practicing with musician’s earplugs

Everything is loud these days.  Music on the web is mastered especially loud so that people listening back on internal laptop speakers still get that blast-effect on most commercial music.  This elevates the general, perceived standard for how much tolerance we give to something that is loud.  The more we adjust this standard, the more our hearing is at stake.  See The Loudness War.   As musicians, we often find our selves in small concrete rehearsal rooms, and playing venues with  mediocre sound systems cranked to the highest degree.  And if you ride public transit, I highly recommend wearing musician earplugs because train and traffic noise is some of the worst causes of hearing damage on a day-to-day level, but maybe that’s just a New York thing – screeching subway brakes are very fatiguing on the ears.

One of the best investments a professional musician or audio professional can make is in a set of musician earplugs.  These are custom-molded by an audiologist to fit perfectly within your ear canal, that will protect against hearing loss and tinnitus.  The sound quality heard while wearing musician earplugs is identical to sound heard when not wearing them, it simply attenuates the entire frequency spectrum equally.  The biggest challenge is actually wearing them and playing an instrument.   Wind players find them especially disorienting at first since they emphasize all the natural oral sounds produced by your mouth as heard through your jawbone.  Try plugging your ears with your index fingers and chewing a piece of gum to hear an example of what I’m talking about.  This is disorienting at first when all you’re used to is hearing your full, unattenuated sound.  Like most things, in order to perform with musicians earplugs, it is necessary to practice with musician earplugs.

For wind players, there are hidden benefits from practicing with musician’s earplugs:

1) Amplified Articulation: The sound of your tongue movement against the mouthpiece is very clear, which promotes a practice of clean, precise and intentional articulation.

2) Amplified Key noise: Opening and closing keys will produce a mechanical sound heard through your instrument and up into your jaw, revealing inconsistencies of the hand’s rhythmic precision.

It is a meditation to hear these nuances through musician’s earplugs.  Cultivating an awareness to the minutiae details in your sound production will only enhance your performance.  Best of all, it will save your ears from wear and tear.

temptation

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Continuing on the dance front, choreographer Cherice Barton had me sound designing, mixing and mastering her Tom Waits influenced production of Temptation, a ballet performed and commissioned by Canada’s Ballet B.C.

A review straight.com:

But it’s New York–based choreographer Cherice Barton’s Temptation that seems custom-made for the venue’s old-style cocktail atmosphere. Set to Tom Waits’s booze-soaked “Temptation”, “The Piano Has Been Drinking”, and “Jockey Full of Bourbon”, it finds the troupe decked out in speakeasy-vintage fedoras, satin dresses, and garters, twisting and strutting in vignettes that cover the stage, with Léon Feizo Gas lurching around to the drunken opening number. It’s seedy and smoky, with Marianne Grobbelaar’s red-dressed vixen at one point laughing maniacally until she collapses in a crying jag. It could easily fill a much bigger stage, but it’s so much more fun watching it in the faded Legion hall.