Your monitor engineer is the person standing between you and a miserable show. They're mixing for you — not the audience, not the room, not the recording. Their entire job is to put the right sounds in your ears so you can perform at your best. And yet, most performers make their monitor engineer's life harder than it needs to be.
This isn't a callout. It's a field guide. The better you understand what's happening on the other side of that console, the better your mix will be every night.
The in-ear monitor vs. wedge monitor debate isn't really a debate. Both are tools, and both have tradeoffs. The problem is that most performers choose one without fully understanding those tradeoffs.
In-ear monitors (IEMs) give you isolation, consistency, and hearing protection. Your mix travels with you from room to room. You're not fighting stage volume. You can hear detail that wedges will never reproduce in a live setting. The downside: you lose the room. The physical sensation of low end moving air, the energy of the crowd, the bleed of the kit — all of it disappears behind those drivers. For some performers, that trade isn't worth it.
Wedge monitors feel natural. You hear yourself the way you hear sound in every other context — through the air. For genres that thrive on stage energy — punk, blues, heavy rock — wedges keep you connected to the physical moment. But wedges create problems. Every wedge on stage adds volume, which makes every other wedge need to be louder, which creates a feedback-prone arms race that your monitor engineer has to referee. Loud stages also bleed into vocal mics and make the front-of-house mix worse.
The hybrid approach is what most experienced touring acts settle on. You wear IEMs for your core mix — vocals, click, keys, whatever you need to stay locked in — and you keep a wedge or sidefill for "feel." A floor wedge with kick and snare, or a sidefill with a guitar amp feed, gives you the chest-punch of a live stage without the volume chaos of a full wedge setup. If you go hybrid, tell your monitor engineer during advance so they can plan bus assignments and outputs accordingly.
The single most useful thing you can do for your monitor engineer is tell them what you need before you show up. Not during soundcheck. Not by walking up to the console during the set. In advance, on paper.
Your stage plot should include monitor assignments. Label each monitor position: MIX 1 at the vocal wedge, MIX 2 at the guitar position, MIX 3/4 (stereo) for the keyboard player's IEMs. This tells the engineer exactly how many sends they need and where they're going before they patch a single cable.
What not to write: "More me." Every performer wants "more me." That's not a monitor mix description. Be specific: "Vocals on top, kick and snare for time, a little bass for root reference, keys panned right in stereo IEMs." That's a mix your engineer can build before you play a note.
Soundcheck exists so your monitor engineer can build your mixes in a controlled environment. It's not rehearsal, it's not a jam, and it's definitely not the time to learn a new song. Here's how to make the most of it:
If you've switched to IEMs and something feels "dead," you're not imagining it. You've sealed off your ear canals from the room, and your brain notices. The fix is simple: an ambient mic.
A condenser mic — usually an omni or wide cardioid — placed at the front of the stage or near the drum kit captures the room sound: crowd noise, cymbal wash, the physical thump of the kick drum through the air. Your monitor engineer blends a small amount of this into your IEM mix, and suddenly the stage feels alive again.
Most touring IEM artists use ambient mics. Some use a stereo pair (left and right of the stage) for a more immersive room image. The key is subtlety — you want just enough room to feel connected, not so much that you lose the isolation benefits you switched to IEMs for in the first place. If you want ambients, put them on your stage plot and input list so the engineer can plan the mic, the stand, and the bus routing in advance.
Systems like the Aviom A320, Allen & Heath ME-1, and Behringer P16-M let each performer control their own IEM mix from a small unit on stage. In theory, this is liberating. In practice, it depends entirely on the performers using them.
Personal mixers work well when performers understand gain structure and are willing to spend five minutes learning the interface. They remove the monitor engineer from the feedback loop entirely — you want more vocal, you turn it up yourself. For bands with straightforward mixes and consistent shows, this can be faster and more satisfying than shouting requests across the stage.
They create problems when performers don't understand them. Turning everything to maximum defeats the purpose. Constantly resetting the mix because you don't remember what you changed introduces chaos. And when something goes wrong — a dead channel, a feedback loop, a blown mix — there's no engineer watching your sends to catch it. You're on your own.
If your band uses personal mixers, establish base mixes during soundcheck with the monitor engineer, save those as presets, and make small adjustments from there. Don't start from scratch every night.
If you're playing festivals or multi-act bills, your wireless IEM frequencies are sharing spectrum with every other act's wireless mics, IEMs, and communication systems. Uncoordinated RF means dropouts, interference, and the terrifying moment when someone else's mix bleeds into your ears.
This is why festival production teams do RF coordination — they assign specific frequencies to each act's wireless gear so nothing overlaps. Your job is to make this possible by providing your RF information in advance: make, model, frequency band, and current frequencies for every wireless device you're carrying. If you're using Shure PSM systems, include the group and channel settings. If you're on Sennheiser or Wisycom, include the bank and preset.
For club and theater gigs where you're the only act, RF coordination is less critical but still matters. Scan for open frequencies before you soundcheck, and avoid frequencies used by local TV stations (the FCC database is your friend). Your monitor engineer will do this if you let them — just make sure they have access to your transmitters.
Monitor engineers are professionals. They'll smile, nod, and try to give you what you want. But behind the console, they're dealing with the same frustrations show after show. Here are the recurring offenders:
Your monitor engineer is your most important ally on stage. They can't read your mind, but they can build you an outstanding mix if you meet them halfway. Communicate your needs in advance. Put monitor assignments on your stage plot. Play at real volume during soundcheck. Be specific about what you hear and what you need. And when the mix is good, say so — monitor engineers hear complaints all day. A thumbs-up from the stage goes a long way.
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