Front of house mixing The front of house (FOH) engineer focuses on mixing audio for the audience, and most often operates from the middle of the audience or at the last few rows of the audience.

A mix created to allow musicians to hear themselves, whether onstage or in the studio. Depending on the situation and application, a monitor mix may also be known as foldback, a cue mix, a headphone mix, or other names.

Musicians need to be able to play in time. It is a skill many struggle with and is essential for a tight performance. To do this you must be able to hear the music as it is being played.

The FOH (front of house) engineer, who works at a mixing board located in the audience, controls the sound heard by the audience through the venue’s main speakers.

Front of House
FOH means Front of House, which refers to the public parts of bars and restaurants that guests interact with. Think the dining room, bar, cocktail area, patio, private dining rooms, waiting area, and coat check. This is opposed to the meaning of BOH, which is Back of House.

The “front of house”(FOH) is all aspects of the restaurant forward of the kitchen wall, and, if there’s one, an expo “window.” The “back of house” (BOH) is simply the kitchen. During my time working in the back of house, I learned that those jobs made up only half of the restaurant as a whole.

In-Ear Monitors or IEMs for short are earpieces that allow performing musicians to listen to the music they’re playing live. The main purpose of having them is to monitor and hear what your music sounds like while you play. When performing on stage, it can get really loud.

When you can hear yourselves on stage, your intonation (vocals, and other instruments) will be more exact AND your ability to stay in the pocket of the groove will increase dramatically. Many stage shows today are enhanced with “extra” backing tracks, imagine trying to pull that off without a good monitor mix.

A Monitor Engineer mixes the instruments and vocals on stage for each individual performer to hear. A FOH Engineer is only responsible for mixing one mix for all of the audience to listen to while a monitor engineer is responsible for many different mixes depending on what the performers need to hear.

A monitor engineer mixes the sound the musicians listen to onstage during a performance. Typically the musicians will be provided an individual mix with either speaker monitors (also called wedges) or in-ear monitor systems (IEMS).

Specifically the main, or house mixing position is referred to as the FOH position, which is meant to differentiate the main house mixer from the monitor mixer normally located to the side of the stage.

Some live as the halfway house between being a runner and an actual live Front of House (FOH) mixing engineer. For me, monitor mixing is great in its own right. There are certain drawbacks to being way out there by yourself mixing at the FOH position while the monitor mixer is in the middle of the party that’s going on onstage.

First, you need a microphone (or DI) on stage feeding an input on your mixing console. Powered floor monitors like the JBL Eon Series integrate the amp into the speaker enclosure. If the channel fader for each input is used to adjust the main FOH mix, then how do you send different mixes to the monitors?

An auxiliary send is a separate bus that allows you to sum multiple channels to one monitor mix or FX device. The number of separate monitor mixes is dependent on the number of auxiliary sends on your console and you’ll probably want to keep one or two post fader aux sends open for reverb FX.

The number of separate monitor mixes is dependent on the number of auxiliary sends on your console and you’ll probably want to keep one or two post fader aux sends open for reverb FX. Boards with at least six aux sends are ideal, allowing for four pre-fade monitor mixes and two post-fade FX sends.