Micah D. sent in this question on the “How to introduce click tracks to your band” post.

How do I put the click track through monitors [and] the loop … through the main speakers?

Good question. The goal is to get the loop playing through the mains and available to monitor mixes but the click only in monitors and not through the mains. Getting the loop to play through the mains is just like getting any signal to the mains so I’ll assume that part needs no explanation and focus on getting a click isolated in monitor mixes and not mains. There are a couple ways to do this, I’ll start with the best and most flexible way that I know of.

1. Route the click signal to the board on an isolated channel. How exactly you do this depends on what is generating your click. In my case I take the left channel from my audio interface which carries the click signal generated by Ableton Live. The right channel carries the loop signal. Ableton makes it easy to split your click signal. In my upcoming posts on how to create your own click tracks I’ll show how to go about doing this.
2. Take the click channel’s fader all the way down. This of course turns it off in the main house mix.
3. Use your pre-fade aux sends on the board to control monitor levels. In order for your monitors to pickup the click with the fader all the way down these sends must be on a pre-fade send. That basically means that the fader doesn’t come into play at all in the aux send level. Post-fade takes into account where the fader is at.

Wikipedia does a better job at explaining pre/post fade aux sends:

The Auxiliary send routes a split of the incoming signal to an auxiliary bus which can then be used with external devices. Auxiliary sends can either be pre-fader or post-fader, in that the level of a pre-fade send is set by the Auxiliary send control, whereas post-fade sends depend on the position of the channel fader as well. Auxiliary sends can be used to send the signal to an external processor such as a reverb, which can then be routed back through another channel or designated auxiliary returns on the mixer. These will normally be post-fader. Pre-fade auxiliary sends can be used to provide a monitor mix to musicians onstage, this mix is thus independent of the main mix.

What to watch out for?

You want to listen for channel bleed through where your click is still audible in the house even though the fader is all the way down. We recently had this issue and the cause, besides the board being to blame, is how hot a signal was being sent to the board. The click channel was clipping, so we fixed our gain structure and brought it down a lot and that helped our bleed.

Other options: In ear monitor pack Mix-In

Another way of doing this is using the Mix-In input on your in ear monitor packs. Most in ear monitoring packs have a 1/4″ in. input for mixing in some auxillary signal. You could use a multi-channel headphone amp to carry the click signal and then take the 1/4″ in. outs on each channel to all your monitor packs.

This isn’t a great way of doing this if not for complexity sake then for the cabling mess, but maybe if you had limited aux sends on your board this could come in handy.

I hope that helps.

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