Years back I ran monitors for a set where a vocalist kept coming back to me between songs asking for more of themselves in the wedge. I gave it to them. Still not enough, they said. I gave more. By the third ask I was pushing a level that was genuinely uncomfortable for anyone standing near that wedge, and it still wasn’t landing as “enough” for them.
I was so focused on being right about the mix — I’d built it carefully, I knew what was in it, I was confident it was technically correct — that I never stopped to ask the actual question. I was solving “give them more of the fader” instead of solving “why do they feel like they can’t hear themselves.”
Turned out the actual issue had nothing to do with the monitor mix at all. Their in-ear seal had shifted mid-set from moving around on stage, and what they were hearing was a physically worse seal letting more stage volume bleed in around the monitor, not a genuinely insufficient send from me. No amount of fader pushed would have fixed that, because the problem was never in my hands to begin with. I found out after the set, from a two-minute conversation I should have had after the first ask instead of the fourth.
Here’s what that night actually taught me, and it wasn’t about monitor technique: the fastest way to make a real problem worse is to be so sure of your own competence that you stop actually listening to the person telling you something’s wrong. I trusted my mix over their experience of it, and that’s backwards every single time. They’re the one standing in the sound. I’m the one guessing at it from a board twenty feet away.
Now, second ask for the same thing, same show, I stop the fader-pushing and go ask a real question in person. Not “is that better” — “what does it actually feel like right now.” Half the time the answer has nothing to do with a level at all, and I would have kept turning a knob forever trying to fix a problem that was never mine to fix with a knob.
Confidence in your mix is good. Confidence that overrides someone telling you it’s not working for them is just ego with a fader attached. Learned that one the hard way, and I don’t plan on relearning it.