Drummer/vocalist on-stage monitoring problems

We have a drummer who sings well and has begun singing lead vocals in several songs and harmonies in most of the songs we perform. He is an excellent power drummer who does NOT hit softly, and he cannot do so (think Bonham and you'll understand). During rehearsals, we can adjust the PA so that he can hear himself and the other vocalist well enough (even with having earplugs in) to sing the leads and harmonies perfectly.

Our problem: Live gigs are a completely different story. He is unable to hear himself or the other vocalist in the stage monitors above his kit and the bass and guitar in the stage monitors. We have tried lowering/raising levels of instruments and vocals in the monitors for him, but if the instruments are dropped too low, he can't hear them, and this causes a problem as he cannot figure out what song we're playing, etc.(duh!). Raising the levels of the vocals in the monitor mix doesn't work, as the drum kit then gets picked up way to much through his vocal mic and starts to feed back, which is not good. As it stands, he cannot sing harmonies or leads well live, because he can't hear himself at all.

He is currently singing through an SM58. We have tried one of the Audio Technica dynamic headset mics, and that didn't work well. He had a crown condenser headset mic, and that was even worse (way too sensitive).

I was thinking that perhaps if he were to use an in-ear monitoring solution, he could then unplug the onstage monitor speaker (use that as the input for the in-ear system), and turn up the vocals in the monitor mix so he could hear them without getting all the feedback. Would this work?
…If so, what are some good products to look at?
…If not, what are your suggestions to solve this problem?

Any (relevant) ideas/comments/suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks!

-mr moon

In the limited world that I am around, heres what I have seen in the bands around me. Each one uses either a shure sm58 or beta58

A - Two EAW monitors (boxes - not wedges) with vox in one and instruments in other. The boxes seem to do much better because they can get right near the ear, they are always placed off axis - never directly at the mic. This seems to work real well for this guy. He insists on having the guitar and bass amps pushed ahead of his hearing enough to just get the mix he wants out of the boxes. If they are behind him, the monitor mix has to be pushed so loud, it ends up with out of control feedback.

B - A EAW wedge monitor, again off axis, and IEM 300 G2 in ears with custom ear buds. The one drawback is that the buds sometimes fall out. She likes both at the same time, getting the low end reference from the box for beat and the reference to her voice from the buds.

C - AKG Headphones with 30db of isolation. This seemed to work really well for this drummer - he was a meat fisted guy. The drawback is sweat in the ears, but this option produced great results for him.

You can see its pretty varied, what my take away has been for all three is - get the very best transducer you can (afford). We use EAW/Sennhieser/AKG.

We do not get a lot of feedback from A or B and I can't ever hear C with the exception of the drummer screaming in pain and tossing them off - it could be the EAW products, it could be we have a graphic EQ on each monitor we use, it could also be that the instrument amps are pushed ahead of the drums so that the monitors do not have to be as loud to get past thier levels. I don't know since I am not the sound guy, but you may want to look at testing each of these items.

Best Regards,

Lance