Having in-ear monitoring is crucial
for any worship team wanting to achieve a better mix
as well as being able to use a click track
and backing tracks in worship.
But when you browse in-ear monitoring solutions,
you maybe intimidated by the price tag
of getting a system up and running at your church.
Personal mixers like this cost $400 apiece
which can add up over to $2,000
if you're gonna get in-ear monitoring for your whole band.
Well in this video,
I'm gonna show you an in-ear monitoring setup
that almost any church budget can afford.
And this in-ear monitors setup has some advantages
over digital personal mixers like this
and even wireless in-ear systems.
So keep watching this video and you're gonna learn
all about the in-ear monitoring system that I purchased
for my worship band that only cost us $241.68.
(upbeat electronic music)
What's up YouTube, my name is Jake Gosselin
from Churchfront.com, an online resource
for innovative and creative church leaders.
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As a worship leader,
when I first started using a click track
and backing tracks in worship,
I quickly realized how important it is
to have in-ear monitoring.
There are many benefits
for using in-ear monitoring at your church.
Number one, it's gonna reduce stage volume
so that your front of house audio engineer
can produce a better mix.
Number two, musicians are gonna hear themselves better.
And number three, you can use a click track in worship,
which then allows you to use backing tracks,
allows you to automate, you know,
lights and lyrics within worship.
So in-ear monitors are the foundational starting point
for being able to up the quality of your worship band.
I'm currently serving at a church plant
and we just launched a few months ago.
And within these first few weeks, months
of launching the church, you know,
we're still getting to know our production system,
we're making tweaks here and there,
optimizing things for setup and tear down.
And one of the areas that I quickly realized
I wanted to change was how we were doing in-ear monitoring.
For myself and another worship leader vocalists,
we use wireless in-ear monitors.
We could afford to have one transmitter with two receivers,
which is actually another great hack to know about
'cause most of those transmitters have stereo inputs
which then you can just split to mono outputs
to each of the body packs.
So that's what we do for worship leaders
who have to move around on stage
but then for the rest of the band members,
we have four of these P16 personal mixers.
So for the rest of this video, I'm gonna hop back in time
to a couple of weeks ago
when I received our new in-ear monitoring system
that only cost $241.58 or however much it was.
You're gonna see me unbox the video.
I'll talk about the gear and how it all works
and then I'll also explain
to you why I wanted to make this change in our setup
for our in-ear monitoring system.
And then after you hear about, you know,
the new gear I got and why we're implementing it,
I'm gonna hop back to today and tell you
about how it's been going
using this new in-ear monitor system.
So let's hop back to a couple of weeks ago.
So it's a Saturday morning here
in the Churchfront headquarters
and I wanted to shoot this quick video for you guys
to show you my new $241 and,
$241.68 in-ear monitor setup.
I am not a fan of personal digital mixers like this one.
We use the Behringer P16 digital personal mixers
and I think those are much better suited for a church
that's permanently set up somewhere.
I'm just not a fan of having extra hardware
that I feel like is unnecessary.
So let me explain.
We use the Midas M32 Digital Sound Console
as our front of house soundboard.
It's an amazing console.
It uses the same digital ecosystem
as the Behringer X32 which is a super popular board
I recommend for any church.
If you have the money, get the Midas M32.
It's a little bit nicer hardware on there.
And then we also have the Behringer S32 Snake
that's on our stage.
I put it right next to our drummer.
So we have all of our inputs
and outputs for our sound board
up on the stage in a really convenient place.
And we set up a tear down church
so all the stuff of course, is portable.
And when it comes to monitoring,
I've been kind of frustrated
with the P16 digital mixers lately.
Number one is that, this is honestly the problem,
more my fault but like the routing has just been screwed up
when it comes to setting the digital singles
to those mixers.
We can just never consistently get it set up the way we want
and we honestly don't have time.
We're a church plant so I just need things
to be able to plugin in and work.
And since we store everything away during the week,
I have very little time during the week
'cause I'm making videos like this for Churchfront.
I just haven't had much time to troubleshoot it.
But even regardless of the idea
of my routing's not completely the way I need
to be with P16, I just feel like it's those types
of digital personal mixers are just an antiquated,
outdated way of doing in-ear monitoring.
With the Midas M32 board and the Behringer X32 board,
you have these cool little mobile apps
that you can use to control them.
So here's the mobile app.
This is the M32 and I think I actually you have
to use this app now for both the X32 board
and the M32 board.
And I just much prefer using a nice mobile app
on my wonderful iPhone to control my monitor mix
because, the nice thing is that is that it's all digital.
It's a screen.
This can change as the settings on the board changes
but with a digital personal mixer,
it's just hardware.
You don't have like an LCD screen
that shows you what the different channels are.
You have to use label makers to label the channels
and to me, that's just like really clunky and unnecessary.
In my ideal world for monitoring,
I like to have wireless in-ear monitoring
and then I control my monitors on my phone, like this.
And that's what my other musicians in my band also prefer.
Every time we use the P16 monitors,
we just get frustrated.
So while do have two wireless in-ear packs
that we use for myself and any other worship leader
who's singing me on a given week
because we're the one's moving around the stage the most,
it's nice to have that wireless flexibility.
For the rest of the band,
I wanted to have a better solution
than using the P16 digital personal mixer
and I actually found a solution that's way less expensive
than buying a bunch of digital personal mixers.
And that solution is
to use a headphone amp with headphone extension cables
and then each of the members can use this app
to control their mix rather
than fiddling with a digital personal mixer.
So I just wanna unbox and show you the gear I purchased
in order to make this possible.
And again, this is only $241.68.
Super inexpensive and this is gonna give me the capability
to have up to eight different monitor mixes for my band.
So I got my first box here,
I can't remember what's actually in it
but I will open it up.
All right, so this first box
has all my headphone extension cables.
I've got the, let's see,
Hosa adapter cable 3.5 millimeter TRS to quarter inch TRS.
So this is gonna go from the headphone amp
and then the other end of it,
you can just plug regular in-ear earbuds into it.
So this is 25 feet long, which is plenty of length
to get from our headphone amp
to like our drummer who's gonna use one of these.
And maybe any other instrumentalists
who are close enough within 25 feet
to our digital snake on the stage.
And then I also got some 50 foot extension cables
for headphones in case if we need to get all the way
to the other side of the stage.
We will have to use these
for our keyboardist's in-ear monitors.
And of course, this is the only downside
of using this route.
To me, the benefits of going this route
with monitoring far outweigh any of the downsides
because these headphone cables are super cheap
and it's not that bad if your,
especially if you're not a worship leader,
someone who has to move around the stage
and stuff like that.
If you're like a pianist or a keyboardist
or a drummer or a base guitarist or an electric guitarist
and you really are just kinda hanging out in one spot
during worship, it is so easy.
You just go to your spot,
you grab the end of this cable,
you plug it into your earbuds
and then voila, you have in-ear monitoring.
And then you actually don't have to worry
about batteries like you do on wireless systems.
And you don't have to worry about signal drop
like you do on wireless systems.
While this is the only downside,
you have to have these cables connected
to your headphones as a musician,
it's also, actually I feel like it's got more upsides.
So that was that box.
Contains all of them.
I got about, I got four 25 foot cables
and I got two 50 foot extension cables.
There's plenty for our band, we're not a huge band.
And then next, I have this box.
I believe this one contains the headphone amp itself.
This box contains,
The Behringer HA8000.
Eight channel high power headphones.
Mixing and distribution amplifier.
This thing was only like 150 dollars
and I've seen this used at my friend's church, Josh Shaw.
He's another church plant in the Lakewood area
and he recommended this setup.
At first, this whole headphone amp
and extension cable thing,
I was like, man this seems like a pain
to have headphone cables
but then I actually led worship at his church one time
and I was like, this isn't that bad.
And it sounds great, it works great
and it's way cheaper than digital personal mixers.
Right, so in the box, we got an instruction manual,
we've got power cable and then the headphone amp itself.
And here's the headphone amp.
Nice and shiny.
Ouch, I almost cut myself on it.
It's got some kind of sharp edges on the side here.
It's a pretty simple setup.
Eight on the front and then you have direct inputs
and headphone outputs on the back as well.
But I imagine, what we're gonna do,
we're gonna mount this into our rack, like this.
It's gonna go onto the rack
and then we're gonna have the headphone extension cables
come out of the front and to our musicians on stage.
It's gonna be really slick.
And then the final piece
of gear I ordered is this analog snake.
So we're gonna rack mount the headphone amp.
It's gonna go right above our digital snake
that's in our stage rack.
And this is just a really great way
to kind of clean up how we get the signals
from the digital snake,
from our mixer to the headphone amps.
So these are gonna come out
of the outputs on the S32.
These are our monitor mix outputs
and then these are gonna go into the headphone amp.
So this is a simple little eight channel snake
and this should do the trick.
So it's really not complicated.
We go from the digital snake, outputs,
direct outputs to the headphone amp
to the headphone extension cables
to the musicians earbuds.
So I'm gonna bring my camera along with me Sunday morning
so you guys can see what this will actually look like.
And then I'll kind of come back with a report
of how it worked out and how my musicians liked the setup.
All right, I just hopped to the future, couple weeks ahead.
So we've been using the Behringer headphone amplifier
with the headphone extension cables
for a few weeks now for our drummer,
our keyboardist and any other instrumentalists
that we have in our band
and they have been working great.
As a matter of fact,
I brought these four Behringer P16 digital personal mixers
back to my office.
I'm gonna list them on eBay because we do not need them
and we could use the money
towards some other things we wanna get.
So I'm just really happy with the way this worked out
and I think this setup can be great
for really any church looking
for in-ear monitoring on a low budget.
My musicians love how easy it is
to plug their headphones into a headphone extension cable
which goes into the headphone amp
and then they can just run their monitor mix
and control what they hear with the M32 app.
It's just so much easier than these darn things.
So if you wanna build this in-ear monitor system
at your church, you need to download my worship toolkit.
In my toolkit, I've included all the information,
pricing and links to easily find everything
that I talked about in this video
plus much, much more.
The link to the toolkit is in the description
of the video so click that link,
complete the form.
I'll send you instant access to the worship toolkit.
If you have any questions
about this in-ear monitoring set-up,
just let me know below.
I'll do my best to get back
to you as soon as possible.
And let me know, do you use these things,
do you use the headphone amps.
Do you like what setup that you have.
Just what thoughts do you have
about in-ear monitoring in general.
I love hearing from you below in the comments.
If you found this video helpful,
be sure to hit that thumbs up button
and share it with your other friends
in ministry who are looking for a great affordable option
for in-ear monitoring at their church.
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(light chillstep music)