As the monitor engineer, I do both in-ears and wedges, and reproducing the tone of the cabinet for both of those applications is very important to have a natural sounding mix. Using the -10dB pad and the supercardioid setting, I have been able to reproduce the sound of our bass cabinet with little EQ’ing at the console. The V7 X is a great mic. It has a lot of gain before feedback, and a smooth, natural frequency response that keeps the vocals crisp without being harsh, and keeps the body of my vocalists without being too muddy.

For snare, hi-hat, and guitar we used the sE8. These microphones were great! For snare we were able to get nice and close to the snare head, because of its small design, without it getting in the way of the drum hardware – which is essential to us getting a clean snare sound with no hi-hat bleed. And same with the hi-hat, although it is much easier to place the hi-hat mic to where it has minimal snare bleed. This mic has nice body without being muddy, and nice high-mids response to get the crack or the attack on the snare and hi-hat.

For the guitar set-up, we are running a 4×10 with an 18W satellite amplifier, alongside a 2×12 with a 20W satellite amplifier. I’m using the sE8 alongside a ribbon mic in the guitaRF on the 4×12, and a VR1 on the second guitar cab.

With there only being one guitar in this band, it is important to have a great driving tone along with smooth clarity because it is both our lead and rhythm electric guitar. Our guitar player’s tone at the source is very clean with volumes between rhythm and lead parts are equal at the source. So then it becomes our job to translate that.

The sE8 provides great mid-high frequency response, making it easy to get the clarity needed to allow the guitar to present in the mix without being harsh or over-powering. I was very focused on using the sE8 for my in-ear mixes, but my FOH engineer loved the VR1’s warm tone that he was able to get from the second guitar cab, and said he had to do little EQ’ing to get the sound he wanted.

We used the sE4400’s on our overheads. I was able to achieve a nice rounded sound from the whole kit with these microphones, which is my preferred style of mixing in-ears. At the same time, with the right mic placement, our front of house engineer was able to focus his sound around the cymbals, which is his preferred style of mixing overheads. Padded to -10dB and in the hypercardioid setting, approximately 1 to 1.5 feet above the stage-left and stage-right cymbals.