Make Everything Louder Than Everything Else

TL;dr short history of stage monitors, modern history of the last 40 plus years hands on of stage monitors, gear, techniques, milestones in the craft

Mixing monitors is 60% audible and 90% psychological. Instead of mixing for a venue full of spectators who have no say in how you structure the mix you’re mixing for the people that are paying you to give them what they want. Back in the beginning there were no monitors. The beginning of rock concerts not the beginning of humankind. Though I imagine the Dead were jamming in a cave somewhere working out a 30 minute version of Truckin’.

As amplified concert music became a thing live audio production started to evolve. In the earliest days of recording you need to be a literal electronics engineer to keep the gear on the air. It was the same in the early days of sound reinforcement. There was no store bought PA. No Sweetwater or Sound Productions to call. If you needed something you built it or adapted it from hi-fi, move theater sound or whatever prehistoric sound gear you could find.

The first stage monitors were an afterthought. As concerts grew this started to change due to the acts wanting and needing to hear themselves. People like Bob Heil, the Hanley brothers and Bear Stanley were each working on ways to bring better sound to the masses. And the people playing the instruments on stage. Heil was touring with the biggest acts of the time. Also touring at the time were the Hanleys who also provided the PA for Woodstock and the Beatles at Shea. Bill Hanley is often referred to as the “father of festival sound”. Bear was a long time fixture in the Grateful Dead camp (renown chemist) and had the idea for the iconic Wall of Sound system.

Designs were modest at first. A stack or two on each side of the stage pointing across the stage. Minimal inputs and few outputs (often only 1 mix) controlled from the front of house console. Not too long after the idea of smaller enclosures on the floor in from of the players came to be. Equalizers were limited, power amps were low power and speaker designs were not able to keep up with the SPL created by the mains. This was particularly true at large festivals. Consoles were likely custom built and those that weren’t were repurposed studio consoles. Getting good mons let alone anything you could hear was a pie fight in and of itself. I’m not sure who did it first but at about the same time the idea of having a separate console on stage for mons came to be. This lead to the invention of a microphone splitter to split the mics to each console something that’s largely outdated today. In those days impedance matching was essential and you needed a transformer splitter to feed the desks.

In the 70s the touring business exploded. The demand for stage monitor specific gear went into overdrive. Amps got more powerful, active crossovers were being used in monitor systems with more powerful equalizers. By the mid-late 70s you could buy gear specific to live sound. You still had to build your own infrastructure but you could buy stacks, wedges, amps, consoles and more. No longer held to a mix or two onstage mix counts grew to four or six or eight for the big dogs. Companies were starting to make monitor mixing specific consoles.

One of the first monitor consoles was the Midas Pro4 a 24 or 32 channel by 8 mixes. The PR4/PR5/Pro 40 modules set the standard for the sound live audio consoles for many years. Others followed. Studiomaster, Soundcraft with the 400B and 800B. Yamaha was slow to the monitor console game so they were limited to modified PM1000s and PM2000s where potentiometers replaced the bus assign switches. Dave Martin developed some of the most peel your face off wedges at the time. Klark Technic pioneered a full throw 1/3 octave eq the DN27.

My first break mixing mons on a bigger gig came at a roller rink in Northridge. Those gigs were loud and it was sound by the pound. I had a Studiomaster console, Soundcraftsman equalizers and passive Yamaha wedges. I was listening away in the cue bus and thought it was killer. When there was feedback I adjusted the graphics until it went away and it sounded great.

But what I was listening to wasn’t what was going out to the stage. The console didn’t have insert points so I wasn’t listening to how the eq was butchering the mixes. I was listening to the unequalized mix. It was a painful learning experience not only for me but more so for the band. Eventually listening matrices were designed so you could monitor post mix eq on consoles that didn’t have inserts or weren’t cabled to use the inserts.

After that for the next few years I toured with college radio darlings doing college festivals and field houses and arena support act gigs mixing house. I had exposure to all kinds of PA. From local and club hacked together rigs to the best clubs, theaters and as the support act with the biggest companies in the business providing the headliner. From that I went to mixing aging classic rock bands doing big clubs, theaters and sheds whose budgets weren’t quite what they were.

During that time gear ran the gamut in the smaller leagues. Various Midas Pro4/Pro5/PR40 consoles on the big gigs. Yamaha PM1000 and PM2000 consoles on the smaller gigs. Soundcraft 400Bs and occasionally an 800B. Yamaha had introduced the MC series for monitors. Wedges and fills were big and loud though in many cases fidelity was a distant afterthought. Martin now had an LE400 which was one of the loudest monitors on the planet and sounded good. The big name manufacturers all had various offerings though most wedges were still custom built. KT and BSS eq and crossovers were prevalent.

The big touring PA companies at the time, Showco, Clair, Electrotec, Tasco and Delicate all had in your face wedges with the latest in consoles and processing. In console land Showco was working with Harrison, Electrotec was working with Soundcraft on what would become the original Series 4 (the first mon console I’d heard of that had 16 aux outs). Delicate was dyed in the wool Midas. At one point Clair had a console that folded for transport. There were house and monitor configs of consoles. There were no universal house/mon consoles at the time though sometimes, particularly early years house consoles were used on mons. Mixing monitors was no longer an afterthought. It had become something in and of itself. The acts were demanding it.

I wasn’t considered a “monitor guy” at that point. I’d done a few tours as the monitor bloke but mostly did house. Since I almost never had a monitor person with the act I walked the house person or PA company person through the mixes. I’d barked plenty of monitors of all kinds at that point. Then I took the house monitor gig at the iconic theater/club near Hollywood and Vine across from the round building with the killer reverb chamber in the basement. I had a Yamaha MC2408, KT DN300 graphics, BSS crossovers, Crest amps and Schubert JBL wedges with 2445 drivers that could knock a buzzard off a shit wagon. I had a couple of 15” subs for the drummer and 2 x 15” and 2445s for side fills. It was a stout little rig.

The house gig was good. I could go tour when I needed and come back and have something to do. We did everything there. Rock, pop, ethnic, special events, TV and radio. It was an excellent proving ground. A woman that had been mixing several of the acts coming in the room was looking for a monitor mixer for a storied rock band. They were the band that spanned aviation history going from a plane to a starship. I got the last big tour they did.

I had what had become a staple of the touring industry a Ramsa WRS840. If you weren’t using a higher profile brand name console chances are you’d be using it for mons and a PM3000 out front. It was my first taste of TDM products. Tim Miller from Oregon was a small manufacturer of graphic eqs and active crossovers. They were affordable and clean. I had Crown Macrotech amps and a two way wedges with a B&C 2” and EV15”. It was a clean little wedge. It wasn’t sound by the pound but rather more fidelity than horsepower.

From then on I was now a “monitor guy”. No good deed goes unpunished. That tour gig wound down, the club that was the side hustle was seized by the Feds so I moved to Seattle. I was about a week into it and doing mons at a theater where I was the defacto house guy. The band was a side project of those singing sisters. It was a little six mix gig. Good hi-fi sound and great playing. The next week the house guy called wanting to talk to “that long haired guy that did monitors”. That started a 14 year journey with a couple of the most iconic artists in music. And fantastic humans to boot.

Over the life of the gig I used a lot of different gear from different vendors. All high quality, state of the art at the time. The console was the most consistent part. For the first several years it was the good ol’ Ramsa. It had enough mixes and was clean. We used a good variety of wedges over those years. I was most pleased with Clair 12AMs and Sound Image 12” x 2”. Unless you were a client you probably were familiar with the Sound Image wedges. Small, snappy, plenty loud enough and sounded great. Outboard processing grew as well. Soon it was 8 gates, 8 comps 2 verbs and a delay. There were PCM 70s, perhaps a Lexicon 224, Super Primetime or a tc 2290. A bit later I started using a tc 6032 eq system and shortly after that moved to a Midas XL4. The XL4 remained their choice until I did my last gig with them in 2004.

In late 93 while rehearsing for South America and Japanese tour the guitar playing sister mentioned to me and the house guy there was a contemporary of theirs that was flying like an eagle with what she called “little custom wireless headphones”. We told her we’d look into it. In private we thought it was the silliest idea we’d heard yet. Who wears headphones live, right? Especially a front person. But we checked it out anyway.

It would turn out to be the most significant change in the history of stage monitors. In ear monitors. It would be a few more years until the girls changed over to all ears. Once we moved to ears I was able to up the processing quality. At times Massenberg eqs, Manley comps, 1176, Distressors and for one tour a Pultec and Fairchild pulled from a personal studio. The racks resembled house or studio racks rather than the spartan offerings of most monitor systems. Ears were the point I stopped using outboard mix eq as a default. Many others were using outboard gear by this point as well.

In the mid-late 90s I was able to get the monitor gig with the jazz singer. Band configs varied. Big R&B, smooth jazz, pops style jazz with a symphony. The gig could be 10 to 16 mixes depending on the instrumentation. It was a versatile bunch. Sometimes were carried mons other times we used local support or were at festivals. The bulk of our work was outside the US. In most places we got the same gear we got here. By now the Yamaha PM4000 had come out and had a monitor specific version as well. In the US we saw that and a Ramsa 840 the most with a smattering of smaller Soundcrafts. In Europe it was mostly Midas XL200s and Soundcrafts. A year or so later the Midas Heritage 3000 was released and pretty much took over the industry at both house and mons.

Wedges for the jazz singer needed to be small and high fi. The Meyer UM1s worked great. A Nexo PS15 on its side even passive worked though just on the edge of not being loud enough. As always 12 AMs were great (and my favorite for this act) and at that point they were QSC powered. Off the shelf wedges from EAW, L-Acoustics, d&b and many others sounded good and were readily available. At that point even for regional gigs the normal number of mixes was 10 with a dozen wedges, sides and something for the drummer.

Jazz singer was bitten early on in the ear revolution like so many were when when the squelch of the original Garwood Radio Stations went into full white noise. That turned some potential early adopters off. At one point he allowed the band to use ears (he was still using wedges and sides) but came back to wedges as he didn’t like the quiet feel on stage.

By then the changeover to ears for many bands was in full swing. It was a watershed moment. Except for the jazz singer every monitor gig I did from then until the time I stopped touring was an ear gig. Nearly everyone replaced their original Garwood units (paired with Aphex Dominators) with Shure PSM 600s. The 600s while more frequency agile than either the Garwood or the Sennhieser EM series was still hindered by fixed frequencies. In some markets it was difficult to get 6-8 band members mixes plus whatever mics and instrument pack you had to operate reliably. As a workaround some stationary performers, keys or drums perhaps, went to wired units or headphone amps.

At the time 16 channels of wireless was a lot. Now it’s entry level on the bigger gigs especially a festival or multi act bill. Now not only did the monitor mixer need to be able to mix ears they needed to be able to coordinate frequencies. It could be a crapshoot as intermodulation software specific for entertainment didn’t exist and spectrum analyzers were too expensive to carry on tour. The addition of the original WinRadio helped and eventually PWS introduced IAS.

Some limitations of the PSM600 were to be addressed in the PSM700 but many thought the 700 didn’t sound as good. Fortunately Sennheiser introduced the G1 series that was not only more frequency agile (as you could tune the freqs instead of being fixed) but it sounded better. As a result of this not long after the position of RF coordinator became a must on tour regardless of it was the monitor mixer, stage tech or a dedicated RF tech. These days it’s difficult to imagine a large tour without a specific person coordinating. The same is now happening for network techs as well.

The early 2000s saw a paradigm shift to digital consoles. Technology had developed and offshore electronics manufacturing has pushed price points in the low and mid range of the market lower. There was more bang for the buck in those price points. It was also the acceptance of a universal console for house or mons. The Heritage 3000 lead the way but was still a high end console. It took going digital for the rest of the market to join them.

The Yamaha PM1D was first but was slow on the uptake. Long forgotten Innovason had an entry though was pretty cumbersome to operate (Lawo bought them out of bankruptcy about 10 years ago). Former Midas and KT guys joined Digico and propelled the console (early warts and all) to to the top of the pile but it didn’t come cheap. For a short while those were the only three brands with much recognition.

Around 2005 analog console world at the high end started into a death spiral. Yamaha released the mid range priced PM5D which would become the PM4000 killer. And the killer of most other midrange analog consoles. Allen & Heath was lurking in the background though it would take quite a bit longer for them to catch on. Digidesign (AKA Avid) came out with the original D-Show though it was a bit short on buses for a big monitor application. They made up for that a bit later with the Profile in the mid range and the SC48 in the lower end.

Between the Profile, SC48 and PM5D analog console world was soon relegated to the dustbin of audio history. Most of what’s available today are decedents of the above with a few exceptions. Lawo has recently entered the live fray as well as SSL though not near as prevalent as the others. Midas was resurrected from the music store world with a new Heritage but it’s yet to be seen if it will make much of an inroad after the brand was Uli-ed.

Not only has the gear changed where we are when we are mixing has changed. Many of the larger gigs are no longer on stage or even at the side of the stage. As sets have become more elaborate and complex a designer doesn’t want hanging out in the middle of that with the console and screens acting as a beacon showering the stage. We’re now hidden under stage, behind the stage or off in a vom where we can’t be seen. No longer can they glance over and motion what they need. We see the band on cameras, they may see us with a camera. We have talkback systems. Many times we’re isolated from the sound of the room and need to adjust our references accordingly. For those that came up in the glory days of wedges it’s a different beast.

It’s a long way from hoping a double 15” scoop and a multi-cell horn on a 400 watt Phase Linear would get loud enough without bursting into flames. Taking a monitor system even on a small club tour is now not only feasible but better for all involved. They are as ubiquitous as backline. The consoles are small, they fit in the bay of the bus or even a van. You don’t need a forklift to stack them. A small band can now buy a monitor rig for less than the cost of renting one. Good monitors have been democratized. It’s come so far that your band might even be able to do an hour long version of Truckin’.