Drummers are a breed apart. They create the primal element in most popular music. The drumbeat gets people’s hearts pounding, their feet stomping, and their souls soaring.
There’s something wild and primal about what they do for a living. But one of the most enigmatic elements about them is that, in the 21st century, you’ll frequently see them wearing distinctly un-wild and un-primal headphones.
At practice, at recording sessions, and most of all at live performances – wild and crazy drummers in snug and comfortable headphones.
What the hell gives with drummers and headphones?
Actually, there are several different reasons why it’s important for drummers to wear headphones. So the real answer to why drummers wear headphones when playing live is that it depends on the drummer, the band, the kind of music they play, and other factors besides.
But when it comes to live performances, there are a few reasons that stand out from the crowd.
Hearing Protection
Firstly, drummers have ears, and if they have half the sense they were born with, they will want to protect them.
Drum headphones equate to ear protectors that absorb on average a minimum of 20db of sound because sitting at a drum kit playing live for any appreciable amount of time without ear protection will be almost guaranteed to lead to hearing loss and possibly even tinnitus and deafness.
This should be non-negotiable whenever you play drums live. Even a short session playing drums will be enough to begin the process of damaging your hearing through high decibel noise.
So reason #1 why drummers wear headphones when playing live – hearing protection when otherwise exposed to extremely loud noise over long periods.
In case you’re wondering how drummers can block out the sounds of the drums and still know what they’re playing – the headphones only block out the harmful high-frequency sounds.
That means their ears are protected, but they can still hear what they’re playing, so headphones on drummers are the best of both worlds.
Click Tracks
When you’re a drummer playing live, there is a lot of sensory input to deal with, but you’re also charged with some vital sensory output. It’s usually the drummer who keeps the band in time.
By slipping on some headphones, you can not only calm the raging sounds around, you can add a click track to your ears.
What’s a click track?
Simply a track with a recorded click that runs at the same tempo as the song being played. It allows you to shut out the extraneous input and focus on what you need to be putting out in order to keep the band in time and stop the songs from going entirely freelance and organic all over the time signature.
This is by no means mystic drummer-sorcery – or is it? Most modern bands are using click tracks to keep to time. With some complex arrangements, bands are not only playing their live instruments, but need to keep in sync with pre-recording elements too, and that means the need for pure synchronization is intense.
Therefore, these days, while everything about the tempo and the rhythm begins and ends with the drummer, you might well find more band members than the drummer wear headphones to synchronize their click tracks, so they know exactly when to play exactly what.
This is also extremely useful when it comes to reining in enthusiasm – because some songs energize the crowd and the musicians both, a thing called tempo creep can come in, where you get faster and faster without realizing it until the song’s structure is almost at breaking point.
Slip on your headphones, listen to the click track, and you’ll resist the urge to speed up much more easily because it won’t be indicated by the clicking in your head.
Shutting Out Unnecessary Stage Noise
As a drummer, if you wear headphones with in-ear monitors, what you have is an alternative to the noisy stage environment, which can be the norm if your band or venue uses a combination of conventional monitors and large-scale amplifiers.
Headphones with in-ear monitors help you avoid the high noise floor of that combination, but a little ironically, if all the band members wear in-ear monitors, rather than using conventional monitors, it can actually substantially lower the on-stage noise floor anyway.
The Monitoring Mix
If you wear headphones at a live gig, you can use them to give you an idea of the monitor mix.
What does that mean? Simple – most of the sound of your band will be coming from sources in front of you, and the sound waves will mostly be traveling forward, away from you.
If you have the monitoring mix fed through to your headphones, you can hear the band’s performance as it sounds coming through the monitors. So you’ll get a much better idea of how your band actually sounds through your headphones than you would through your unprotected ears.
Combining that with the likes of a click track will help you get an idea of how the songs as they’re performed are sounding compared to how they should be sounding, and allows you to impose the discipline of rhythm and tempo from your seat behind the kick drum if you need to.
Staying Calm
With everything that could be coming through a drummer’s headphones, it’s vital to the rhythm of the band that they stay as calm and composed as can be.
Using headphones acts as a set of audio blinkers for drummers, to keep them focused on everything they need to know to keep the pulse of the music flowing, through click tracks, and monitoring mixes.
Isolating drummers from the flotsam and jetsam of performance and distraction keeps them calm. Calm drummers are effective drummers, so headphones also help to keep them isolated from unnecessary distraction. That makes for happier, more in-time drummers and a better performance overall.