Submitted by rodeo-boy

I have found something about Radiohead in-ear monitoring system on mixonline.com/live/applications/audio_ear/.

In Your Ear

Jan 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Blair Jackson

“One of the top monitor engineers in Great Britain, David “Tree” Tordoff has spent much of the past six years working with the great British band Radiohead. He’s also done monitors for UK acts such as Lloyd Cole, John Cale, Supergrass, Marillion and others. As of their most recent tour, Radiohead are using IEMs on singer/leader Thom Yorke and drummer Phil Selway, and wedges on the rest of the band, a combination that seems to be working well so far. In this case, both the wedges and the in-ears were supplied by Firehouse Productions: The IEMs are the highly regarded dual-driver Firehouse 6500s, used in conjunction with a Shure PSM700 beltpack.

“I went through a long process before arriving at the Firehouse in-ears,” Tree explains. “We tried various models over the years, and Thom Yorke finally settled on certain characteristics he wanted. We felt that dual-driver ones all sound better than single-driver ones. He preferred silicon material to acrylic, because he wanted something slightly softer. And he wanted the shape to be the larger kind, so it held more solidly in his ear. He finds that as he performs, he gets hot and sweaty, and, if it’s not the larger shape, it starts to unscrew out of his ear. Anyway, no one seemed to be making something with those three characteristics. I was moaning about this to Bryan at Firehouse, and he suggested we try his Firehouse ones. Technically, it’s acrylic, rather than silicon, but it’s a softer, smoother version, and Thom thought they were fine.

“I think one of the most important things about in-ear monitors is that they should fit properly and give you a measured isolation so you’re actually listening to the in-ear monitor and a fixed mix of other sounds”, he continues. “You can have ports and things like that, but it must be controlled. If it’s a bad fit, the mix of in-ear sound and leaking sound is never the same from day to day, and you don’t have a consistent environment, which makes it very difficult to mix for. With some of these systems, it’s like listening with the door banging open and shut and the outside noise coming and going. So, the fit is really important, and the best way to get them to fit really well is to use the softer material and a larger mold. For someone like Celine Dion or Kylie Minogue, you might want the smallest, most discreet ones you can get, but if you’re in a rock band, it probably doesn’t matter as much. I know the first ones Thom ever ordered, he said, ‘Oh, can I have them in green?’ He doesn’t care if people see them. But different people have different priorities.

“Ed O’Brien, who plays guitar and does backing vocals, had a phase of using in-ears when he was very worried about singing backup vocals. It’s hard to sing backup vocals for someone like Thom Yorke, who’s such a good singer and expects the very highest from everyone around him. I think Ed was lacking confidence, and the in-ears helped him a lot with his singing. Nevertheless, he eventually felt he couldn’t hear his guitar amp properly and that’s his primary role in the band, so once he’d spent a year using IEMs and increased his singing confidence, he got rid of them and went back to listening to his amp and singing with wedges again. With in-ears, you always win on the hearing of your own voice, but you always kind of lose in hearing the instruments, particularly if you’re a guitarist; guitarists always feel like what they hear from the amp is the real sound of their guitar, not what’s coming through the P.A. or the wedges. And in the case of in-ears, it’s even further removed from the real sound of the amp. To me, it sounds fine, but to the guitarists, they hear more subtleties from the amplifiers.”

Actually, Thom Yorke uses a combination of IEMs and wedges. “He uses the in-ears for his voice, but he has all the drums and certain other instruments in the wedges. There are certain things he doesn’t want to hear right in his ears, like [keyboardist] Jonny Greenwood for example! It does eat up mixes, though: Yorke and O’Brien use four each [for stereo ears and wedges and reverb sends], and Phil Selway uses three [for stereo ears and stool shaker].”

On the issue of stereo vs. mono for IEMs, Tree comments, “Some people think that doing them in stereo is a waste of time, but I think it’s quite useful to separate things left and right. Obviously, if the singer turns around, the left and right image doesn’t change with him, and it can be a little disorienting. I don’t think you want to necessarily pan things spatially to match things on the stage, but I’m a firm believer that if you put the guitar on one side and the keyboard on another, you can psychologically mix the two things yourself in your head if you hear them coming from a separate place, and that gives the singer more control. Others say if you do it in mono, you get a stronger radio signal, because the two channels back each other up and all that, but I haven’t had any trouble with that. The stereo obviously gives you a little more space to work with, and that’s important when you’re talking about putting sound directly in a person’s ear. It’s more natural that way and, I suspect, easier to sing to.”