Coheed & Cambria’s front-of-house engineer Pete Robertson recently made the switch to putting the majority of the band on in-ears, as well as finding the right gain in a Sennheiser 945 mic. Robertson also owns Woodstock Wired, a studio design business.
I found that, starting out with another mic, I was driving it quite harshly and getting a lot more noise out of the board. Now, I’m not driving the mic amps as hard to get as much gain as I need, especially with Claudio [Sanchez], our lead singer. He’s got a very youthful voice — very soft, very high-pitched. Because he doesn’t push a lot of air with his vocals, the high gain of the 945 is very helpful. I have also put each of the four main members on Sennheiser EW 300 IEM G2 personal monitors. I remember one day taking my SPL meter up onstage as they were performing. With vocals through the monitors, sidefills and each musician with two 15-inch boxes in front of them, plus a drumfill, we had a volume of about 108 dB, A-weighted, onstage. The only musician on a wedge now is Dave Parker on keyboards.
