Protecting your hearing while editing patches

Only horror stories here mate. You learn pretty quickly that resonance knob can be vicious.

- Keep a hand on the volume control
- Don't use headphones, they are dangerous.
- Keep your levels extremely low
- Don't use headphones
- Emergency Button/Ejection Seat
- Buy Monitors
- Stand directly in front of the stack at the next concert you're at.

Honestly tho, if you're hearing isn't already damaged, do you really need to listen at extreme levels? With decent monitors, or headphones, conversation level should be enough to reveal the details. You might like mixing a bit hotter, but modest levels are still going to help protect your ears, reduce fatigue,and often give you a better sense of the sound(see Fletcher Munson).

That said, I have to remind myself to turn the cans down too, it's easy to get lost and forget.

From when I used to DJ for a small FM radio station, I remember that the station used a compressor/limiter in the signal path to provide good reception for the listeners without exceeding the FCC-mandated limits on our power output. However, my understanding of how compression works and what the settings mean is nil.

I was thinking about possibly throwing a compressor or limiter effect on the patch output during patch editing to limit the dynamic range of the sound while doing editing and remove it once the patch sounds good, but I don't really know enough about compression to know whether this is a sensible approach or if it would fundamentally alter the character of the sound such that after you got the patch how you wanted it and removed the compressor/limiter the patch would sound drastically different. Does anybody do this sort of thing and, if so, what settings do you use so that the compressor/limiter constrains the dynamic range but doesn't fundamentally change the character of the sound?

Yeah, compression would be a bad idea as it would alter the sound, the transients, frequency balance. It just wouldn't work like that because, like you said, it constrains the dynamic range.

Cool that you DJ'd on the radio. A lot of people don't realize that material on the air is squashed to pieces. I was listening recently to a pop station and could actually hear the compressors squashing and pumping in my phones. It was bloody terrible.

In their case, compressors aren't to 'limit' the signal to your ears at all. Quite the opposite; they are trying to push as much percieved volume(RMS) into that limited bandwidth. Sadly enough, it's another version of the loudness war.

I think the easy solution is still just turn it down. If you're concerned, a sound level meter isn't a bad idea either.

SHURE SRH 840 PROFESSIONAL MONITORING HEADPHONES `

This Headphone set is mainly designed for Musicians and Sound Engineers.

You will be able to hear the finest sound details, without pumping decibels.




EDIT: WRONG HEADPHONE ATTACHMENT

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This is the right one !

Simple suggestion, when you tweak resonance and cutoff after it, just turn the volume down a bit... works really well