Ear protection??

Hi Olly

I do use ear protection but tend to use it more when I go to see a gig. The best thing is to play at a sensible volume onstage.

Obviously if you're playing drums that's not always possible, though some of my favourite drummers play very quietly onstage. The other thing is that if you're playing in a pub band you wouldn't have the budget or space even to install a proper PA system with multi-send foldback etc and when you get excited, the volume goes up. Especially guitarists. Then the poor guy at the back, the one who plays the only true acoustic instrument, the one who's first in and last out, has to work so much harder, so the volume goes up again. Volume is not really so big or clever. Sure it's exciting but it also becomes very tiring.

Don’t get me wrong, one of my favourite places in the world is behind a very loud electric guitar. This is also the best hangover cure I’ve ever found. Most of the time that I was in Fairport, the band was in fact the English drinking team A team disguised as ambassadors of our national heritage and we tested many hangover cures, some more successful than others, but that’s a different book…

When I was at music college we had a Friday afternoon big band rehearsal which entailed quite a large and very thirsty (as they all are) brass section. After the thirsty ones had had one particularly liquid lunch, I took my seat on the bass guitar in front of the trumpet section and the soloist who maybe was not so able to assume the perpendicular decided to blart his drunken rantings straight into my left ear, which never recovered and still gives me grief at large volume. Not so much at loud music, but when people are shouting in a bar or something similar. If I could remember his name I’d sue the b*st*rd.

When I played with Jethro Tull, it was then a stadium rock band and the loudest gig I’ve ever been stageside on. The drums were thounderous as was Dave Pegg’s bass. I had a stereo 300w per side PA as my keyboard rig. However I used to run it at number 5, so it sounded like a million dollars but not loud enough to trouble the singer at the front of the stage who probably didn’t want to hear me particularly anyway. I used to have two monitor wedges on my section of the stage and all I had through them was Ian’s vocal and his acoustic guitar. Everything else I could hear sufficiently from the onstage sources (drums, amps, other wedges, etc) which made me quite popular with the sound crew as I presented no problems for them.

Last year I was privileged to play with Beth Nielsen Chapman opening up for James Taylor in a football stadium in Kilkenny. I’m a big fan of James and his bass player Jimmy Johnson, so we went and sat side stage for most of his gig. You could hardly hear anything. The band had their own in-ear monitoring system and their own mixers so they didn’t need to be loud. Out front it sounded very expensive and totally controlled. Top stuff.

So to conclude –
1. Spend £20 on those Danish earplugs with two separate attenuators which you can swap for different uses. They are totally comfortable and totally transparent frequency-wise. The name escapes me at the minute but ask any pro PA company such as Britannia Row or Wigwam what they’re called.

2. Turn down onstage. Try to persuade the others to do the same, but don't forget to get the r*ck out!!!!

3. Watch out for drunk trumpet players.

Hopefully you’ll be able to hear your grandchildren then. You’ll also be able to feign deafness or deploy selective hearing, which is one of the perks of aging…

Cheers
Maart