Marc Reck

Its been a long time coming, but they have just arrived. It was quite a process to get here, so thought i’d demystify it a little.

First you have to make sure your ears are nice and clear, so that an impression can be taken. This involves a trip to your local nurse, who will have a look and let you know. If they aren’t clear (of wax naturally) then you book an appointment to have your ears syringed. This is painless, and its a jet of warm water into your ear, which in effect flushes out ear canal.

Before you go for syringing, you have to use olive oil to soften the wax. They say you have to do it 5 days before, twice a day. You can actually get away with just doing it a couple of days before if you forget like i did.

Then when you’re all clear you book an appointment with the closest ear impression guy and he does the impression. Again it’s painless, and they just put in a load of expandable stuff, which forms the ear impression. They do put something into stop the expandable stuff going into your ear, and  the whole process takes about 20 mins.

Then they send off the impression and you get your earplugs.

Earplugs cost about £150 (which includes the ear impression). I got the Er-15’s, which on first impression seem to be a little too much, though i am in my studio where i can’t whack it up too loud. You can get different filters, and i expect they take a little getting used to. At the moment they feel like when you put your fingers in your ears and its hard to hear the bass when i bring a record in.

They worth it to save your hearin, but like anything i hope they do what they are supposed to – e.g save your ears and hear everything well enough and allow you dj.

More news as is it breaks, and drop us a comment if you have any experience of earplugs and djing.

Soundcloud is a fairly new service that i’ve been a member of since beta testing. It “lets you move music fast & easy. The platform takes the daily hassle out of receiving, sending & distributing music for artists, record labels & other music professionals”. For me i thought it would a nice way of sharing mixes and tracks as the player’s really nice, and getting feedback as the (customisable) player allows comments.

I bought the pro lite account, which allows me to upload a fair amount of tracks each month, so next stop is uploading own tracks and getting some feedback.

There’s a free account open to all, which limits the amount of uploads, users you can follow, and sets that are shown. Seems like a great service but this year will tell.