In-ear monitors

When you are playing live, monitors are a must when it comes to playing any kind of rock music. Really just loud music in general, you need to be able to hear not only yourself, but the rest of the band as well. Especially for drummers considering everyone's amps are usually set up in front of us with most of the sound projecting towards the crowd. As we all know, drums are loud, and if you want to be able to hear your monitor it will have to be louder than your drums. This means not only are your drums already blaring in your ears, but now you have a monitor blaring as well. All in all, it's not good for your hearing. After every show my ears are ringing for hours. Sometimes they are even still ringing when I wake up the next morning. Most people would say "Just wear some ear plugs!" but lets face it, most musicians don't like wearing ear plugs. Yes, they protect your hearing, but they also make everything all muffled and they are really just kind of annoying. So what's the solution? In-ear monitors. They block out most of the ambient noise and you can send everything you want to hear right into your ears, controlling your own volume so you dont have to blow out your ear drums.

As most of you probably know, good in-ear monitors are expensive, but this is where the old saying "You get what you pay for," comes into play. I knew they were expensive but I thought I really needed to get some. They would really protect my hearing. I would always be able to hear everything and control the volume myself, and the custom molds would keep them from falling out of my ear like some of my ear buds did in the past (I play to a click track so I always have ear buds in whether they are for monitors or not). So I decided to go with a company called Alien Ears.

First off, their customer service was practically non-existent. I paid for a rush order and still got them later than they promised, but as long as they did what I needed them to do I didn't really care. They were finally finished and delivered to our hotel in Chicago the night before our show there. I got to listen to a little music on them to get used to the sound. They sounded pretty good I guess, but not as good as I was expecting. They did block out all of the sound and fit real tight so that was cool.

Anyway, onto the sucky part. So I played my first show with them in Chicago that night and they did pretty good until about 3/4's of the way into the set. Everything was going great until all of a sudden I felt a bead of sweat go down between my ear mold and my ear. That wasn't a big deal, but then it got into the actual monitor somehow. At this point it sounded like some headphones after they got wet. Everything just sounded like a bunch of jumbled up noise. I took that one ear monitor out just to keep from ruining it and played the rest of the show with the other one in.

So the next night we played in Pittsburgh. I had the same issue, except this time it happened in both ears and ruined the speaker in the one that got wet the night before. They lasted two shows! The next day I called Alien Ears. No one answered so I left a message. I ended up leaving 3 messages and sending an email over the course of 4 days before someone got back to me. After a few days I finally got a response and ended up sending them back so they could re-fit them. It took about a month and a half to get them back. We were on tour again at this point so I was able to try them out in a live setting for a second time. Long story short I ended up having the exact same problems. I called and emailed them again and no one ever got back to me, so I just gave up.

 I realize this could have been a problem with my actual ear MOLDS and maybe if I went to the audiologist and had them redone it would have fixed the problem, but after I dealt with the Alien Ears customer service, I decided it wasnt even worth it until I was ready to spend $1000+ on some Ultimate Ears or JH Audio's. I wouldn't have minded the bad customer service so much if they had at least been friendly on the phone, but for the most part they were rude and treated me like I was an idiot. I learned a little but about customer service when I was waiting tables and the most important thing is to make the customer happy. If that isn't your main focus then you should forget about running any kind of business.

For my short term solution, I went out and bought some Ultimate Ears ear buds from best buy for $60 and they sound awesome and get the job done for now.

What's the moral? Don't buy Alien Ears.

Catch ya on the flip side,
Casey