Hookin’ it all up! A Laptop and IEMs on stage…

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Ok, so you decided to jump head first into using a laptop with Ableton Live, or similar software, on stage… Or you just got these really snazzy in ear wireless monitors and you’re not sure how to include them in your setup? Maybe you’re just curious about this sort of stuff…

Whatever the case may be, its always helpful to visualize whats going on. So I included a little drawing I made of our on-stage setup. Its nothing fancy, and probably not the “best” way to do these things, but you work within the resources you have available.

Anyhow, if you stare at this long enough it should make some sort of sense to you. Its sort of messy on paper, but it works out pretty well on the stage. The splitter, the wireless transmitters, the direct box for the laptop, and the monitor mixer are all in one single enclosure.

So here is the rundown. Everything runs into the splitter (Microphones, guitar setup, keyboard and computer) The splitter… um… splits… the signal of each of these to both the stage snake (which feeds the main console not shown) and the monitor mixer. From there, the two aux sends on the monitor mixer output two seperate mixes for the two in ear monitor transmitters.

As for the laptop; the software is setup to output the main output to the left channel and the click track to the right channel. The main audio from the laptop gets sent to the splitter to go to the FOH (Front of House) mixer and also the monitor mixes. The audio from the right channel (just the click) goes into the monitor mixer so that the metronome sound doesnt go into the mains (what everyone else hears).

Pretty straight forward, however, if we had the resources there are a few things we would do differently.
1) There would be a seperate monitor mix for each band member, but this would mean a much nicer mixer with more than 2 aux feeds, and additional transmitters.
2) Use an audio interface such as the presonus firebox to get more than 2 outputs from the computer. We could output each recorded instrument on its own output to give the sound person more control. We would also need a larger splitter to do this.

Hope this helps someone out.
Feel free to leave comments.