How can we improve our foldback monitoring?

Many churches with bands/musicians make a real hash of foldback monitoring, yet it does not have to be this way, and a few simple changes can make life easier for the musicians, front of house sound and the congregation as a whole. This is the ChurchPA take on the situation....

Typically, bands in churches still go for the floor style "wedge" monitor to give foldback to the band members. However in most churches these actually cause a large problem. You see, with these speakers, the sound level has to be high for the musician to actually hear themselves clearly. Floor wedges are generally poorly placed due to floor space considerations - if you must use this kind of speaker, the speaker should point directly at the singer, and not have anything in the way, such as music on stands (or worse, word sheets actually on the monitor). To achieve this, the speaker often needs to be about one to two metres in front of the singer, yet they are normally placed right at the singers feet!!

Now, there is a physical law which can really help - thanks to God for a wonderful world. Sound level is proportional to distance SQUARED. What? Well if you halve the distance between a speaker and your ears, you can quarter the sound level from the speaker and still hear the same sound! Amazing! Had you ever wondered why PA systems are rated in the hundreds (to thousands!) of Watts, where headphones are rated at only 100mW? This is why! So..... We supply a discreet range of stand mounting monitor speakers, which are rated at 20W and by being placed at waist height can be a lot lot quieter. The speakers then give the musician a very local sound, and do not fill the church with problematical sound levels. The speakers are small, and if you have enough aux sends from your mixer, can be used to give just the right foldback to the musicians.

The next logical step from this is in-ear-monitoring. This is a small earpiece worn by the musician, so that they can hear exactly what they want. This is out of the cost range of most churches, but the option is there!!!!

A couple of extra monitoring tips -

• Don't put the bass guitar through the monitors - the ambient sound from your PA should be enough for the bassist to hear themselves. Adding them to the monitor mix just reduces clarity in the speakers, and increases the "stage" sound level (a bad thing).
• Get your musicians to play at a quieter level - this then means that the monitor speakers do not have to fight against them. The worst culprit is the.... drummer... we love them, but they cause so many problems! To allow your drummer to play at a normal level, and to stop using brushes (which they hate!), one can use a cost effective transparent acoustic drum screen, which means that all of the musicians around can still hear the drums, the drummer can play loudly but the sound is tamed.
• After *every* song, get the mixing engineer to reduce the foldback just a fraction - the musicians will not notice, but the overall sound level on the stage is that much better off! Sneaky, but this really is a technique used by the top professionals!

So, next time you are being told by the singers that they cannot hear themselves, don't just rush for the volume control.

Bye for now.

Tim Ridgway.

***** Visit us online at www.ChurchPA.co.uk *****

***** Phone 0845 430 9486 *****