Yesterday we played a show with my metal band, and our monitor engineer was running all our in-ear mixes on his rack using an Allen & Heath CQ-18T. He also used a splitter to send all inputs to the FOH engineer.
We ran into a problem: when our bassist asked the monitor engineer to lower the level of my lead guitar in his in-ear mix, the change also lowered my lead guitar level in my own in-ear mix (I’m the lead guitarist), which made me miss the intro of a song.
Here are two additional details that may matter:
My lead guitar channel is linked in stereo, because I use a Quad Cortex in stereo.
My own in-ear mix is also linked in stereo.
Does anyone know what could cause this behaviour on a CQ-18T?
Could it be related to stereo linking, pre/post-fader settings, aux linking, or possibly the way the splitter was wired?
Any insight or things we should check would be really appreciated.
Are you using only the Out mixes or also the Main LR mix for anything else?
A simple explanation would be that you’ve set both of your in-ear mixes to Post Fader, and the operator accidentally made the change in the Main LR Mix instead of the bass in-ear mix.
Thanks for your reply!
I checked, and both of our in-ear mixes were definitely set to Pre-Fader, not Post.
So unless it was a simple human error from the monitor engineer in the heat of the moment, I still can’t see what could have caused this behaviour.
If you can’t rule that out, it could be, that he wanted to select the bass mix several times and accidentally selected your guitar mix once.
Another technical possibility is that, if both of you are using stereo in-ear monitors, you accidentally connected them incorrectly: perhaps crossed 1+4 and 3+2 instead of 1+2 and 3+4.
This would mean each of you was hearing half of the signal from the wrong monitor mix, and it could even explain why your guitar was too loud in the bass mix in the first place.