Usually, when you’re recording parts, your song isn’t mixed yet. That means if vocalists, for example, don’t want to hear the scratch vocal but do want to hear themselves awash in chorus, reverb, and delay, simply handing them headphones won’t give them what they want. Luckily, nearly every modern recording app allows you to create separate headphone mixes.
In your DAW or recording app, create a separate auxiliary track (or bus, depending on your application), and give it a descriptive name; for our example, “Vox Phones” or the like. Then add a send on every track with material that the vocalist wants to hear. Send that auxiliary track to your interface’s headphone outputs or a separate set of line outs from your main monitor outputs into a headphone amplifier, and that’s it! You’ve just created a separate headphone mix.
Note that with some audio interfaces, there may be issues with latency or delays in the headphone outputs when overdubbing parts. In this case, the interface usually comes bundled with a utility mixer app that allows you to create a separate headphone mix with no latency issues.
Depending on your audio interface you may need to buy an additional headphone amp or distribution box to drive headphones off those outputs. If you’re recording multiple musicians simultaneously, you can use this method to create as many additional simultaneous separate headphone mixes as you need, assuming you have enough independent headphone or line outputs available on your audio interface.