At live events using in-ear monitors, how do you keep the artists from feeling isolated from the audience while providing them the necessary monitor mix of musicians and vocalists?

56:35from feeling isolated from the audience while providing them the necessary necessary monitor mix of musicians and vocalists? Let's make these answers pretty quick. We're getting towards the top of the hour. Ronny? I'm speaking as a video producer. So what we have in the venue is sometimes something called a room tone microphone or ambient sound microphone, which we're using to kind of sitting below everything and kind

57:02of keeping it together and not have these entirely silent breaks. breaks. And those microphones can be typically positioned up on the trusses above the stage and pointed towards the audience. And we use some of that feed to feed back into the IFP and that is how the artist is using. That is, of course, if they are using 100% like these ACS custom molded in-ears that blocks out almost everything coming from the outside.

57:35side. Some of the artists are using leaky earplugs, which is actually leaking audio in, and then also have the in-ear in their ears. So it's depending on the artist's choice, but yeah, use microphones to get the room tone. Alexander? Yeah, I'm going to mention three things, and then we'll talk about the mixing very quickly. But for me, non-negotiable with with in-ear monitor mixes as I've done this for bands

58:03is one, stereo mix for spatial reasons. Number two would be crowd mics like Ronnie was talking about. Number three, then there's the processing part of it. So adding reverb to taste to give a better sense of that. So like for me with stereo mixes, usually what I will do is, first of all, if you do stereo, that allows you to spatially create some separation

58:30between instruments. So typically like a vocal is going to be right smack dab in the middle, right? And each artist will have different requirements too. But, you know, with stereo allows you a lot more freedom to do things like have like I often have stereo guitars, stereo keys, that kind of thing. And I will not necessarily hard pan left, right. But I just move them out from the middle to provide more space for the vocal to be right in the center.

58:56And that combined with reverb, that combined with the crowd noise being mixed into will be a much better experience because typically, you know, in-ears, you stick them in, you get about 25 to 30 dB of isolation. So that's, you know, without doing any processing or having crowd mics, it's going to sound really dry. And Mickey, briefly? Yeah, definitely crowd mics. I'm not the monitor engineer, but I cosplay as one and shows that are low budget and need someone to step in to mix ears.

59:30But absolutely, you need crowd mics for in-ears to give them a sense of the room, the sense of the energy of the crowd that they can then react to. As someone who does mostly more on the broadcast and also recording side of things for these events, I bring way more crowd mics or room mics. I usually bring 8, 10, 12 room mics spread across the entire room, which monitor engineers tend to appreciate when I say, hey, you want to get a patch from my room mics?

1:00:00You know, a little brownie point there, maybe get a free beverage at the end of the day sometimes. Room mics definitely help. Another thing that may help musicians in terms of how they feel the room is every musician, everyone wants their own mix. Everyone has their own preferences. But when it gets to panning, some musicians prefer that the monitor engineer follow the panning of the other instruments, the other musicians, based on their position on stage.