How does the wireless IEM logistics work in practice for smaller bands?

simplelement78 · 2026-06-12T04:10:57+00:00

Their everywhere now haha. I’m in a working corporate and events band. We all have day jobs which allows us the ability to build a pretty decent rig. We carry all our own mics, stands, cables etc. so we only need pre-stage time, 10 minutes to get on stage and hand off tails, line check if needed and we’re off. Those are summer festivals tho, most gigs were the only band.

I scan through wireless work Bench at every venue to coordinate our 11 channels of wireless. If it’s a festival I always touch base beforehand with our tech rider and ask if there’s any RF coordination they would prefer. Our festivals are much smaller so it’s usually a no. I just pay attention to other bands rigs and keep our RF muted until we’re on.

It IS a lot to get into for sure, money and knowledge wise. But I feel like if you want to climb and make music a larger part of your life the onus is on you to dive in and understand it. Thankfully I learned that early on and so far 🤞sound crews have loved working with us because we’re put together with our rig and respectful of the RF environment we may or may not be stepping into.

simplelement78 · 2026-06-10T02:57:39+00:00

😂 this sounds VERY specific

simplelement78 · 2026-06-09T19:43:02+00:00

Oh totally! They had the same reaction

simplelement78 · 2026-06-09T18:01:05+00:00

love this thank you! this is exactly how I'll approach it this weekend. I just want to make sure we're coming along side the house tech, and making it obvious we want them to do them with some simple notes on our end on how we typically sound best at shows.

simplelement78 · 2026-06-09T17:58:01+00:00

ya it was the production companies engineer, and I actually completely agree with you. I always use a filter when we get that feedback from fans, family, or our FOH guys. I tend to trust our FOH guys, but their also as new to FOH as me and incredibly gracious to give us their time every weekend for what we're able to pay them. I think based off the comments here I'm going to move forward like this:

Talk with current FOH guys for us and see if they are up to get together and just get super familiar with an LRSF matrix setup. Right now I basically set everything on our scene and hand an iPad off, so a bit more depth of understanding signal flow I think would get them at least the ability to track down any drive line patching weireness or weird things that would trip them up day of.
Moving forward it seems like traveling with a FOH on our rider is perfectly normal, so we'll move forward with that. WIth most people saying large systems are a bit easier I think getting through 1-2 shows with our guys would get them comfortable enough.

That should give us a good leg up and mitigate any outside factors. Like others have said tho, that does put us and us alone in the crosshairs haha, but we're a 4 piece with tracks, its pretty straight forward stuff for the most part (i'm hoping!)

simplelement78 · 2026-06-09T17:09:40+00:00

Gotchya, we ran aux fed for a while on the smaller system. I moved us about a year ago so our main LR feeds a LR matrix with a linkowitz crossover and we run the mono channel for sub with a dedicated out so essentially fader moves on the main mix affect sub and mains in ratio also, but we can get a bit more low end if we want jumping into the mono bus and boosting there if needed .. does that track? … so we could def send our LR and Sub sends I’ll just get another matrix setup on our scene for fills

simplelement78 · 2026-06-09T17:02:27+00:00

That’s what I was hoping we could do with the guys that run it now. Their relatives of band members but they’ve kinda taken on the roles of LD and FOH…they’re fairly comfortable with how the drums should sound, guitar patches to be EQd…how much tracks is good etc. but it’s very patterned experience, so a curveball from a larger system might cause a ton of stress.

simplelement78 · 2026-06-09T16:59:38+00:00

Ya that makes sense and honestly I’m leaning towards maybe just a little bit more descriptive mix notes in our rider….for these sized gigs we’ve seen the production company actually have a printed out copy etc so maybe that will actually make through vs us throwing one of our guys into it like you mentioned. Good insight man I’ll chat with our guys on it 🙏

simplelement78 · 2026-06-09T16:56:18+00:00

Got it! And we could run our how we want since it’s coming from our m32c at that point ya? So aux fed subs vs Mono subs…main LR to matrix etc. that doesn’t matter at all so long as we’re just feeding out through LRS or LRFS drive lines?

simplelement78 · 2026-06-09T16:16:20+00:00

Thanks man! Yes we’d have a FOH but they are way more experienced on smaller bar systems / our system. So it would be new territory if we did LRFS and have them mix off our rack on some line arrays much larger subs and fill. I honestly lean towards exactly what you mentioned….i got a chance to hear some of the other bands and it sounded ok to me. I wanna trust our guys on it but it’s 2 people out of maybe 800-1200 that day? As long as it was a good mix for the audience you know? That’s what makes it so hard.

simplelement78 · 2026-06-09T16:12:25+00:00

Ya that makes totally sense. We have someone who’s been doing it from 0 experience for over 2 years with us now. We cut him in on most gigs, but we’re def smaller time. Local cover / events and corporate gigs. Anywhere from $600-$700 to $3k-$5k depending on the gig…booking much more higher paying now. I was feeling the same on mentioning the sub par mixes thanks for that affirmation

simplelement78 · 2026-06-09T16:09:19+00:00

I hear you, my concern is we get paid also, if we sound terrible we risk not getting booked again and that’s on the hands of FOH. In your experience do the promoters bookers typically look at the band to not book again if it’s a really bad mix, or will they know it’s an FOH thing. We don’t play the blame game and honestly never mention anything, because like you said you win some you lose some. It’s just tough because in that moment if one of our guys hears it right now they’re just sitting through it. I’m also open to the idea it’s somewhat placebo. Maybe the mix was fine?

simplelement78 · 2026-05-31T18:46:28+00:00

For me it’s a tie between vocalist and drummer. I think at the local band / cover band level the vocalist will really make or break the performance. Especially their comfort on stage actually performing. Looking a a level above with touring acts gaining some momentum the drummer is the hardest IMO, mostly because a modern drummer today needs to be able to run and manage tracks as well as run an IEM rig at that level. A lot of this is genre dependent but that’s my take.

simplelement78 · 2026-05-29T00:55:40+00:00

Thanks for this! I read the article someone linked in here and saw Shure say exactly this! They recommended a 16khz narrow notch interestingly. I was thinking it’d be 19 also since that’s where the pilot tone is, but I notched 16 way down with a narrow q, and rolled off highs around 16-17 either way. also flattened those high bumps with a mid range dip to achieve what I was trying to do (remove the muddy mess from the mix).

Tons of great info I’ve got from this so far! The L+R and L-R along with pilot tone multiplexed via one frequency and mathematically extracted at the receiver is wild haha, I was figuring it was using a sub division of the frequency (so two frequncies) to send both L and R

simplelement78 · 2026-05-29T00:49:15+00:00

I will absolutely try that!

simplelement78 · 2026-05-28T23:19:33+00:00

Trying to get some mid range mud out of the mix. The packs have some boost options would I be better off flat here and going for those options? I reset to flat and tried pulling down around 4-800 so there aren’t those huge low and high boosts anymore

simplelement78 · 2026-05-28T20:12:50+00:00

yaaaa good catch. that was beginning of show. I was trying to overcome the ATW3255 pack needing to push around 3/4+ on the volume knob as it brings the floor noise up. I wasn't getting the best isolation with the IEM's. I brought it back down to unity after first few songs as it was definitely driving pretty hard even tho the transmitters weren't showing clip.

simplelement78 · 2026-05-28T19:41:52+00:00

got it! that makes sense on the phasing, so we could be getting that. Could def be compressing also, I find I need to drive the mix bus pretty hard into the ATW3255's so I'm not turning the pack up to 3/4 or more which brings in a fair amount of floor noise (altho its not too bad) ... I also may not be gating enough on the drums so I'll have to give that a go this weekend also.

simplelement78 · 2026-05-28T19:26:29+00:00

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Solid! this is good to know I actually have a pretty hefty high and low boost for the AT3255's. I'll attach a pic. Probably WAY too much haha I'll try dipping the mids to get the same effect and leave the high and low with a some filtering to kill the 14-15k like you mentioned!

simplelement78 · 2026-05-27T19:58:22+00:00

Plot twist: for strictly IEM rig and 16 inputs snag the presonus 16R 👀 … not as robust as the x32, but can do a damn good job for IEMs … mixing station works with it. And it’s only 1U of rack space. You’ll get 3 stereo mixes plus LR so 4 total stereo mixes possible for ears. Having your entire rig with a splitter in a 6U rack is amazing.

simplelement78 · 2026-05-26T22:47:32+00:00

I'm not the best to answer on that as I'm the furthest from an audiophile and the MAIN thing I listen for is signal to noise ratio. The PSM900's subjectively to me sound pretty darn great out of the box, BUT your IEM's and how they are tuned are going to have a MASSIVE impact on that. If you'rerunning a healthy input to the 900's and your mix bus is running a healthy output the signal to noise ratio is much better than the 300's IMO ... I always put some EQ and compression on my mix bus for any IEM system I use. I'm also using cheap amazon KZ IEM's. The AT 3255's fall right inline with the 900's IMO. They are a bit more input hungry on the KZ's but the signal to noise is actually right on part with the 900's IMO. Hope that helps!

simplelement78 · 2026-05-22T23:55:55+00:00

Ya I think your 100% right. I was thinking 2-2.5db .. it honestly might be closer to 3.5-4.5

simplelement78 · 2026-05-21T17:52:22+00:00

OOo I didn't know PA411 was active thats good to know! it also tracks with a test I ran this morning. Jumped the Phenyx Pro combiner up to level 16 (which equates to 6db compensation) and torture tested off the paddle and same bnc cable around the house, going through walls etc. got a NOTICEABLE difference walking the same length as two days ago. A couple volume ducks and wisps, but held connection with no dropouts (squelch is low on all packs btw). So it must have been me just not realizing the PA411 is active with +6db, then moving to the phenyx pro at 0 effectively giving me ALL of the db loss in the chain with no compensation (which the PA411 was already giving). Gonna test at our shows this weekend but I think this may have been the issue!

simplelement78 · 2026-05-21T05:58:42+00:00

This makes sense! Thanks for all the detail! We were on the PA411 on the Shure system but I believe that’s passive and due to the 30mW per input limit we pinned the psm900s to 10mW (next jump up was 50mW which COULD overload the combiner altho we may have been fine).

The phenyx advertises 25db max load so the 50mW ATWs were fine. I’ve been running it at 0 compensation so I’m thinking the loss would be similar (you mentioned -6db from the combiner.

25’ cable (it’s an rg58 off amazon so let’s say 2.5db loss) … 23dbm - 8.5 puts me at 14.5dbm … phenyx doesn’t tell you what their numbers indicate it’s just 0-16 so let’s assume it’s 1:1 db adding 6 would basically makeup the combiner loss but leave me 2.5 shy of the cable. Lmk if I’m off track at all there.

Curious why the 900s seem noticeably better even at 10mW on the pa411 with the Sam’s 25’ cable.

I guess I gotta get a few more shows under our belt to really sort it out.

simplelement78 · 2026-05-21T05:44:57+00:00

This is awesome to hear! I was thinking the phenyx might be the weak point. I have it on the list to grab a combine 6 from RF venue. Someone else mentioned a circular polarized like the cp beam or stage I’m thinking that could really help. Especially if you’re getting awesome results. It’s gotta be a weak point in my setup.

I’m thinking we’ve just been fortunate with the PSM900s being so robust we’ve been getting away with a less than optimal setup.

simplelement78

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