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[Bryce Bloom]

Bottom line:  The rest of my band is ready to switch to in-ears to gain control of monitors after multiple venues with dead drivers, lack of monitors, etc etc.

We play a lot of shows with 2 or 3 bands on the bill.  A decent amount of the time we are the "headliner" and the stages are small so its full gear swaps (I use that term loosely but for local shows it is what it is). 

I am trying to run through my head if I could use my X32 rack and a splitter snake or something to easily tie into a house system.  I imagine for this to work well and ensure the same mix we would need to always bring our own mics etc?  I can see how we would tie our rig into the house existing snake.  My question is when it comes to multi band gigs though, I guess if they fit within our footprint it would be fine, but one band last night had 8 members and definitely would not fit in our footprint.

Curious thoughts on how or if I can make this work with minimal extra set up on our band (usually we are last on for the night so stage swaps have to be fast), but I also dont want a crazy headache for the FOH guy.  I run FOH probably 40ish times a year, but the only bands that have fed me a split have been the only band playing that night.

Wanted to get thoughts on this.  Venue gear ranges dramatically from analog with tons or outboard, to some digital guys etc etc.  Some are also running the x32 as well, I could let them mix on the IPAD but not everyone is comfortable with that and for a walk in band, I would rather be on the faders and knobs to grab and go faster, just my opinion.

Looking for thoughts from both sides of the fence here, bands doing it, FOH guys that have walk in ear rigs showing up frequently etc.

Thanks and sorry for the long read.

Just joined this forum.   We've got the setup you describe.  We just put it together, and while we have some bugs to work out (I will be posting on that separately) I've done a ton of research and this is definitely the way to go.  We have an X32 rack, S16, 4 ART s8 splitters, and 3 12 channel analog snakes.  The snakes are in the rack pre-connected so we can just plop them down on stage and plug in.  That takes care of the inputs without a lot of cables.   Then there are two 16 channel fantails labeled up that we can hand off to the FOH.   

We first had a system like this a few months ago with an XR18 and we used it at a gig which worked flawlessly.  But we needed more channels so we upgraded.  At the time we were using P16's personal mixers, but as you can only mix 16 channels we are ditching those and going with ipads to control our personal mixes.   

To keep things a little lighter in the main rack we have a separate rack to hold our wireless IEM transmitters.  So at the gig we just need to connect up a couple of 4 channel patch cables between the main rack (X32 and S16 outs) to the rack that holds the wireless transmitters. 

I went back and forth a number of times trying to decide if analog splitters or trying to stay all digital (with SD8 or SD16 stage boxes) was the way to go.  But at the end of the day it comes down to how many outputs you have back at the rack - and while it's attractive to go with all digital input boxes around the stage because you just have to connect them with lightweight Cat5 cables, the issue we ran into is you have to have enough physical outputs to send 1:1 to the FOH.   That requires a significant investment i.e. 2 S32s to give you 32 outs from the rack (or you could run snakes from each of your SD8 stage boxes) - but that's messy and requires reconnecting every time.   Defeats the purpose.  Plus if you go with the digital route, the FOH loses control of your Pre's and then if you make changes on your system to gains it affects the FOH.  Finally, you may have to deal with routing issues between your IEM setup and the FOH's behringer board (AES50 assignments). 

So that's a very long winded explanation of why it is just far simpler to go analog with your splits.  No matter where you play, it's going to work and the FOH guy will understand it.   Oh and I wouldn't use a splitter snake.   You want isolated transformer splits - so go with the ART s8 units or something similar. 

[Ned Ward]

Minimize stands with Z-bars or Cab-Grabbers for guitar rigs, clip on mics for drums (with a drum cable loom), etc.  The idea is that as soon as the PA inputs are muted you can disconnect the mic lines and strike the back line gear.  We work with a lot of 'bus and trailer' bands that do exactly this.  They can have the deck cleared of big stuff in 5 minutes, and another 5 min to get cables and the IEM rack off the stage.  Some of them can do the whole thing in 5 minutes, it's amazing to watch.

Z-Bars are great for amps, but I've found switching to E906 mics works even better, whether using a tilt-back fender cab or a straight cab. Loop the mic cable through the strap and Bob's your uncle.

[Ed Taylor]

Bottom line:  The rest of my band is ready to switch to in-ears to gain control of monitors after multiple venues with dead drivers, lack of monitors, etc etc.

We play a lot of shows with 2 or 3 bands on the bill.  A decent amount of the time we are the "headliner" and the stages are small so its full gear swaps (I use that term loosely but for local shows it is what it is). 

I am trying to run through my head if I could use my X32 rack and a splitter snake or something to easily tie into a house system.  I imagine for this to work well and ensure the same mix we would need to always bring our own mics etc?  I can see how we would tie our rig into the house existing snake.  My question is when it comes to multi band gigs though, I guess if they fit within our footprint it would be fine, but one band last night had 8 members and definitely would not fit in our footprint.

Curious thoughts on how or if I can make this work with minimal extra set up on our band (usually we are last on for the night so stage swaps have to be fast), but I also dont want a crazy headache for the FOH guy.  I run FOH probably 40ish times a year, but the only bands that have fed me a split have been the only band playing that night.

Wanted to get thoughts on this.  Venue gear ranges dramatically from analog with tons or outboard, to some digital guys etc etc.  Some are also running the x32 as well, I could let them mix on the IPAD but not everyone is comfortable with that and for a walk in band, I would rather be on the faders and knobs to grab and go faster, just my opinion.

Looking for thoughts from both sides of the fence here, bands doing it, FOH guys that have walk in ear rigs showing up frequently etc.

Thanks and sorry for the long read.

again, my disclaimer is that I'm small potatos.  but I love it when a band shows up with their own ears/rack unit, and after running into a number of them, seeing that they would roll in with the Behringer Xair.. I grabbed one and have never looked back.  I used to make my presonus available for their smart phone self monitoring etc, but the Xair UI is so much more friendly and more young guns seem to be familiar with it. So if they have their own (and I work two bands regularly that have their own) they have their own mix already set and it doesn't get any easier than that. If a band needs my mixer, we've discussed it in the advance call so they know what's waiting for them. I just split it at the stage and then I'm FOH with none of the monitor world headache.. I love it!!

I also have my Xair racks now doing double duty for the past couple year when we do high end wedding ceremonies. Everything I run is wireless...using Sennheiser top quality wireless stuff...so from pastor's mic, keyboard, guitar, string trio, etc...to the xair is all wireless, then xair uses Senn dongle to transmit to Boss L1compacts out on the lawn wireless, and depending on layout, I'll even run those bose with battery pack, so no cables at ALL. being able to stand around in the background with my ipadmini in a nice suit...yeah..the transparency is total pro and the high end wedding planners love that I care about appearance like that. but for me it's really about being easy too.. I can walk up to the pastor, put his lapel mic on and stand right there in front of him doing soundcheck on the ipad.  Can't tell you how happy I've been with the Xair product..it works, it's super simple interface, etc...n fact there's one off my right shoulder here in my studio as I type.. I've been using it to dial in best frequency performing levels on  some new compact subs..finding their sweet spots..so much easier to finger drag the eq on this little rack unit , than to pull out one of the large digital consoles out of the trailer.

[Paul Johnson]

Surely 16 channels is ample for performer mixed IEMs? We use P16s and ended up simplifying the stems - so 4 vocals, drums as a premix, click, track pre-mix, keys, guitar, bass plus a reverb channel and an audience mic. 12 in total.

What happened to create this was for something simple, but accurate and flexible. When we tried other systems where we had more channels, we had worse mixes - because not everyone is good at mixing - the drum premix was a godsend. Nobody but the drummer wanted to faff around with a little more kick or a little more toms or overheads - so the drummer set up his 'perfect' mix, and we were all happy with it - and could always add/cut bottom or top. I, as singer and bass player just need quick access to maybe 4 knobs? the rest can be set and forgotten. How long do you get between songs to fiddle? Suddenly realising you need more of one knob can be done mid song with care, but I really like the P16s - the ease you can pan each stem and adjust things - AND - it still works with sweaty fingers and critically, without looking - twang a string, reach right, count three knobs and turn it up. To do that with pads means you need to turn away and look, then touch in exactly the right place. I'm happy with pads when doing sound engineer duty, but hate them as a player.

[Jarrod Schroeder]

Friday's and Saturday's bands both showed up with exactly this setup (X32 rack + IEMs) and mixed their own in-ears, handing over an analog split for FOH.  The instrumentalists also largely all went direct.  Except the drummer (of course).

[Paul Johnson]

Exactly Jarrod and I bet your people were so pleased. I'd take the offered analogue split any day! A few festivals grumbled at my band turning up like this, but would any musician walk on stage with a guitar they'd never played before with a pile of random pedals, and trust the guy who says - "It's OK, I've labelled them up!" There is nothing worse than having to do an Elton John and moan at the monitor people. Anybody seen the generic monitor guy in the wings on his phone when you are waving your arms at him?

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