onto the vocal mic. Have studio cans available but you don’t have to insist yours are used.

Talkback

A key component of any headphone mix is talkback, difficult communication brings stress and stress means bad performances. Making sure playback over speakers is available as well as headphones is especially important if you are working in a studio with a separate control room and live area. The increasing popularity of studios with large control rooms which serve as a combined live area/control room has much to commend it, even if it does make things more tricky for the engineer, and one of those things is that no-one has to remind players to put their headphones back on between takes to hear the talkback. If your studio has a separate live area and no speakers for playback and talkback consider installing some.

If you’ve worked with a band who do what I’ve referred to in the past as ‘getting married to the demo’ meaning that they are so used to the demo recording that any deviation from that original meets with resistance, you’ll know how susceptible we can be to our first exposure to a song. While I have no evidence to support this I’ve always suspected that songs like Don’t Fear the Reaper and King Of Pain, with their metronomic percussion are a result of the band getting so used to the sound of the click track that it felt it too important to the arrangement to do without it on the final version!

How Do You Run Your Headphone Mixes?

So the headphone mix is fundamental to the success of a recording. While things are more manageable if you aren’t working with an ensemble and are taking the overdubbing track-by-track path, the headphone mix still fundamentally influences the results. But how should you set this mix up? Do you need a separate mix for each performer? Do you monitor through your DAW? What if you are using a Native DAW and latency is an issue? Should you be using an analogue mixer for speed and to sidestep the latency issues altogether? If you are using a mixer, will you have problems when dropping in? All of these things need to be thought through but each has its own advantages and disadvantages. This is a big subject but to summarise the contenders:

• Native DAW monitoring through software - Combined with a multi output interface and suitable headphone amps this approach seems flexible and inexpensive. However you are at the mercy of your system’s latency and the temptation to run as low a buffer as possible will probably lead to performance issues unless your computer is powerful and your session modest.

• DSP DAW system - Pro Tools HDX, Pro Tools CARBON, Universal Audio LUNA, and any of the other available DSP powered solutions offer the negligible latency of an external mixer with the convenience and workflow advantages of tracking and monitoring from within your DAW. Convenient but more expensive.

• Analogue Mixer with DAW - This is an excellent solution for quick, flexible foldback but presents issues when dropping in when using a DAW and precludes the use of plugins when tracking.

• DSP mixer built into interface - Less convenient than a hardware mixer and inherently more complex than setting up mixes using sends in a DAW. But inexpensive and potentially very powerful.

• Tape System with Mixer - The old school approach using a mixer with a tape machine or a dedicated hard disc recorder can be restrictive and expensive but it does simplify latency issues!

Who Sets Up The Headphone Mix?

A fundamental issue is who should be setting up these headphone mixes. If they are so important, is it really a good idea to leave them to the performer to set up? The increasing popularity of personal monitoring solutions where the performer has access to the relative levels of the key ‘food groups’ of their mix make sense. After all, why should a performer have to ask the engineer to turn a knob when they can do it themselves? However isn’t setting up this mix best done by the person in the room with the most experience of mixing? If the mixes aren’t set up by the engineer, isn’t that ducking responsibility? Some engineers think so, and I can see their point but I still think the ‘more me’ knob is a good idea…

We had an interesting discussion on this and other aspects of tracking sessions in this week’s episode of the Production Expert Podcast in which, amongst other things, Grammy award winning engineer Mike Exeter shares his thoughts on how to get the best results from a session and setting up a good headphone mix is central to his approach.

What is your preferred approach to setting up foldback to performers in the studio? Share your tips in the comments.

Photo by cottonbro