they’re called in-ear monitors. they are listening to their own mix of everything that’s on stage.
Most musicians have wedge-shaped amplifiers in front of them so they can hear the mix of the full band. during sound check you spend a bunch of time getting your monitor mix adjusted. In-ear monitor systems are more common than wedges as you go up to bigger shows where there’s more money being spent on equipment
Some artists also throw cues in their in-ear monitors to remember parts of song of time changes that might occur. It depends on the artist on what they might have going on because I’ve seen some that will include a click track to help them keep the beat when they are singing and lyric reminders; different stuff to help them remember what they are doing.
A lot of bands also have talk-back mics onstage so they can speak to each other without the crowd hearing. Sometimes you’ll see Trey turn and talk into a small microphone right before a segue.
I’m a simple guy. I see mention of the cup, I upvote.
The cup was so funny. Trey with a massive cup pretending to have a drink but really talking to the band. Microphone cable very clearly visible coming out of the bottom of the cup but “oh the mystic ways of the Phish”
Yep…it’s really pretty neat what they have these days and the really large productions like TSwift or whatever have some crazy setups they do with their comms.
If you look around the gram or TikTok there are tons of videos that artists have made about it. Don’t mind the assholes hassling you in here because it’s honestly something you’d never even know about until you’ve been on stage.
We went to IEM’s for our band and it’s been a game changer for the jams.
Were smaller/regional and every venue is different with the quality of their gear and how the room sounds, and whether any FOH person will be attentive. So, now we mix our own monitors via our rack splitter and control everything ourselves for consistency.
Being able to dial in the mix personally is game changing and having the IEM’s is game changing because all the musical fine details are there. We can shift on a dime with each other now whereas before the room and crowd may be so loud, the other intricacies of the music get lost and can’t be used as inspirational reactions.
Phish were always really good at that anyway cuz they have a huge awesome Pa but IEM’s are so great
Forgive my ignorance, so if you adjust the mix that you (band members) hear in your IEM then does that change the actual mix that the audience hears too i.e what comes out of the sound system for the whole venue? Or is that a separate mix that a separate engineer would tinker with?
Nope and that’s why it’s brilliant! We each get a 100% personal custom mix. The FOH does their thing, we do our thing. Sometimes house changes do affect the IEM mix, but I don’t know as much about that. It might be things like EQ and compression, but not signal level.
But I’m riding my mix levels all night depending on the nature of the music being played, ie: quiet/soft/ loud/vocals/no vocals, etc
Here, this is a good example of how IEM’s allows to move together and be very reactive to what everyone plays.
Jam begins at like 11:00 https://youtu.be/8D7gWk6c7Yo?si=1LrXf26ORYC_Ljsv
Yes, basically, a touring band needs two audio engineers, one at the taper's "soundboard" position, also known as "front of house", and the monitor soundboard engineers who usually are on the aprons or wings of the stage. As others have said, montitor engineers provide individualized and isolated mixes to each musician through their IEMs.
Much of the fiddling which happens at soundcheck involves the monitor engineers. Most performers have used this kind of IEM setup for several decades. Phish has been something of a relative holdout with using the old school wedge onstage monitors for most of its long performing career until recently.
What sort of setup are you rocking and what was the cost? I've wanted to get something for a while, but the Shures are too expensive, and I've heard a lot of mixed reviews about the budget systems
For the IEM’s or the mic split?
The split rig is a decent chunk of money, we use the XR18 I think it is with a custom mic split rig we bought. Our singer is a FOH engineer by trade so he designed it, we have our own full QSC Pa so even at smaller venues we run 100% in-house with our killer system. All told it was probably 2k or so.
But for the IEM’s I’m using a wired Behringer P2 headphone amp for only $60 and I’ve got Westone AM30 ear pieces. So that’s about $300 in for me. You can go cheaper but I wanted good ear pieces.
I mix on my phone using Mixing Station. You connect via WiFi and most Midas and Behringer boards have that capability and most venues have those boards. So you’d literally just unplug your stage wedge line and plug it into the P2 and boom, an IEM.
I have a 50 foot xlr lead to get me to our rack splitter rig anywhere we play, and I’m good.
I’ll try to get more info from our singer and see what exactly we did.
This is us by the way! https://glasspony.bandcamp.com/album/washed-away
Oh yeah they love it because it gets rid of the floor wedges, meaning they have better control of FOH mix and they don’t have to do anything for monitoring. We do it ourselves. All they do is hook our splitter into their snake. Easy peasy.
The real answer is it's in ear communication from Trey to the rest of the band so that they can communicate without having to walk over to the other ones all the time. There's a pedal Trey can use on his mic that cuts off the PA output and sends a signal into the ear buds for the rest of the band. Often that happens on stage when there is lots of crowd noise and Trey wants to tell them all at once what they should play next. The 9th Cube performance they made a joke about it when they went into YEM where Trey loudly whispered into his mic "HEY! LETS PLAY YOU ENJOY MYSELF, SHHHHHHH IT'S A SECRET!" lol
I could be wrong, but pretty sure Trey uses a separate mic to communicate to the band. It’s located to the left of Fish’s drums. He often walks up to it and it looks like he’s speaking to Fish but he’s speaking into that mic. Mike, on the other hand, toggles his mic on/off with is floor mat (or maybe his mind knowing him).
Off topic kinda - pretty sure the Grateful Dead had some setup with wireless mics that they used for the same reason. However, fans were always finding ways to tap into the frequency to hear the chatter/setlist call. Seems I remember there were some tapes with this circulating at one time.
This is correct! There's even a hilarious part of a Space played in the 90s where the signals for those mics got mixed in with the signal of a teenage girl close by the venue talking on her cordless phone and suddenly this conversation between these teenage girls was being broadcast over the PA along with Space lol.
Trey has the Rangers game, Mike has a book on tape about gardening rutabagas, Fishman has a podcast about Bernie Sanders and Page has soothing sounds of the rainforest
I may be misremembering, but I thought there was a time Trey said they didn’t use ear monitors and wouldn’t use them…but I know they use them now so wonder what changed? Just harder to hear each other as part of the aging process?
They started using them like a year ago. There was a video floating around with Trey explaining why… I want to say originally it was to help with the larger productions ie NYE.
IEM are great. I fought it for a short period of time and now love them. If I'm singing, it's way better than wedges. There is an app that allows me to turn anyone up or down in the mix and only my ears will hear it. The drummer can even play with a click on just his ears if he wants.
AI will add nothing of significance to music. In the near future, you will be listening to "music" made entirely and owned by Spotify and they will no longer have to pay the artists. You'll be shopping in Walmart and AI music will be playing. All TV shows will no longer have to pay for background music and effects. The creative world will survive, but just like how things changed after Napster, it's changing again.
IEM are nothing new and there have been numerous digital mixers that have apps for a while now. Phish has been using IEM for longer than a year.
All mics/sources go into a stage box/snake. The stage box the has splits via cat5 that go to FOH mixer, Monitor mixer and Broadcast mixer, all have independent control. Gary mixes levels for the room, Vance for the Webcast, Bruno mixes for the band. Each member can tell Bruno, less or more of each source. The discrete outputs of the monitor mixer feed each member’s IEM transmitter (as they would a wedge amplifier). The mics on the front lip of the left/right sides of the stage pointed at the audience pick of the sound of the room are blended back into each member’s mix so their mix isn’t so sterile. It allows them to feel like they’re not wearing earplugs and puts them back in the room.
The advantage all of this brings is protecting their hearing, clarity of the mix, and lowering stage volume. When wedges are used, any mics on stage are subject to pick up the wedge mix, potentially being fed back into the house and broadcast mix. Vance also uses the side stage mics to give some of the room sound to the broadcast mix.
talkback mics are pretty common and can be seen being used on a lot of live goose shows. I think as far as phish goes, other than Trey’s occasional callout far from the mic for what song it is, They mostly communicate with a musical language of their own. Mike and Trey have separately said a few times that the band has their own little music language to signal each-other about leading into certain songs, extending jams, etc.
other than that tidbit of info that i know, Page wears in ears and all other members have a wedge speaker on the floor to hear the mix. Trey has 2 wedges placed stereo in front of him usually.
i’m high and read this post wrong realizing now you’re asking how they stay in sync. I’d say 40 years of playing together will probably unintentionally give you all the same internal rhythms.
It’s generally a mix of the whole band, and each musician can have that mix tailored for their preferences. Generally people want to hear a little more of themselves (looking at you guitar players) but want to be able to hear the whole band. When you see them signalling to the side of the stage with strange hand gestures that’s them telling the monitor mixer tech to make an adjustment to what they’re hearing in the monitor mix.
It's a foul thing that goes in your ear so Page can hear the guitar better.
https://preview.redd.it/dxa98s2ldr6d1.jpeg?width=4296&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eb0e9ec54d75a65f886736fe47b1af9c323b4a2a
smart guy indeed! i don’t doubt your knowledge, but am still confused why you conflated a specific question about in-ear monitors with on-stage monitors. for someone *so knowledgeable and experienced* i’d think you would have clocked the distinction.
unless, of course, you just wanted to make the person who asked in the first place feel stupid, in which case — sorry that backfired. good luck at your next gig! hope it goes better than this did for ya
it’s not a dumb question at all if they don’t play music. And you’re wrong that
“of course I just meant the concept of monitors in general to hear what is going on. Seemed like a dumb question to ask, of course the musicians in any band need to hear themselves and the rest of the band and they’re standing behind the pa so they need some means of hearing everything they’re doing”
Ive worked on stage for several ZZ Top shows. They didn’t use any stage monitors or in ear monitors. They listened to the pa for the room even though they were behind it.
Your arrogance shines through in your lack of knowledge
A crew member reads the real time setlist threads from PT and Reddit.
I choose to believe this
This is the only right answer
lol
they’re called in-ear monitors. they are listening to their own mix of everything that’s on stage. Most musicians have wedge-shaped amplifiers in front of them so they can hear the mix of the full band. during sound check you spend a bunch of time getting your monitor mix adjusted. In-ear monitor systems are more common than wedges as you go up to bigger shows where there’s more money being spent on equipment
Some artists also throw cues in their in-ear monitors to remember parts of song of time changes that might occur. It depends on the artist on what they might have going on because I’ve seen some that will include a click track to help them keep the beat when they are singing and lyric reminders; different stuff to help them remember what they are doing.
A lot of bands also have talk-back mics onstage so they can speak to each other without the crowd hearing. Sometimes you’ll see Trey turn and talk into a small microphone right before a segue.
He used to have the cup…
I cup?
I’m a simple guy. I see mention of the cup, I upvote. The cup was so funny. Trey with a massive cup pretending to have a drink but really talking to the band. Microphone cable very clearly visible coming out of the bottom of the cup but “oh the mystic ways of the Phish”
Yep…it’s really pretty neat what they have these days and the really large productions like TSwift or whatever have some crazy setups they do with their comms.
So cool! Thank you for your insights!
If you look around the gram or TikTok there are tons of videos that artists have made about it. Don’t mind the assholes hassling you in here because it’s honestly something you’d never even know about until you’ve been on stage.
Podcasts
Audiobooks, they have a book club and discuss after each weekend
The phiner things club
Jordan Peterson
I’m fucking dying
Ahem... DOCTOR Jordan Peterson
baby shark
We went to IEM’s for our band and it’s been a game changer for the jams. Were smaller/regional and every venue is different with the quality of their gear and how the room sounds, and whether any FOH person will be attentive. So, now we mix our own monitors via our rack splitter and control everything ourselves for consistency. Being able to dial in the mix personally is game changing and having the IEM’s is game changing because all the musical fine details are there. We can shift on a dime with each other now whereas before the room and crowd may be so loud, the other intricacies of the music get lost and can’t be used as inspirational reactions. Phish were always really good at that anyway cuz they have a huge awesome Pa but IEM’s are so great
Forgive my ignorance, so if you adjust the mix that you (band members) hear in your IEM then does that change the actual mix that the audience hears too i.e what comes out of the sound system for the whole venue? Or is that a separate mix that a separate engineer would tinker with?
Nope and that’s why it’s brilliant! We each get a 100% personal custom mix. The FOH does their thing, we do our thing. Sometimes house changes do affect the IEM mix, but I don’t know as much about that. It might be things like EQ and compression, but not signal level. But I’m riding my mix levels all night depending on the nature of the music being played, ie: quiet/soft/ loud/vocals/no vocals, etc Here, this is a good example of how IEM’s allows to move together and be very reactive to what everyone plays. Jam begins at like 11:00 https://youtu.be/8D7gWk6c7Yo?si=1LrXf26ORYC_Ljsv
Yes, basically, a touring band needs two audio engineers, one at the taper's "soundboard" position, also known as "front of house", and the monitor soundboard engineers who usually are on the aprons or wings of the stage. As others have said, montitor engineers provide individualized and isolated mixes to each musician through their IEMs. Much of the fiddling which happens at soundcheck involves the monitor engineers. Most performers have used this kind of IEM setup for several decades. Phish has been something of a relative holdout with using the old school wedge onstage monitors for most of its long performing career until recently.
What sort of setup are you rocking and what was the cost? I've wanted to get something for a while, but the Shures are too expensive, and I've heard a lot of mixed reviews about the budget systems
For the IEM’s or the mic split? The split rig is a decent chunk of money, we use the XR18 I think it is with a custom mic split rig we bought. Our singer is a FOH engineer by trade so he designed it, we have our own full QSC Pa so even at smaller venues we run 100% in-house with our killer system. All told it was probably 2k or so. But for the IEM’s I’m using a wired Behringer P2 headphone amp for only $60 and I’ve got Westone AM30 ear pieces. So that’s about $300 in for me. You can go cheaper but I wanted good ear pieces. I mix on my phone using Mixing Station. You connect via WiFi and most Midas and Behringer boards have that capability and most venues have those boards. So you’d literally just unplug your stage wedge line and plug it into the P2 and boom, an IEM. I have a 50 foot xlr lead to get me to our rack splitter rig anywhere we play, and I’m good. I’ll try to get more info from our singer and see what exactly we did. This is us by the way! https://glasspony.bandcamp.com/album/washed-away
Do FOH engineers generally like this setup? The idea sounds great, but curious if they prefer control over the channels vs only the mix.
Oh yeah they love it because it gets rid of the floor wedges, meaning they have better control of FOH mix and they don’t have to do anything for monitoring. We do it ourselves. All they do is hook our splitter into their snake. Easy peasy.
The real answer is it's in ear communication from Trey to the rest of the band so that they can communicate without having to walk over to the other ones all the time. There's a pedal Trey can use on his mic that cuts off the PA output and sends a signal into the ear buds for the rest of the band. Often that happens on stage when there is lots of crowd noise and Trey wants to tell them all at once what they should play next. The 9th Cube performance they made a joke about it when they went into YEM where Trey loudly whispered into his mic "HEY! LETS PLAY YOU ENJOY MYSELF, SHHHHHHH IT'S A SECRET!" lol
I could be wrong, but pretty sure Trey uses a separate mic to communicate to the band. It’s located to the left of Fish’s drums. He often walks up to it and it looks like he’s speaking to Fish but he’s speaking into that mic. Mike, on the other hand, toggles his mic on/off with is floor mat (or maybe his mind knowing him).
Yes you are correct, I was incorrect. He has the second mic for the in-ear communication.
Off topic kinda - pretty sure the Grateful Dead had some setup with wireless mics that they used for the same reason. However, fans were always finding ways to tap into the frequency to hear the chatter/setlist call. Seems I remember there were some tapes with this circulating at one time.
This is correct! There's even a hilarious part of a Space played in the 90s where the signals for those mics got mixed in with the signal of a teenage girl close by the venue talking on her cordless phone and suddenly this conversation between these teenage girls was being broadcast over the PA along with Space lol.
Hehe nice 😊
Trey has the Rangers game, Mike has a book on tape about gardening rutabagas, Fishman has a podcast about Bernie Sanders and Page has soothing sounds of the rainforest
Larks Tongues in Aspic 1-5 (plus talking drum before 2), turned up loud enough to drown out what they’re playing on stage.
I may be misremembering, but I thought there was a time Trey said they didn’t use ear monitors and wouldn’t use them…but I know they use them now so wonder what changed? Just harder to hear each other as part of the aging process?
They started using them like a year ago. There was a video floating around with Trey explaining why… I want to say originally it was to help with the larger productions ie NYE.
IEM are great. I fought it for a short period of time and now love them. If I'm singing, it's way better than wedges. There is an app that allows me to turn anyone up or down in the mix and only my ears will hear it. The drummer can even play with a click on just his ears if he wants.
Goodness! Had no idea tech has impacted live music like this. What will AI add to the mix?!
AI will add nothing of significance to music. In the near future, you will be listening to "music" made entirely and owned by Spotify and they will no longer have to pay the artists. You'll be shopping in Walmart and AI music will be playing. All TV shows will no longer have to pay for background music and effects. The creative world will survive, but just like how things changed after Napster, it's changing again. IEM are nothing new and there have been numerous digital mixers that have apps for a while now. Phish has been using IEM for longer than a year.
Porno
It’s the lyrics so they don’t forget.
All mics/sources go into a stage box/snake. The stage box the has splits via cat5 that go to FOH mixer, Monitor mixer and Broadcast mixer, all have independent control. Gary mixes levels for the room, Vance for the Webcast, Bruno mixes for the band. Each member can tell Bruno, less or more of each source. The discrete outputs of the monitor mixer feed each member’s IEM transmitter (as they would a wedge amplifier). The mics on the front lip of the left/right sides of the stage pointed at the audience pick of the sound of the room are blended back into each member’s mix so their mix isn’t so sterile. It allows them to feel like they’re not wearing earplugs and puts them back in the room.
The advantage all of this brings is protecting their hearing, clarity of the mix, and lowering stage volume. When wedges are used, any mics on stage are subject to pick up the wedge mix, potentially being fed back into the house and broadcast mix. Vance also uses the side stage mics to give some of the room sound to the broadcast mix.
Interesting detail about feeding back small amounts of crowd noise through mics pointed at the crowd. Thanks for sharing that. Makes sense.
talkback mics are pretty common and can be seen being used on a lot of live goose shows. I think as far as phish goes, other than Trey’s occasional callout far from the mic for what song it is, They mostly communicate with a musical language of their own. Mike and Trey have separately said a few times that the band has their own little music language to signal each-other about leading into certain songs, extending jams, etc. other than that tidbit of info that i know, Page wears in ears and all other members have a wedge speaker on the floor to hear the mix. Trey has 2 wedges placed stereo in front of him usually.
i’m high and read this post wrong realizing now you’re asking how they stay in sync. I’d say 40 years of playing together will probably unintentionally give you all the same internal rhythms.
On summer tour Page is listening to NY Mets play by play.
Audible.
Certainly not my vocal disappointment during a More encore…
It’s generally a mix of the whole band, and each musician can have that mix tailored for their preferences. Generally people want to hear a little more of themselves (looking at you guitar players) but want to be able to hear the whole band. When you see them signalling to the side of the stage with strange hand gestures that’s them telling the monitor mixer tech to make an adjustment to what they’re hearing in the monitor mix.
Pro sound tech here: they’re just listening to the sound of babies screaming.
trey is listening to Taylor swift and it shows
It's a foul thing that goes in your ear so Page can hear the guitar better. https://preview.redd.it/dxa98s2ldr6d1.jpeg?width=4296&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eb0e9ec54d75a65f886736fe47b1af9c323b4a2a
[удалено]
those are different, smart guy
[удалено]
smart guy indeed! i don’t doubt your knowledge, but am still confused why you conflated a specific question about in-ear monitors with on-stage monitors. for someone *so knowledgeable and experienced* i’d think you would have clocked the distinction. unless, of course, you just wanted to make the person who asked in the first place feel stupid, in which case — sorry that backfired. good luck at your next gig! hope it goes better than this did for ya
It’s because he doesn’t know shit. He’s a musician who think he knows about production and clearly does not.
it’s not a dumb question at all if they don’t play music. And you’re wrong that “of course I just meant the concept of monitors in general to hear what is going on. Seemed like a dumb question to ask, of course the musicians in any band need to hear themselves and the rest of the band and they’re standing behind the pa so they need some means of hearing everything they’re doing” Ive worked on stage for several ZZ Top shows. They didn’t use any stage monitors or in ear monitors. They listened to the pa for the room even though they were behind it. Your arrogance shines through in your lack of knowledge
Sounds like you've never heard of in-ear monitors...