You came out of the rehearsal room
and the world sounded like it was underwater.
By morning it had cleared,
so you filed the evening
under a good one.
It did not all clear.
What you heard was tissue
that had been pushed too hard
and had stopped working for a while.
Most of it comes back.
A little of it does not,
and the part that does not
is not coming back later.
Nobody warns you,
because nothing hurts.
Understand the shape of the loss.
It is not a dial turning down.
It is particular frequencies going quiet,
the high ones first,
and the high ones are where
cymbals live, and consonants,
and the difference between
two guitars in the same register.
So the first thing you lose
is not loudness.
It is the ability to tell things apart,
which is the whole of the job.
Then watch what you do about it.
You cannot hear yourself,
so you turn up.
The guitarist cannot hear himself,
so he turns up.
Nobody has ever won that,
and every rehearsal begins
a little louder than the last.
The dull fixes are the ones that work.
Wear the plugs.
The flat ones,
that take the whole mix down evenly,
not the foam that strips the top
and leaves you playing
on feel and hope.
They will sound wrong for a week.
Then they will sound like the room,
and you will start making
better decisions about volume,
because you can finally hear
what is actually going on.
Turn the whole band down
instead of turning one thing up.
It is one conversation,
it takes ten minutes,
and it has never once failed.
Give your ears the rest of the day off.
Silence on the drive home
is part of the practice.
You have one pair.
They are not serviceable,
and everything you want to do
for the next forty years
depends on them staying
better than average.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
