Drummer Headphone Mix - I don't understand!

redamp95

New member
Hi guys,

So a common theme that keeps me awake at night in preparation for doing drum recording in a month is what equipment I will need so the drummer has the mix coming into his headphones. For background:

I'm recording the drums in an outhouse down the bottom of the garden and then control room will be in the house. I'm buying a 30m stage box (the garden is quite elongated!) so that I can have all the mics (9 total). Equipment wise I'm using:

Logic Pro X 10.3
iPhone with Logic Remote (the outhouse doesn't have wifi so can't use this for monitoring)
Saffire Pro 40 / M-Audio Octane
9 inputs.

What I can't get my head around is how I use the line outputs to go into the stage box (XLR only), to then go into something like a headphone amp for the drummer to plug into. Would I use two line outputs so it's stereo? Do I use a jack to XLR in order to plug into the stage box? Absolutely boggling my mind right now and I have no idea way. This is more a hardware issue as I've figured out Saffire MixControl in order to actually set the mix up. Any help would be really appreciated!!
 
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What I can't get my head around is how I use the line outputs to go into the stage box (XLR only), to then go into something like a headphone amp for the drummer to plug into. Would I use two line outputs so it's stereo? Do I use a jack to XLR in order to plug into the stage box? Absolutely boggling my mind right now and I have no idea way. ...
Sure, assuming you have already dedicated the 1 & 2 outputs to monitor speakers, you just have to have another pair (set via MixControl s/w) to have the same thing. You can test those easily by swapping the monitor speakers to those outputs. Cable them with balanced 1/4" TRS->XLR cables at the house, and then hook the sends up to a headphone amp at the drummer end. (Quick Google shows that the PreSonus HP2 has a balanced stereo input via a Y-adapter they include - just one I found, so I'm sure there are others.)

P.S. For those of us raised in a long time ago, just a step out of our hillbilly roots, "outhouse" has a distinct/different meaning!
Outhouse - Wikipedia
 
I can only tell you how I do it/would do it (using your gear as it is similar to mine):

I would connect a stereo pair of outputs on the Saffire pro to a headphone amp using short TRS cables.

I would plug in one of the sends on the snake into one of the outputs on the headphone amp. The reason I would do it this way is to keep cables limited at the drummer's end.

If your snake is like mine though, the end of each send is a XLR instead of a TRS so an adapter is needed (or you can solder on a TRS cable, whatever you prefer. I prefer adapters)

At the snake side of things where the drummer is I just plug in a 6' heaphone cable that goes from 1/4" TRS to 1/8" female heaphone plug and then plug the headphones into that.

The plus side of the above setup: less cable and stuff at the drummers end and in my case I use an ipad to give them mix control over that stuff anyways (not an option in your case).

The downside: The drummer has to rely on me for overall headphone level unless I pickup an aux box like the furman HR2 (which I think is discontinued).

Now for your set if you want the headphone amp with the drummer just plug 2 of the snake sends into pair of outputs on the focusrite and at the other end of the snake take those 2 sends and plug them into the headphone amp. You may have to get adapters and such for this but the essentially it's the same thing.
 
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