In-Ear Monitors for Singers - Set Yourself Up for Success

Singing well isn't easy, and in-ear monitors (IEMs) can trip you up in a hurry. So how do you avoid all those pitfalls and sing your best? Today let's talk about how to sing successfully with in-ear monitors and how to set yourself up for success. 

Hey, if you're new here, my name is James, and I help church sound techs save the day by making the best audio decisions possible. If that's you, stick around and check out some of my other blog posts HERE!

Getting Started with In-Ear Monitors

Step one is to warm up before you sing into the microphone. You have to get an idea of how it feels with proper singing technique. Make sure you're pushing from your diaphragm, getting good support, and getting good resonance in your head before you add in all these other variables. Two things that will often trip a singer up are having themselves either too loud or too quiet in their in-ear monitors. If they're too loud, they're not pushing from their diaphragm. If they're too quiet, then they're pushing too hard. You have to get an idea of what it feels like with good breath support before you start singing into the microphone.

For your in-ear monitors, there are at least two other gain stages. There's the microphone preamp, and there's the in-ear monitor level itself. This can introduce a lot of changes into the way that you hear yourself. You want to make sure that the gain stage of your voice is set right before we go on to the preamp and the in-ear monitor levels. Lip trills, sirens, all of these are great for getting your voice warmed up and getting that diaphragm going.

Step two keeps you out of the in-ear monitor still, but you want to start singing into the microphone so that the sound tech can set your preamp level just right. Experienced sound techs will know that you're probably still on the way to getting warmed up and maybe you don't have your full power quite yet, so they'll leave a little bit of headroom (or level between the normal operating level and the point where the signal will clip and distort). This way when you get excited and your voice is all warmed up, nothing's going to distort. And that's a good thing! 

As a sound tech talking to singers, I would really encourage you to give it your all during soundcheck and don't hold back. Some singers just have naturally quieter voices and other singers have really, really powerful voices. Like my friend Jaye Thomas. He needs about 10 dB less gain on his mic, because when he opens up and really sings as hard as he can, it's much, much louder than most everybody else. So practically speaking, get where you can hear the piano or a guitar, and start singing into the microphone without in-ear monitors in yet. This will allow the sound tech to get the preamp set and then you can move on to getting your in-ears dialed in. If you've got a completely quiet stage, maybe you pop one in-ear monitor in so that you can hear the piano or some sort of pitch reference for singing your song and getting your preamp set.

Nailing Down Your In-Ear Monitor Mix

After the sound tech has your mic preset, now you can move on to your in-ear monitors. Pay attention to the master volume level and the volume level of your input. I've got more detail in my monitor mixing tutorial video, but the first thing you need is a pitch reference. Usually, this is the worship leader's instrument, like a piano or an acoustic guitar.

When you're singing and setting your levels, don't forget to project your voice and get all up in the microphone. If you don't have it right up to your mouth or you're not really projecting (because you can finally hear some detail in your voice), you're going to turn yourself up too loud and then lose that breath support and that raised soft palate to get great tone. After you've got your own level set, now you've got a benchmark for everything else that you need to place in the mix. A good rule of thumb is to turn stuff up so that you can hear it, and then dial it back just a little bit. Look around the stage, look for the drums, look for the bass, the guitar, and the keyboard. Because as you add things into your mix, they're going to ratchet up and up. Then you might have to turn up your voice a little bit more, and then things get louder and louder, until you've reached levels that can damage your hearing.

The problem with mixing your own in-ear monitors is that nobody can tell how bad your mix is except for you. So if you're having problems, if your mix just isn't coming together, don't be afraid to ask for help.

Troubleshooting the Dreaded "Inner Hum" 

Now sometimes singers deal with the inner hum, and that can be a real issue, especially if you're making the transition from monitor wedges to in-ear monitors. It can be completely disorienting. So for just a second, I want you to do something, stick your fingers in your ears and talk to somebody. You hear the voice bouncing through the bones inside your skull, and then it's going into your inner ear, bypassing the ear canal. When we have in-ear monitors, we're hearing both the sound through the microphone and the in-ear monitors, as well as this occlusion, or the vibration of the bones through your head.

There are a few ways to deal with this, and the first one that I recommend is getting custom in-ear molds. If you get in-ears that fit just right, it can go a long way to removing that inner hum or making it less apparent in your ears. If you haven't done that yet, make sure that you get the tips that fit just right. A lot of times if you bought in-ear monitors, they'll come with a variety of sizes and shapes so you can test out the different ones that might make the inner hum a little bit less than normal.

If you've tried both of those and you're still dealing with a lot of inner hum and it's messing with your pitch and your projection, I have a couple of outside-the-box things that you can try that might feel weird at first, but don't knock it before you try it. 

The first one is trying to pan your voice either a little bit or a lot to one side or the other. This can help your brain identify there's a difference between what you're hearing through the in-ear monitors and what you're hearing through the vibration in your head. This could help keep it so that you don't have to have your vocal really loud in order to hear yourself and overcome that inner hum.

Of course, you probably also need a reminder to always, always keep both in-ear monitors in. It can be really tempting when things don't sound right or your mix isn't coming together to pop one of them out so that you can hear what's going on from the front-of-house speakers. There are a few problems with this. The first is that you've taken a stereo mix where you've got a wide stereo field in order to balance all the different inputs that you have, and now you've just got mono from one side. On top of that, you can end up damaging your hearing and not even recognizing it. Your brain measures loudness by taking an average of both sides of your ears. So if one is really loud and damaging your hearing, but the other one isn't so loud, you can actually end up damaging the physiology on one side without the normal warning signs that you get from your brain that it's too loud. If you couple this with trying to overcome the inner hum and turning up your voice really, really loud, that can be problematic. I want you to have great hearing late into your life! So please take care of your hearing and keep both in-ear monitors in.

Room mics or crowd mics can also go a long way into adding back in the ambiance you need to feel in order to feel engaged with the audience. Yes, it costs a little bit more money to set those up. But it can be done for a couple hundred dollars, which in audio terms is not all that much. And it's worth it to maintain your hearing! You really don't want to mess that up.

The last thing I suggest you try if you're having a lot of problems with the inner hum, is cutting a lot of low-end out of the vocal that's going to your in-ear monitors. That way, instead of competing with the hum that's coming from your bones, you're actually complimenting it and you're getting that clarity without having to overcome the mud or the lower frequencies. Now, to be honest, you might have to cut so much low-end that it sounds almost unusable for everybody else in the band. So if you're having a lot of problems and you've got a personal monitor mixer, maybe you need to duplicate that channel so that there's one coming in just for you and one coming in for the rest of the band that sounds normal.

The final tip I'll give you is to try to invert the polarity of your vocal mic going to the in-ear monitors. Polarity is the absolute push-pull of an audio signal. If we can dive into the nerd zone for just a minute, sound waves are vibrations where air molecules are wiggling back and forth. There's a relationship between the diaphragm on the microphone and the diaphragm on your in-ear monitors that are moving back and forth. Sometimes we can flip the absolute direction where that is pushing and pulling by flipping the polarity on the vocal. Sometimes that can change the way that the vibrations in your head and the vibrations coming through your in-ear monitor relate to one another, and it can make it clearer and easier to understand.

Before we wrap up, I just want to say, I know singing is hard and I want to do everything I can to help you sing your best because it connects with the human heart in a way nothing else can. If you've got some suggestions of things that have worked for you, I'd love for you to share them in the comments of my Youtube video HERE! I love reading them and I love the community that's around here at Attaway Audio.

Remember: it's all about the low end, avoid the sound tech solo, and nobody leaves humming the kick drum.