Monitoring and cue mixes

When recording, it’s important for your performers to be able to hear themselves, each other and the guide track or click they’re playing to. In a live gig situation, this would be achieved with wedges and/or in-ear monitors. In a studio space, the same method can work, but it’s easiest to opt for headphones or in-ear monitoring for everyone. This helps you get the cleanest recording, without sound from the monitors getting into the microphones.

Regular mixing desks are well designed to handle headphone mixes, either via auxiliary busses or dedicated cue mix busess, which is why they’re popular for recording bands. This is called ‘hardware monitoring’, and the DAW (via a multichannel audio interface) is used simply as a multichannel recorder.

However, when it comes to recording into a computer DAW with a simpler setup and no desk, you have to find another way to achieve a headphone mix that combines the mic inputs and the track. Conveniently, many interfaces include hardware monitoring, either using a physical input/output balance control, or within the interface itself via a software-controlled hardware circuit.

The first option is pretty basic, and is enough to enable the input mic or mics and the existing track or click playing back from the DAW to be heard. The second can – depending on interface – serve up multiple different mixes and route them to multiple headphone outputs.

Both of those options tap the input signal off before it reaches the computer, but monitoring via the DAW can also work if you set a very small buffer size (64 samples or less, ideally), so that the round trip delay (latency) added to the input signal isn’t too offputting. Be aware, though, that a very short buffer size will tax your computer and can cause audio glitching. Also bear in mind that most vocalists will find any noticable delay unworkable, and this is why hardware monitoring is always the better option.

“It’s important for your performers to be able to hear themselves”