I don’t think it would be presumptuous of me to think that readers of this site probably spend quite a lot of time at gigs. Whether on stage or in the audience, musicians (and VJs) spend plenty of time in loud environments.

I find it quite surprising then, that relatively few of the artists I know use any kind of hearing protection. Stereocilia damage in mammals is permanent, and tinnitus is no fun. Most people know that cheap foam earplugs can help prevent damage, but few seem aware that a slightly larger investment can make gigs considerably more enjoyable.

Etymotic ER-20 are affordable (around US$12), semi-professional, one-size-fits-most earplugs. Their biggest advantage over disposable, foam plugs is their reasonably flat attenuation. Foam and other disposable plugs tend to cut out more high frequencies, causing everything to sound muffled.

When I was learning to VJ, playing 6-hour sets alongside whichever DJs or live acts were in town on the weekend, I always kept a box of foam earplugs in my box-of-adapters-and-miscellaneous-cables. They stopped the tinnitus after a night of throwing photons around the place, but I was loath to use them at bands I’d paid to see. If I was exchanging money for music, I wanted to hear every nuance, even if it made my ears considerably less nuanced the following day.

Fortunately, I was introduced to nice earplugs by a mild-mannered musician who happens to make bionic ears when he’s not hanging upside down playing guitar. The ER-20 plugs aren’t quite as easy on the ear canal as the soft foam-rubber disposable ones, but the slight physical discomfort is definitely worth the increased listening comfort. Not only do they protect your hearing, but for particularly loud PA systems, I find that they allow me to hear the band much more clearly.

The first show I used them at was Mogwai, one of my favorite groups, who I hadn’t been able to see in 7 years. In the middle of the set I tried a couple of songs without the plugs, but found that replacing them allowed me to discern more detail in the wall of sound.

One caveat: I’d be careful using them in a boisterous crowd.  The plastic stems extend a bit beyond the outer ear, and I can imagine a physical blow to the side of the head could lodge them somewhere near your brain stem. To protect yourself from that fate, 20x the investment will give you some custom molded earplugs, and the molding can be used for in the future for an excitingly expensive in-ear monitor system.

For now, I’m happy with the ER-20.

(Available from Amazon.com: US$10)

Speaking as a sometimes-music-journalist, I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion that we were all part of a vast conspiracy. Our job can become wrapping big-name artists into a polished, glamorous narrative. There are small nods to humanizing them, of course, but the message can quickly become: this person is special and different from you, this is the person you should want to be or want to consume, and as a result you’ll buy our magazine. I’ve never believed that myself, and I do believe a lot of great music writing is something very different, but there’s always that danger looming somewhere in the background.

Of course, now it’s 2009. We’re nowadays broadcasting minute details of our lives in real time, blurring the line between celebrity and nobody. We have all become a kind of text-only cinema verité. It can be downright scary to expose yourself that way, even as a non-celebrity. But then, in the occasional high-quality corner of a service like Twitter, something extraordinary happens: the little, insignificant moments of your life can actually prove to be what you want them to be. “Live each day like it’s your last” becomes “live each day like you’ll be pleased to read about it, even 140 characters at a time.”

Combine a really gifted creative imagination with a special kind of personal insight, and Twitter tells the side of a story a music journalist can’t: the day-to-day life of making music. Imogen Heap has been unusually generous with her Tweets. Following her Twitter feed, I think you’ll find new appreciation for her as a person and an artist, and also some of the ways all of us can work through day-to-day creative challenges and juggling to actually make music. It demonstrates that a world in which artists live-broadcast what they’re doing (but in the right quantities, and with the right attitudes) could be more utopia than dystopia.

Oh yeah, and thank God there’s a musician who drinks coffee sometimes and not just tea, and who gets a little wired.

NIN: Echoplex – Live at Rehearsals, July 2008 from Nine Inch Nails on Vimeo.

Jaymis at Create Digital Motion was admiring this video and watching the Lemur action at the beginning. It further inspires me to custom-install a touch overlay on my laptop, which isn’t terribly expensive – having touch in a live playing situation is really quite nice.

But as I watched the video and its modular synth action and Novation gear, I actually found myself thinking about something else: why aren’t more bands this tight? Most importantly, why don’t more bands simply use in-ear monitors when they’re working? Lots of bands now are adding drum machines again, working with more complex rhythms and harmonies, mixing electronic and acoustic elements. Yet you’ll often see them playing live trying to stay together with a monitor on the floor, and they not surprisingly go out of tune and out of step.

Shure makes a number of fairly affordable models with different in-ear attachments for adapting to different situations. Frankly, just about anything would work. There’s also no crime to routing a separate output with a click track. That’s something even a lot of “serious music” contemporary composers are doing these days. It’s not always the right answer, but there are now situations across genres where it makes sense.

The main thing is, set up so you can take advantage of the musicianship you’ve got. And on that note, while readers here regularly knock Nine Inch Nails – something along the lines of, “if they weren’t NIN, you wouldn’t care” – imagine if you hadn’t heard of this band. They’re an extraordinary group of musicians. Plenty of brilliant musicians labor in obscurity, but it is comforting to know that some of the light of fame is hitting people who can play amazingly well.

Now, sing along: “You will never ever ever ever / own this much gear.”

What? That’s not what they’re singing?

(Actually, the lyrics “You will never ever ever ever get to me in here” can also work nicely on the door to your music studio.)

NIN Visuals:

For once, the visual environment is actually upstaging the sound gear lust. See this video on the “stealth” LED screens, cameras, particles, and … lasers. Mmmmm, lasers.

LEDs In The Sky: MomentFactory’s “Show Environment” for Nine Inch Nails [Create Digital Motion]

Moving house is a tiresome affair at the best of times, but takes a whole new level of energy when you are basically something of a geek. When you have a room converted into a studio and most rooms in your house or apartment contain at least some element of gadgetry spilling out with a mess of chargers, documentation, manuals or interfaces then you probably don’t want to move often. Or at all. Much like learning the tooth fairy is not real (sorry) or realising that Sony has nothing but contempt for its customers (blackhat) it is an inevitability. It will happen. When it does, consider some of these tips that I have found useful in my own recent moving.

1. Keeper of boxes

Keep boxes for your studio visual monitors – such as LCD screens – and your studio audio monitors – such as reference speakers. For sake of shipping for repairs or warranty claims, and given their delicacy, it pays to keep the boxes for your studio monitor speakers in any case. This stuff is the most difficult to do without should something happen to it, so more than most other items you should consider packing down and storing these boxes where possible.

2. Plastic storage treasure

Plastic storage containers are much better then cardboard boxes for cables and electronic gear that might be affected by moisture and dust, or require some greater protection from clumsy handling. With the clip-on lids it only takes a small band of packing tape over the handles to secure, and they can be stacked for storage afterward. If they are unpacked after the move, they fit neatly enough inside each other for storage, and are always useful for shepherding gear around where sherpas are rare.

3. Pull the power

If you are like me you will have packed the bedroom, bathrooms, kitchen and lounge room well before you will even have moved one item from the studio or studio space. There are always so many projects to work on, so many great sites to read, and so much internet to download. You are addicted to being awesome. Go cold turkey. Pull the power to your computers, unplug the studio monitors, turn the modem/router off and disengage. Commit to the move and the hunger to get precious interwebz and megahurtz again will motivate you to hurry up and finish the process!

Electronic musician BT recently had US$150,000 in gear stolen from his studio, including his primary show computer with the entire This Binary Universe show on it and rigs for two other live shows and recording. He doesn’t just want to get his stuff back, though: he also wants to help musicians protect themselves from a similar fate. Few of us have studios worth anywhere near that amount, but losing your whole rig: priceless.

Among the loot: a Dave Smith PolyEvolver, serial #271, a Hartmann Neuron with BT’s patches, and a loaded Apple Mac Pro with This Binary Universe. All pretty priceless; the Neuron and PolyEvolver would be tough to replace and the Mac Pro has a whole show on it. To get them back, BT is offering a $20,000 reward or equivalent time as a producer to anyone with a name and address.

BT Theft Announcement and Proposals on MySpace

Via electronic music site Filter 27

And this would just be another painful gear theft story, except BT wants to go further:

1. Protecting gear from theft: He wants to start a simple subscription service to register and thumbprint gear, so it can be easily traced to retailers and online auction sites. (Note that New York’s Sam Ash, for instance, does just this for used gear and coordinates with the NYPD, but with online sites, tracking just got a lot harder.)
2. Giving music tech gear to the needy: He wants to collect new and user gear to give to musicians and producers who can’t afford it.

While the second one is an interesting idea, I’m not exactly sure how it would work here — and there are other, worthy organizations dedicated to this idea. But helping protect gear from theft sounds ideal. BT is looking for lawyers, musicians, and vendors to donate.

Know of similar initiatives? Or think you might be able to help with this? Let us know in comments. Know where BT’s gear is? Email gear@binaryacoustics.com