Cheers guys. The worst thing for us was that monitor mixes were so critical to being able to sing in tune. Festivals we hated, with a wedge you could sort of hear the thing you needed in somebody else's monitor, but once the monitor guy clearly got the bass and guitar mixed up so I had no bass, and the guitarist had my bass, but he had an amp, and mine was off, as I was DI'd - this was a great move usually - the front of house guy had complete control over my sound - I could play with just the local wedge. I remember one song I played in Eb perfectly - but it should have been in E - my fingers were spot on, wrong!
When we went to IEMs we loved them but giving some monitor guy a fader direct to your ears was scary. We had personal mixers - bliss. What we did was put a Behringher X32 rack with the same file as the M32 front of house and we made some cables up so at a festival, we could pre-rig stuff and as soon as we got on stage, the floor board for the guitar, my bass and keys were DI'd - and we split all four vocal mics - one to our X32 and the other to the festival system. We split kick snare and overhead. 11 channels straight into our system with our monitor system. The drummer did the drums, each of us did our vocal mic and instrument - two minutes and our personal mixers were exactly the same. A bit of level tweaking for the different drum distances, and that was it. As for the Beach Boys show - we discovered with IEMs that we all needed a pitch to sing to - we all used the keys, high in our mixes, but I needed to pitch my voice to another - and I chose the keys player. In Beach Boys there never was a lead and BVs for a show - often not even for a song. So lead would be the drummer for a verse, then maybe the keys player for the chorus, but then me for a section lining the two. The guitarist often had the bizarre high low stuff but we all learned to tune to one person. One show we got the personal mixers mixed up and first song I heard a totally different song - what the drummer was tuning to was the guitar - because it started the song - I only started to play and sing after this, so my tuning was keys. I don't think we knew what the others were even singing. editing the video, I discovered at a few points we were singing different words. I went back to the orginal songs and it was right - same tune, different words. We also only learned our parts - so I would sing what the guy I replaced sung. In the songs about cars, while the melody is being sung, the others would be singing about move on up, keep it up, all kinds of random things.
Sometimes you hear people saying that bands should be able to play without monitors - I always smile. Like string instruments, you cannot join in, in tune without clues. Beach Boys vocals were chords really - at least a 3 note chord with melody. If the original song needed 5 notes, we had to work out a way to reduce that to 4.
Just before covid we had invested in a click track system because we needed a way to replace Ian's keys with a recording. We often had a MacBook connected to the mixer so we had lots of shows recorded, so we used these on the track. We had always banged on about live music, but it became clear Ian was fast losing control of his hands and was hitting more and more wrong notes. So we picked a 2 x 60 min show - which was all the songs, and we took his keys part and used that as a basis for the tracks. The click was built around what we already had. His M1 was ancient and to be honest horrible sounding, but he had up/down floor switches so would flick between zones and sounds in each song - piano would turn into organ or strings or kalimbas or other odd sounds, and he couldn't do this on more modern keys, so kept the M1. When I prepared the click track, a few of the recordings revealed mistakes, so I quietly fixed them and never said anything. I think we did about 6 shows with the click system, then covid hit and that was it - band down. Good days but just nostalgia now.
