Anyone use the Eargasm ear plugs?

rocker261

Junior Member
I have a hybrid drum setup: real drums with the Silent Stroke heads and triggers mounted to them, along with real cymbals. I run the triggers to a Roland brain, and have mics on the cymbals. I run everything thru a mixer and then to headphones.

The problem is that even though the headphone I have are pretty good about rejecting outside sound, I still hear a muffled tone from the cymbals. Thus I find myself needing to turn up the overall volume loud enough in my headphones (which has a nice clear mix of drums and cymbals) loud enough to overcome the muffled ambient cymbal tone bleeding in the headphones. Over time, that is taking a toll on my ears.

I figured that getting some "high fidelity" ear plugs, the ones which reduce overall volume while keeping the frequency fairly flat might help. I though if I wear those while also having the headphones on, it would reduce the ambient sound of the cymbals even further, allow me to turn up the overall headphone volume enough to compensate, and have a nice clear mix ultimately.

I tried the Hearos high fidelity model, and they actually worked as I stated above. My only problem is that I would like even more db reduction than those provided. It looks like the Eargasm brand provide a little more reduction than the Hearos does. But they are 3 times the price too. Anyone have any experience with Eargasm?
 
The only way I found to truly neutralize the 'clack' of hitting a triggering surface was to put a close directional mic to that surface then duck(look up ducking for sound processing on the internet) the feed from my mixer based on that 'clack' input to my ears while wearing in-ear monitors and high db dampening headphones over that(or as a line feed to a recording device).

Anything else will get close but will not drop it out unless you are at high acoustic volumes and can set a level too little to be passed on (aka Noise Gate) which appears it will not work in your situation...and didnt work for me as I wanted full dynamics to be clean.

A combo of ducking the 'clack' and a noise gate with some EQ mucking about was how it ended up working for me.

In your situation you could try putting a mic above your head to pick up the acoustic sound then wear noise cancelling headphones over your in-ear monitors. The 'clack' should be minimal especially with a little Noise Gate set....but then you pick up other ambient sounds...bus breaks...sirens...yelling of people as they pass...etc...

I have never tried those monitors...and highly suggest trying your hand at a bit of sound processing beyond built in features as it will pay off in the long run to understand how to capture/transform your sound via electronics.

I ended up learning how to make printed circut boards and making my own audio processing units as I was DIRT poor at the time...served me well as time passed. You can find schematics for different processing needs...then build it!
 
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