I was performing at a corporate event in Linz, about halfway through my set, when I realized I was shouting.
Not deliberately shouting, not for dramatic effect, not as part of a punchline. I was simply speaking much louder than I needed to, pushing my voice with effort that the audience could probably see in my neck and jaw, straining against a room that did not require straining.
The reason was simple and, once I understood it, obvious: I could not hear myself.
The venue had a good sound system. The audience could hear me perfectly — the main speakers were positioned at the front of the stage, angled out into the room. But the speakers were behind me. Sound travels forward, into the audience. What reaches the performer on stage is a delayed, diffused echo bouncing off the back wall and the ceiling, mixed with the ambient noise of the room. What I was hearing from my own position was a thin, distant version of my voice that sounded like it was barely reaching the first row.
So I compensated. I pushed harder. I raised my volume. I projected with the kind of muscular effort that Dan Harlan’s grandmother technique describes for unamplified venues — visualizing someone in the back row and throwing your voice to reach them. Except I was amplified. The speakers were doing the work. I did not need to project to the back row because the PA system was projecting for me. But I could not hear that from where I was standing.
I was performing blind. Or rather, performing deaf.
After the show, the event organizer mentioned, very kindly, that the sound had been “quite powerful.” I knew what that meant. I had been too loud. Not by a little. By a lot. And I had been too loud because I had no way of knowing, from my position on stage, what the audience was actually hearing.
That was the night I learned what monitor speakers are for.
The Gap Between Stage and House
Harlan articulates this principle clearly in his lecture on magic as theater: sound on stage does not equal sound in the audience. They are two different acoustic environments, and the performer who does not understand this will make bad decisions about their own volume, pacing, and delivery.
In most venue configurations, the main speakers — the house speakers, the PA, whatever you call them — are positioned to project sound into the audience area. Their job is to make the audience hear you. They are not designed to make you hear yourself. They face away from the stage, and the sound they produce reaches you only as an indirect reflection off the room’s surfaces.
This means that what you hear on stage is an unreliable representation of what the audience hears. It might be quieter, because the direct sound is going the other way. It might be muddy, because you are hearing reflections rather than the direct signal. It might be delayed, because sound takes time to travel to the back wall and bounce back. And if you are using music in your show, the music might sound balanced and clear from the audience’s perspective while sounding overwhelming or inaudible from your position on stage.
The monitor speaker solves this problem. A monitor — sometimes called a foldback speaker, or a wedge because of its angled shape — sits on the stage floor facing up at you. It delivers a mix of the audio signals from your microphone, your music playback, and any other sound sources directly to your ears, in real time, at a volume you can control.
It is, in essence, a feedback loop. You speak, the mic captures your voice, the monitor plays it back to you, and you hear what the audience hears. Not exactly what the audience hears — the room acoustics are different from your vantage point — but a close enough approximation that you can make informed decisions about your own performance in real time.
What Changes When You Can Hear Yourself
The first time I performed with a proper stage monitor, the difference was immediate and startling. Here is what changed.
Volume calibration. This was the most obvious improvement. With the monitor feeding my voice back to me, I could hear when I was speaking at the right level for the room. I stopped guessing. I stopped compensating for imagined inadequacy. I could hear that my normal conversational tone, amplified through the system, was filling the room beautifully. There was no need to push. The technology was doing the heavy lifting. My job was to speak naturally and let the system amplify that natural voice.
The relief was physical. I could feel the tension leaving my throat and jaw. I had been working so much harder than necessary, and the effort was not just wasted — it was counterproductive. An audience can sense strain. When a performer is pushing, the audience pushes back by disengaging. When a performer is relaxed and in control, the audience relaxes too. The monitor gave me permission to relax, because I could hear the evidence that relaxation was working.
Pacing adjustments. This was subtler but equally significant. In venues with echo — and many Austrian event spaces, with their stone walls and high ceilings, have substantial echo — your words arrive at the audience with a slight smear. Each phrase overlaps with the echo of the previous phrase, and if you speak too quickly, the overlap becomes confusion. The audience hears a blur of sound rather than distinct words.
Without a monitor, you do not know this is happening. From your position on stage, you hear your own voice clearly and directly, unaffected by the room’s reverb. You speak at your rehearsed pace, unaware that the room is turning your crisp delivery into acoustic soup.
With a monitor, you hear the room’s contribution to your sound. You hear the slight echo that follows each phrase, and you instinctively adjust. You leave a beat longer between sentences. You let each phrase settle before beginning the next. Harlan’s advice for echoey venues is to slow way down between phrases, and the monitor gives you the real-time feedback to know exactly how much slowing down is needed.
Music synchronization. This was the change I had not anticipated, and it turned out to be the most important for my show specifically.
Several of my routines use music. Some have musical openings. Others have musical transitions. One has a climactic moment where the effect resolves in sync with a specific beat in the song. Without a monitor, I was timing these moments from memory and hope. I knew approximately where the musical cue would fall, and I tried to reach the corresponding moment in my routine at the right time. Sometimes I nailed it. Sometimes I was early. Sometimes I was late.
With the monitor feeding me the music at a clear, consistent volume from two meters away, I could hear exactly where I was in the song. The synchronization became precise rather than approximate. The effect resolving on exactly the right beat, rather than roughly near it, transformed the moment from good to electric.
The audience may not consciously notice the difference between a reveal that lands on the beat and one that lands a half-second after it. But they feel the difference. When everything aligns — the visual, the audio, the timing — the moment has a completeness, a sense of inevitability, that a near-miss lacks. The monitor made that alignment possible not through luck but through craft.
The Practical Setup
For anyone who has not worked with monitors before, here is what the practical setup looks like at the level where most of us perform.
At corporate events and conference venues, the sound system usually includes the option for a monitor. You need to ask for it. This is important: many event organizers will not offer a monitor unless you request one, because most of their presenters are keynote speakers who read from slides and do not need real-time audio feedback. You need to specify in your technical rider — or in your pre-event communication, if you do not yet have a formal rider — that you require at least one monitor wedge on stage.
During the sound check, the monitor mix is set separately from the house mix. This is critical. The audience does not need to hear what you hear, and you do not need to hear exactly what the audience hears. The monitor mix is tailored to your needs on stage. If your show uses music, you might want more music in the monitor than voice, because you can hear your own voice directly through bone conduction and air, but you need the monitor to tell you where the music is. If your show is primarily spoken, you might want more voice in the monitor to calibrate your volume.
Ask the sound engineer to adjust the monitor mix during the sound check until it feels right. “More music, less voice.” “Can I hear more of the vocal?” “Can we bring the overall level up a bit?” These are normal, professional requests, and any competent sound engineer will accommodate them without hesitation.
The positioning of the monitor matters. Standard placement is on the stage floor, at the front edge of the stage, angled up toward you. If you move around the stage significantly, you may want two monitors — one on each side — so you can hear yourself regardless of your position. For most of my performances, a single center monitor is sufficient because I tend to work from a relatively fixed position, consistent with the standing technique that Harlan describes: feet planted, weight on the rear foot, commanding the space from a position of stability.
The Confidence Loop
There is a secondary effect of monitors that goes beyond the practical audio benefits, and it took me several shows to recognize it.
Performing with monitors is more confident. Not because the monitor makes you better, but because the monitor removes uncertainty. Without the monitor, you are operating with incomplete information. You do not know what the audience is hearing. You do not know if your volume is right, if your pacing is landing, if the music cue hit the right moment. You are guessing, and guessing produces anxiety, and anxiety produces tension, and tension produces a performance that is working against itself.
With the monitor, you know. You have real-time evidence. You can hear the confirmation that your choices are landing, and that confirmation feeds back into your confidence, and that confidence feeds back into your performance. It is a virtuous cycle. The monitor gives you information. The information gives you confidence. The confidence gives you better performance. The better performance gives you better results, which further increase your confidence.
Scott Alexander writes about confidence as the most important thing for any performer, and he identifies its source not as innate talent but as preparation. Monitors are preparation made audible. They are the live equivalent of the video review that happens after a show — except they happen during the show, in real time, when you can still act on what you learn.
What Happens Without Monitors
I want to be honest about the reality that many performing situations do not include monitors. House parties. Small restaurant gigs. Events where the sound system consists of a single portable speaker and a handheld mic. In these contexts, asking for a monitor wedge is not realistic.
Harlan’s grandmother technique is the non-amplified solution: visualize the most distant audience member and project to them. For amplified situations without monitors, I have developed a modified approach that combines the grandmother technique with spatial awareness.
Before the show, I walk the room. I stand at my performance position and have someone play music through the house speakers at show volume while I listen from stage. I walk into the audience and listen from various positions. I ask the sound engineer or a colleague to speak into the mic from my performance position while I listen from the back row. I am building a mental model of the room’s acoustics — how much echo, how much delay, how much volume drop-off — so that during the performance, I can compensate for what I cannot directly hear.
It is imperfect. It will always be imperfect compared to the real-time feedback of a monitor. But it is dramatically better than performing with no awareness of the acoustic gap at all.
The Rehearsal Implication
Here is a practical consequence that connects to the broader practice framework. If your show will include monitors in performance, you should practice with monitors — or a reasonable approximation of monitors.
In my hotel room practice sessions, I have started using a simple setup: a small portable speaker placed on the floor in front of me, connected to my phone, playing back the music tracks I use in my show. This is not a real monitor. It does not feed my voice back to me. But it gives me the experience of hearing the music from the same spatial relationship I will have on stage — coming from below and in front, rather than from headphones or a speaker behind me.
The difference in how I relate to the music is surprising. With headphones, the music is inside my head. With a speaker on the desk behind me, the music is disconnected from the performance space. With a speaker on the floor in front of me, the music is in the room, occupying the same space I am working in, and my movements and timing naturally begin to sync with it in a way that feels organic rather than forced.
Small adjustment. Significant impact. The kind of marginal gain that accumulates over time into something that audiences feel even if they cannot name.
The Night in Linz, Revisited
I performed at the same venue in Linz eight months after that first show where I had been shouting without knowing it. This time, my technical rider included a monitor wedge. During the sound check, I worked with the engineer to set a mix that gave me clear voice and music at a comfortable level. During the show, I could hear myself.
I spoke naturally. I spoke at the volume I would use in a conversation with a friend. The speakers carried that natural voice to every seat in the room, and I could hear the monitor confirming that it was working. My pacing was relaxed. My music cues landed on the beat. My whispered moments were whispered rather than murmured at half-volume because I was too afraid to drop lower.
After the show, the same event organizer who had diplomatically noted the “quite powerful” sound at my first appearance said something different this time. “That was smooth,” she said. “Really smooth. The sound was perfect.”
Nothing about my material had changed. Nothing about my skill level had fundamentally transformed in eight months. What changed was that I could hear what the audience was hearing. That single piece of information — the real-time feedback from a speaker wedge on the stage floor — transformed the experience from one where I was fighting the room to one where I was working with it.
Monitors do not make you a better performer. They make you an informed performer. And in live performance, information is the foundation on which every good decision is built.
The distance between performing deaf and performing informed is one small speaker on the stage floor. Ask for it. Insist on it. And then listen to what it tells you.