Monitor mixing is inherently problematic and extremely subjective. In no circumstance is it more imperative to achieve a good monitor mix than in the a cappella realm.
To begin with, the speakers (many people call the floor speakers used as monitors wedges after their common shape) often suck. Unless you are fortunate enough to work with your own handpicked audio system, you are usually stuck with whatever drecky leftovers the sound company usually a strong-backed deaf-mute with a truck and a load of crummy, beat up second-hand gear throws onstage for you. It seems that a number of these brothertruckers are clueless about setup, too, and will orient the wedges downstage of the house speakers, which will guarantee you a feedback loop no matter what you do.
The optimal situation is to have two mixers, one for the house and the other onstage mixing the monitors. Your onstage mixer is in the wings with a direct sightline to you, and can respond to your changing monitor needs quickly. Because many groups cant shoulder the added expense of a separate board and mixer for the wedges, the job of balancing, eq-ing and mixing them is done from the front of the house by the mains mixer - the guy responsible for how you sound in the audience - who is sometimes, oh geez, the deaf-mute with the truck. Mixing monitors from the house is usually a set it and forget proposition, so what you had at sound check is what you get at the show. Or so youd think. But thats another story for another time.
The next best thing to having a separate mixing engineer is working with sound people who familiarize themselves over time with your group, your music, and your mixes, so you arent starting from zero every time you play out.
Whether your monitors are mixed from the stage or the house, monitor mixes almost always represent an uneasy compromise. To begin with, the monitor mix has to be balanced against the house mix, both for tonal considerations and the ever-present gremlin of feedback that nasty ringing that interferes with singing. Many putative sound engineers never really deal with the touchy relationship between the house system and the wedges, and that relationship fluctuates wildly from one venue to the next. If your guy with the truck gets the house mix even close to right, hes way ahead of the game, and the monitor mix is just going to be dicey. In cases like that Id say be grateful. It could be so much worse. You could have a bad house mix, too. An instrumental ensemble might - might be able to survive that sort of brutish treatment, but itll trash an a cappella group.
Being a master of the obvious, let me state unequivocally (now how many times can you use a word like that as a pun? Huh?) that sitting around a table in a quiet room and singing together is a world away from standing in a spread out formation on a stage, singing with amplification into a large space, and with only the wedges to keep tabs on oneself and ones colleagues.
Its probably self-evident, but a given in an a cappella performance is that the singers be able to hear both themselves and each other. The volume of the house speakers by themselves would completely drown out the unamplified sound of the voices, hence wedges. When they cant hear themselves, singers tend to push their voices too hard, and when they cant hear each other, train wrecks are inevitable. It surprises me that many groups that perform amplified dont bother to rehearse that way, so the amplified experience generates lots of shocks and unwelcome surprises.
Many singers, when newly exposed to the amplified experience, back way off the voice and get mic-shy because the sound is so in-your-face different from the unamplified sound they are accustomed to. So it is a good strategy to rehearse amplified at least once or twice before taking your act onstage just to get used to the difference. Even a good monitor mix may be beside the point if the group is unused to hearing itself blasted back in its collective face.
Now, what exactly is a good monitor mix? Thats a very touchy question. The answer would depend upon whom you asked, since every singers ears are different, and every sung part needs to hear different things in order to stay on track. Monitor mix fights have scuttled more bands than opinionated girlfriends and bad managers combined. Most of them began with the phrase Turn me up in the wedges.
Take 6 solved the problem by giving each member his own wedge and providing a separate cue mix for each one. The downside to that solution is that each member was glued to his wedge, since moving around onstage would be aurally disorienting. Most groups attempt a compromise consensus mix that rarely completely satisfies anyone.
The job of a monitor mix is to keep yall together and in tune, period. It isnt there to make you feel all rock and slammin. Thats for the house mix. Thats where all the rock and slam has to go. If you need to feel the gut whump of the bass or the sizzle of the spitter, go sit in the house. The only thing that whump and sizzle do in a monitor mix is get in the way of hearing each other and singing in tune. Monitor mixes for a cappella groups should, for most purposes, sound more like a crummy am radio than a glorious, full-spectrum sound field. Anything below 100hz is useless in an a cappella monitor mix. Yeah, chopping out the bottom makes the low end sound thin, but it also clears out all the fuzz and mud that make hearing the midrange difficult, and thats exactly where most vocal information sits. Too much upper midrange and top can make your ears bleed or the system feed back, whichever comes first. And too loud a monitor mix will, over time, ruin your hearing. When finding a monitor mix, try to put your ego aside if you find yourself sounding less than splendiferous. Its a utility to aid your performance, not to pump up your self-image. By the same token, injecting reverb into a monitor mix may fluff you a little, bit it ruins precision and a true sense of ensemble.
The ultimate solution to this problem, if you can swing it, is in-ear monitors. Wedges are to in-ear systems what a tin can and string are to a cell phone. But if you dont have deep pockets (or an endorsement deal with Shure, who, by the way, make incredible in-ear systems), you are stuck with wedges and you have to make the best of it, hence this casual disquisition.
Stomp boxes, and specifically bass octave stomp boxes, have a place in this discussion. Adding low end to a mix typically known as hanging an ass on the mix is a common solution for beefing up the sound of an a cappella band. In a strange sort of reverse psychology, many vocal groups push to sound more instrumental by adding selective electronic reinforcement to the bass and spitter, hoping to leap the chasm between the a cappella niche and the instrumentally fortified mainstream. When it is done right, it really can enhance the sound and impact of an a cappella group, and make for a more exciting presentation. When it is done more or less indiscriminately, all it does is bury the music in mud and sizzle, and it aint da shizzle. I dont have an opinion (in itself an anomaly) as to whether electronic augmentation is inherently good or satanic. Im rather neutral about it, unless it starts to get in the way of the music, and then it bothers me.
Balancing the extra synthesized bass energy with the natural sound of a group is a challenge for the audio engineer, especially if he wants to hang a big phat booty on both bass and spitter parts. Kick drum spits and bass noise occupy the same slice of the audio spectrum, so trying to keep the two parts distinct and focused is a job made more difficult by adding extra rumble. Ideally the two parts can be made to mesh well without merging them into an indecipherable mess by using panning, compression and by lightly notch filtering both parts in the house mix, which means using eq to keep the shared freqs to a minimum, as a certain amount of overlap is unavoidable.
Since the extra ass provided by an octave divider usually gives a group a speedball spike of testosterone and adrenalin, the natural tendency is to overuse and overmix it. Hey, if a little bit is good, a lot is even better, right? Nope. Low frequencies tend to propagate in large spaces, and can easily overwhelm the rest of a mix. If you decide that your sound needs more junk in the trunk, remember that a little low end goes a long way, both literally and metaphorically. And never, ever route an octave divider through your monitors. You might as well just shoot yourself.
Click on the wrench in the upper left-hand corner to see what else you can do.