I’ve long been a big proponent of In-Ear Monitors—IEMs—and really think that, for me, the evolution of this technology has been an amazing windfall.

Not everyone likes ’em. And it’s understandable why, as, like with most things in life, there are tradeoffs and someone who is accustomed to playing with wedge monitors will doubtlessly experience growing pains when making the switch. But I’ve always been a big proponent of IEMs.

I first started using them before I knew that they were called “In-Ear Monitors.” I didn’t know what to call them, I just knew I stumbled upon something that was working for me.

Here’s my history and how I ended up where I’m at, monitor-wise. Much of what I am going to say here ultimately comes back to this next truth:

Drums are Loud

They really are! Granted, at a certain point—like playing an arena or big theatre—drums will need to be mic’d up; but there are a great many situations (most bar bands playing local venues, for example) where the drums don’t require additional amplification.

How many instruments are like that?

Not many. Whereas guitars, vocals, and the like require amplification to get them audible in a mid-sized room, drums are the opposite: there are tricks employed to keep them from being too loud, like the use of brushes or rods, putting them behind plexiglass sound shields, or ditching them completely and replacing them with a cajon or hand percussion. Drums can be, by their very nature, too loud for their own good. And that’s only speaking to how it relates to the music. There is also the issue of how it affects the drummer’s ears.

Going Deaf

Hearing loss is a product of aging in the best scenarios, and for musicians who surround themselves with loud music, it’s an occupational hazard, to say the least. Especially for drummers.

You know what’s really loud? A snare drum crack or a crash cymbal whack about a foot away from your head. You know what’s really good for hastening hearing damage? Those same things.

A Fender Telecaster
And a Vibro-Champ
Sounds like holy hell
’Cause that ain’t enough amp
To get above the drummer
You’ll never reach your goal
So just turn it up to 10 and call it rock and roll
—“Lo-Fi,” by The Bottle Rockets

All rock musicians play loud and most like to play loud, and I think the lyric above speaks a lot to why: you need to get above the drums! We all end up playing in dangerously loud situations, and I think it starts here.

Back to the loud drums… When I was in high school and first playing drums in loud, hard rock bands, I noticed something curious. It took a few whacks of the drum kit and a minute or so of full-immersion to the crunchy overdrive of the backline amps to get acclimated.

It was like the ear’s version of jumping into a cold water. You know how when you immerse yourself in an unheated pool or ocean water, there is that first 30 seconds—and in particular that first intense 2 seconds–where you’re like, “Holy fucking shit, this is cold!!” Sure, in a minute or so, you get acclimated and it actually feels good! Great, even! super-refreshing. But upon first submersion, there’s a brief moment where you think, “Sweet Jesus, I think I’m going to die!”

That what it’s like for me when I immediately subject myself to loud drums hit at full-volume. Once I acclimate, it sounds wonderful. But the first few whacks are jarring. It doesn’t hurt, per se. But it doesn’t “feel” or sound pleasant. It takes some acclimation.

I didn’t mind doing that… but it hardly seemed healthy. It seemed like a bad idea. It felt like I was purposely doing temporary damage to my ears in order to make them better equipped to handle the volume.

Foam Plugs

I think it was during my first year of college that the lead singer in my band said, “Check these out” and he handed me two foam plugs.

You know, ear plugs. Hearing protection. In the twenty-first century, they’re every where in music circles and musicians have largely gotten wise to the idea that going deaf is not hip. Granted, most players still don’t use ear plugs, because they kind of suck, but we’re at least aware of the risks and not using them is a choice we make knowingly. But around 1990 or so—at least in my circles—plugging up wasn’t really something we ever even considered.

I know I didn’t, until my singer showed me the foam plugs. He was experimenting with them. I was game to try. I rolled them up and deeply seated them in my ear canal and whacked my drums.

Most people hated the plugged up, distant feeling they got wearing them, but I had an epiphany that day. I kind of like them! Not only was their no “acclimation window” and period of time post-rehearsal where I had to wait for my ears to “come down” and stop ringing, but it also kind of made the drums sound compressed, like they sound on a professional recording. No overly clangy snare overtones. No excessive cymbal shimmer. It made drums, which are cacophonous by nature (and more so when they’re poorly tuned like ones in shitty rehearsal studios or rehearsal rooms set up by 18-year-olds), sound somewhat processed, refined.

Others will disagree, and, yes, too much plugging is bad, but I came to appreciate the sound of loud drums with some of the overtones filtered out.

If the music in the room was loud enough—and to be sure, with the kind of music I played at age 18, the guitar players were only too happy to keep it loud—playing with ear plugs might have been fine.

There was one big, big problem through.

Singing with Ear Plugs is Thoroughly Awful

As long as I have been drumming in bands, I have been singing in bands… at the very least back-up vocals, which is what I was doing in the early days. And with every passing year of my music-playing since those very early days, the singing end became a more important part of my gig.

First unison and gang backing vocals started giving way to more focus on harmony singing, where pitch and musicality is of utmost importance. And by my early-to-mid twenties, I began regularly singing lead vocals in projects I was involved in and that has become a big part of what I do.

And plugs don’t cut it. Not for me, anyway, and not for many.

Stick your fingers in your ears and talk. G’head. Try it now. Hear how your voice unnaturally vibrates and bounces around the inside of your head, all while making you feel weird and plugged up? At best it sounded like crap to me, which is very uninspiring, musically. At worst, it was impossible to work with. All I hear is my own head voice. How am I supposed to hear someone else singing across the room when I’m all plugged up internally? And when I can’t hear that, doesn’t it make it harder to find a harmonic pitch to accompany the lead? Harmony singing is challenging enough in the best of situations. Poor sound makes it nearly impossible.

There were other kinds of ear plugs, of course, and not just foam ones. Ones that stack little tiers of attenuation, ones with filters and ambient sound holes, and a bunch of others. But they all suffered from the same sort of issues, plus there was a sliding scale of inversely-proportional effectiveness. The more you dialed back the plug, the better they sounded, but the less they protected your ears. Sigh.

Out-Ear Monitors?

You know those ear-muffs that landscapers and people who shoot guns at shooting ranges use to protect their hearing?

Noted drum manufacturer Vic Firth was the first company I saw who sold what amounted to a pair of those ear-muffs, but with an attached wire that could let you play music into them. It was a brilliant idea, and something I got hip to for in-home use. Up until then, my music practicing habits involved putting traditional headphones or earbuds into my Walkman and cranking the shit out of the music to “get above the drums,” which was good enough for blocking out the drum volume, but, of course, that required the music to be played really loud. It was kind of like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire with respect to hearing protection, you know?

Now, with these Vic Firth style ear-muff thingies (I actually used some knock off brand back in the day), I could block the volume of the drums with the ear-muff part, and still get the feed of the music in my ears. And since the drums were volume-reduced, I could bring the volume of the music down. (Indeed, I was of the first “Walkman Generation” and we were constantly told by parents—even as normal music-listening teenagers and not musicians— that we were all going to go deaf because we played our music too loud in our headphones.)

This was all well and good for playing along to pre-recorded music at home. I didn’t see or know a way to transfer this concept to use while playing with a band. Plus even if I could make it happen, I wasn’t too keen to jumping onto public stages with these big cans on my head that looked like Mickey Mouse ears. But you can see where we are going, right? The concept is falling into place here…

I Didn’t Know These Were Called In-Ears

At a certain point I decided to get very serious about coming up with a good plan. By now I wasn’t a kid anymore—heck I had kids of my own–and my gig schedule was really ramping up a lot and I had higher demands about what I should be willing to put up with in terms of shitty sound… and I was still as interested as ever with taking steps to act least delay hearing loss as I aged. I started looking around Internet searches for basically what I was thinking of as an ear-plug with a music feed channeling through them. I ultimately ended up finding a site for a company called Sensaphonic. If you visit the site today, you’ll see the whole IEM thing is what they’re all about and everything is readily available to the public and fully explained and clear. IEMs, after all, are ubiquitous these days. But at the time, this was all in its infancy. At least for regular people like me who played in local bands. I guess if you were in the Eagles or some other national act, you had people who provided these things to you, but it was brand new to us musical peons.

As such, the information wasn’t just “there” on the website. The website itself was primitive (by today’s standards) and I actually had to get on the phone and call them to discuss this thing I was looking for. All I knew was that I was getting a hunch from what I read that this was a company that could help me. What was really cool was that I was getting the sense from what I read that maybe I could even do this without having to visit an audiologist to get molds of my ears done for custom-fit things. (Which, by the way, is still on my list of things I’ve never done, but would like to to someday do.)

I remember calling them and they said something like, “You have to speak to so-and-so; he’s our expert with this stuff you’re asking about.” Wow! Expert! I was encouraged. He was out of the office or at lunch or something. I left my number and he called back later.

He explained that I would simply need some feed from the soundboard, and that I would wear a little pack on my belt clip that the wired ear plug thingies would plug into. It would have a knob on it. This would allow me to adjust my own volume to suit my needs, without having to go up to the sound board or depend on a sound person to dial it in for me. It sounded wonderful.

“And you think this will help protect my hearing, like an ear plug, you know?” I asked.

“I’m sure of it!” he said. “That’s what we do here!”

I was delighted.

And for the total win? It was affordable! That’s always a bonus, especially when you’re not 100% certain whether it will work or not. The headphone part (the IEMs, though I didn’t know that’s what they were called) was an inexpensive single driver that I think cost about 150 dollars. I don’t remember what the other part of it cost, but I seem to remember maybe the whole thing was about 300 dollars. It was a small price to pay for something that might enrich my musical life and help me protect my ears.

Never Looked Back

From the day I got them, I’ve been an IEM wearer ever since, even if for the first couple years I called them “my ear plug feed thingie” or something like that. At any full-volume show, I use the IEMs. (Acoustic volumes that don’t require full-on drums or any drums at all I can still do without any IEMs, which is the ideal situation if you’re not playing at dangerous decibels.) The rare exception is when I can’t get a sound person to cooperate with me or I can’t find a feed on stage to tap into when working with house backline. But that is becoming increasing rare with each passing year, because, let’s face it: IEMs are everywhere these days.

Today I still have that original pack the Sensaphonic guy sold me, but I don’t really use it, because I have a whole collection now of newer interfaces that serve the same purpose, and I use them for different scenarios. I have some that are wireless, I have some that are wired but tiny for quick set ups, I have some that are more involved and offer greater mixing controls than just volume up and down. In a full-on gig, I will set that up. For a quick show where I have to get on and off quickly, I might use one of the simpler ones. Whatever the right tool is for the job.

Some Other Reasons I Love ’em

So, yeah. I am able to hear and also control drum and stage volume. It’s a win. And that ultimately will be the best reason to use them, for me. But here are some other bonuses:

When Dialed In, They Deliver the Most Amazing Experience

I’m no prima-donna with sound. I just want to be able to hear. I don’t like to stress sound people out, because it’s not my style to get pushy, so I won’t always make elaborate requests about what I hear in my monitors. If you push a sound engineer, especially if they’re inexperienced and don’t fully know what they’re doing, they can get very agitated. So I can usually settle for whatever they can give. But when you can dial the monitoring in to perfect it the way you like it? It’s fabulous.

My favorite story I tell to this end involves a time when I was playing at Mulcahey’s in Wantagh. That’s a professional stage. People far more accomplished than I am play there sometimes. The sound people know what they’re doing there. Still, I went about things with my typical low-demand approach.

“So, I have are these in-ears, which I’m hoping you can send me a feed into.”

“Sure,” he said. “Can you hook it into an XLR cable?”

“Sure,” I said. I carry a bag of adapters and wires and am prepared to make any connection work, because I want to make it easy for a sound person—or for myself, if there is no sound person—to plug me in.

A little later, before getting a soundcheck, I said, “Sorry to bother you again… just curious… what will I get in my in-ears?” The question was basically asking what he was able to put in the feed.

“Whatever you want,” he said. Wonderful! It sounds stupid, because, sure, if you’re playing in a national act, you get whatever you want. But, again, on the local level, we play everywhere and every kind of gig with every kind of PA in every kind of venue. Not everyone can accommodate “whatever you want.”

So I told him what I wanted. “I want the whole mix. Send me all vocals and instruments. Guitar can be a little louder than the bass. Kill the kick drum and bring down the drums in general… I don’t need those too much in the ’ears, I hear them plenty right in the room. And don’t worry about putting my own vocal louder than the rest… I have a “More-Me” bypass thing on my Rolls that can let me control that if I need to hear myself louder.”

And I got phenomenal sound. I wanted to play all night.

But even when I don’’t get that….

Some Sound is Always Light Years Better than No Sound

When I can’t be prima-donna about sound because it’s simply not in the cards—talent of the sound person, technology limitations, or not enough set-up time for switch and set up on multi-band shows—anything I can get is like a huge bonus to me when I think about how many times I played in the past and virtually couldn’t hear anything from the stage monitors. Sound should be a “right” for musicians. On the local scene, it sometimes feels like a “privilege.” The IEMs usually help with this.

No Feedback

Guess what you don’t have to worry about with IEMs? Point your vocal mic a little too much in the direction of a wedge or drum monitor and you can risk feedback. An issue no longer.

All the Cats in Nashville Use ’em…

Or so I have read. So if it’s good for them, it’s good for me.

You can have an economical set up, or you can spend big bucks on advanced drivers or more of them. The sky is really the limit.

If you’ve never used IEMs, you might have some difficulty getting used to them. Old dogs, new tricks and all that nonsense. But I encourage anyone to give them a whirl. Throw it at the wall, see what sticks for you. If you don’t like them, pull ’em out. But I’ll keep using them whenever I can.