Mixing together rock music with a brass orchestra!
And how to monitor it!

There is a lot more to monitor mixing than just making sure the singer hears himself and the guitarist hears his outro-solo. There are also quite a few different states of monitor mixing, being it conducted from the FOH(Front of house) position by the sole sound engineer or from a special monitor mixing station by the side of the stage with a dedicated monitor mixing engineer taking care of the stage sound.

From a 4 AUX FOH position to a 10+ AUX dedicated monitor mixer with outboard effects, every concert is different in both band lineup and rider requirements.

I had the pleasure to set up a sound system a while back designed for a rock show with an additional big band brass orchestra, the band 200.000 Naglbítar and Lúðrasveit Verkalýðsins(Brass band of the working class).

The results were 3 monitor wedges, 2 dual mono sidefills and 3 in-ear systems. As seen in the diagram below the monitors were set up as follows:

• Aux 1 - Monitor wedge directed at the singer
• Aux 2 - Monitor wedge directed at the bassist
• Aux 3 - Monitor wedge directed at the drummer
• Aux 4 - Lower mono side fill designed for the brass orchestra to hear the rock band through their very loud instruments.
• Aux 5 - Higher mono side fill designed so that the percussion instruments at the top of the stage could hear and keep time with the drummer on the lowest platform.

Here is another picture so that you can get a better perception of the size of the stage and positions of the monitors.

• The rock band had a powerful monitoring system as they had both wedges and in-ear monitoring at their disposal.

• The orchestra, although not having themselves in monitors could hear themselves quite nicely and had a very powerful presence of the rock band to follow through the sidefills.

• And lastly, the percussion at the top could easily hear the drummer at bottom from their own side fills, as well as a little bleed of the rest of the band, for added ambiance.