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IEMs, Singers and Occlusion
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<blockquote data-quote="brian maddox" data-source="post: 89237" data-attributes="member: 158"><p>Re: IEMs, Singers and Occlusion</p><p></p><p>Okay, i'll weigh in. I'm a retired Sound Guy that now holds a job at a church and uses custom IEMs as a singer/guitar player. i also run the monitor rig for group and I have experienced the same things you describe in working with my various singers. my singers control their own mix, but if there is a technical issue, i will often take their beltpack from them so i can hear what they hear and try to fix whatever isn't working correctly. in doing this, i am often amazed at how wacky some of their mixes are. i'm also often amazed at how Quiet a lot of them have their volume levels. </p><p></p><p>i think a LOT of what you are describing is Occlusion Effect. Different people experience this differently depending on the shape of their ear canal as well as how deep their IEMs go into their ears. the tiniest difference will change what the resonance frequency of that space is considerably. The person's skull shape and other things also will change how this sounds.</p><p></p><p>in my experience, the only way to get over the Occlusion effect is to make the sound of your vocal louder in your ears than the muddy resonance. If you run your overall mix fairly loud, then your vocal might still be only 3 dB over the rest of the band. This is how i run my mix. I run it fairly hot, but pretty well balanced. I'm not killing myself. No ringing ears, etc. after playing. But i've got the level pretty well up there.</p><p></p><p>However, if you don't tend to run the level of your mix that loud, there might be a tendency to still want that vocal level hot enough to get over the occlusion. That can lead to the 6-12 dB over the mix scenario that you describe. Keep in mind that if you tend to run your mix fairly quiet, you're going to hear significantly more of the stage noise as well, so what you may hear as their wildly out of balance mix may be quite different to them since their hearing quite a bit of stage bleed mixing with that mix.</p><p></p><p>All of these comments assume you're talking about folks using RF IEMs, since those people ultimately set the level in their IEMs themselves, and you can never really know how loud that is, even if you take their beltpack from them and listen yourself as your ear physiology is likely quite different and your IEM drivers may be very different as well.</p><p></p><p>Now latency is a whole 'nother bucket of worms. But frankly, my experience has been that various latencies do little more than change the resonance frequency in my head. so long as i have the level up loud enough to overcome that resonance, it's really not a problem. But i'm sure there are folks for whom this is a MAJOR issue [and not just Bono]. I know a lot of folks that are running parallel analog mic channels [Mic goes into analog mixer, monitor mix minus Mic goes into analog mixer, output goes to IEMs] so that at least the vocal mic doesn't have any latency issues, even if the rest of the mix is coming from a digital console. i haven't felt like i needed to do that yet. But i may still try it just to see if i like it better.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="brian maddox, post: 89237, member: 158"] Re: IEMs, Singers and Occlusion Okay, i'll weigh in. I'm a retired Sound Guy that now holds a job at a church and uses custom IEMs as a singer/guitar player. i also run the monitor rig for group and I have experienced the same things you describe in working with my various singers. my singers control their own mix, but if there is a technical issue, i will often take their beltpack from them so i can hear what they hear and try to fix whatever isn't working correctly. in doing this, i am often amazed at how wacky some of their mixes are. i'm also often amazed at how Quiet a lot of them have their volume levels. i think a LOT of what you are describing is Occlusion Effect. Different people experience this differently depending on the shape of their ear canal as well as how deep their IEMs go into their ears. the tiniest difference will change what the resonance frequency of that space is considerably. The person's skull shape and other things also will change how this sounds. in my experience, the only way to get over the Occlusion effect is to make the sound of your vocal louder in your ears than the muddy resonance. If you run your overall mix fairly loud, then your vocal might still be only 3 dB over the rest of the band. This is how i run my mix. I run it fairly hot, but pretty well balanced. I'm not killing myself. No ringing ears, etc. after playing. But i've got the level pretty well up there. However, if you don't tend to run the level of your mix that loud, there might be a tendency to still want that vocal level hot enough to get over the occlusion. That can lead to the 6-12 dB over the mix scenario that you describe. Keep in mind that if you tend to run your mix fairly quiet, you're going to hear significantly more of the stage noise as well, so what you may hear as their wildly out of balance mix may be quite different to them since their hearing quite a bit of stage bleed mixing with that mix. All of these comments assume you're talking about folks using RF IEMs, since those people ultimately set the level in their IEMs themselves, and you can never really know how loud that is, even if you take their beltpack from them and listen yourself as your ear physiology is likely quite different and your IEM drivers may be very different as well. Now latency is a whole 'nother bucket of worms. But frankly, my experience has been that various latencies do little more than change the resonance frequency in my head. so long as i have the level up loud enough to overcome that resonance, it's really not a problem. But i'm sure there are folks for whom this is a MAJOR issue [and not just Bono]. I know a lot of folks that are running parallel analog mic channels [Mic goes into analog mixer, monitor mix minus Mic goes into analog mixer, output goes to IEMs] so that at least the vocal mic doesn't have any latency issues, even if the rest of the mix is coming from a digital console. i haven't felt like i needed to do that yet. But i may still try it just to see if i like it better. [/QUOTE]
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