This is a straight quote from a Facebook page of Don’s Tunes. And his quote comes from Martin Power’s book, Hot Wired Guitar: The Life of Jeff Beck
Hope it’s ok. As many people don’t use FB I thought the text was best.
Jeff Beck: “I remember my mum warning me about tinnitus,” he later told Clashmusic. “She told me clearly what was going to happen. And that was when amplifiers were [only] five watts. She’d read about someone who had a continuous ringing in his ears. At the time, I equated loud noise with being good. [But] in about 1990, which was when I got it, my drummer was using these giant cymbals, which crashed into each other. I think they’re the worst thing ever. I won’t have them onstage with me ever again.” Best defined as a persistent buzzing, ringing or whistling in one or both ears, tinnitus was often caused by a specific condition such as infection, the side effect of certain drugs, a blocked auditory tube or even head injury. But in musicians it was usually more attributable to the results of playing at high volumes over a protracted period of time, with subsequent (and often irreversible) damage caused to the inner eardrum. Aside from Beck, other high-profile tinnitus sufferers included Neil Young, singer Barbra Streisand and, most notably, Pete Towshend, whose hearing had suffered terribly due to endless nights onstage with the ‘high-decibel’ Who. That said, Jeff could take little consolation from the fact he was not alone in having to deal with it. “You just wouldn’t believe how depressed you get,” he told journalist Richard Johnston. “When you get the slightest bit under the weather, like lack of sleep or depressed, it moves in like a bailiff to kick you out of your head.” In Beck’s case, tinnitus manifested itself as a recurrent “hissing sound” and he investigated several possible cures for the problem – from cochlear implants (only for the deaf) to various drugs and herbal remedies. Yet, while it proved immensely irritating in crowded rooms, where hearing individual voices became maddeningly difficult, the greatest threat was to his livelihood. Without a solution, the potential damage caused by playing an amplified electric guitar at any real volume for even the shortest period of time was too horrible to contemplate. Pursuing a course of trial and error, Jeff was able to finally isolate what worked for him. By rolling all the bass off his amp and carefully adjusting the mid and presence controls, he was able to minimise much of his discomfort, while the use of in-ear monitors for stage work also provided great relief. In the coming years, additional experimentation and further medical treatment would help alleviate much of his distress.
Slightly to my surprise, according to the RNID test, link below, my hearing is fine. I say surprise because I’ve had tinnitus (a high pitched whistle, higher and louder in the left ear) for about 15 years. I absolutely recognise what Jeff says about being tired or under the weather making it much worse. I’m pretty much resigned to it, but it would nice to be able to experience silence ever again.
https://rnid.org.uk/information-and-support/take-online-hearing-check/
I’m just reading that book at the moment. Really good.
I have had it for about 10 years now – a constant ringing in both ears, that I only used to experience the morning after gigs. It is now permanent but much more bearable than when it first happened.
The advice given to me was that I will get used to it – which is true. Talking in a crowded room is a problem and I just have to fess up when I am struggling. I am also fortunate in that we have a babbling brook at the bottom of our garden which is a good night-time ambient soundtrack. A constant noise like that switches the focus and the ringing disappears. If I am away and there’s absolute silence in a room, the tinitus can be awful – so I look to something like a fan or a fridge to make a reliable noise to make it go away.
I’m fortunate enough not to have tinnitus and just passed the Gatz test with flying colours. Whereas Mrs thep has the hearing of a bat and is driven mad by extraneous noise. We had to get a new fridge once because the noise was keeping her awake two rooms away. I suspect that one of the reasons she wanted to move from our last house was that she could hear a constant electronic humming that I couldn’t hear at all. She has been known to put her noise-cancelling headphones on in the cinema. She naturally assumes I’m an old git going deaf. Well, she can put my results in her pipe and smoke it.
I wonder if there’s an actual medical condition that involves abnormally sensitive hearing?
And, as if by magic…from today’s Times.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/761c4a7a-c8b9-11ed-84e7-e2697ffed9a9?shareToken=e8c83fd35dad7f652d58a55859ec6dcf
Late to the party. The Guardian covered it in January. I have an old friend who has this, and especially can’t go to a restaurant because the sound of cutlery on plates drives him mad.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jan/26/misophonia-how-sound-rage-destroys-relationships-and-forces-people-to-move-home
Accidentally hearing Coldplay has this effect I’ve found.
They give me synaesthesia – everything goes yellow.
Offspring the Elder suffers from this, and she’s totally deaf in one ear. Taking the hearing aid out of the good ear helps as it stops amplifying the background noise.
Possibly unrelated, but she’s also not at all keen on bright lights.
I’ve long hated the sound of vacuum cleaners and lately, the sound of crockery/saucepans being carelessly put away. Both are more tolerable if I do the chore myself but we had a particularly noisy vacuum a few years ago and I would sometimes go outside rather than listen to it.
I believe I’m quite well known round here for my loathing of petrol-driven garden machinery. In the popular imagination Australia is a land of deserts, bush, cattle stations the size of East Anglia, and a few forests that haven’t been logged yet. No, Australia is a land of lawns, and lawns must be mown (or mowan as they say in Oz) at every opportunity. As well as whatever grass there is on your property, every house in the suburbs has a patch of grass in front of it, optimistically known as the nature strip. The householder is responsible for keeping this mown. The sound of the suburb I live in is the sound of mowers, whippersnippers and leaf blowers, and the smell is petrol fumes. Rare moments of silence are broken by the arrival of utes driven by ockers built like brick shithouses and towing rattling trailers containing massive mowers that show no sign of having been serviced, ever. The really fun bit is when both our elderly neighbours get their lawans mowan at the same time. It’s significant that the operatives wear ear defenders, but nobody in the firing line gets one. I have been forbidden by the domestic authorities to moan about this any more. Cancelled in my own home, what about free speech, etc. etc. So I’m sharing with you. As you were.
Yes! The sound of the vacuum cleaner drives me spare. I usually do the vacuuming with ear bugs in and podcast on to avoid hearing it.
For ages, on retiring to the state rooms of Foxy Towers, I’d worry that I’d left something in the tumble drier – which is in the garage, not the main house – because I could hear what I thought was the intermittent tumbling without heat that it does when the cycle has finished. Given that electrical goods with heating elements are not things you want to ignore, I’d get up from bed, traipse out to the garage and discover that the thing was safely switched off. Eventually I realised that what I was hearing was simply the thermostatically controlled intermittent activation of the fridge, something that’s almost impossible to hear if you’re standing right next to the thing, but which my lugs picked up in the still of the night. My wife, who regularly accuses me of being deaf (‘cos she’s a mumbler and I’ll insist on vocal clarity before I bestow a reply), had consistently mocked my evening protestations, gaslighting me by saying I’d imagined it.
FWIW we ended up with a Mitsubishi fridge – from those wonderful folks who brought you Pearl Harbour – and it’s completely silent, or silent enough to satisfy Mrs thep anyway.* She’s a mumbler too, and is particularly fond of mumbling while facing in the opposite direction. I can hear that she’s talking, but I’ve given up asking her what she said because half the time she says it doesn’t matter or claims she was talking to herself anyway.
*Shame they don’t seem to sell them in the UK.
How the hell can we be separated by half a planet, yet simultaneously married to the same woman?
*X-Files music*
It’s a mystery. I’m spared the mumbling at the moment though, because you and I are on the same side of the globe. She enunciates perfectly on the phone…
arf!
I’ve had tinnitus for 30 years now, I was an electrical engineer in the coal mines where machinery noise was a huge problem. We were provided with ear defenders but of low quality and the issue of tinnitus was not taken seriously at the time. Then there was attending gigs, an average of 2 a week for almost 40 years, at least 75% of them loud.
At this present time I have high pitched ringing in both ears and it is loud. However I have learned to live with it and I’m able to listen to and enjoy music at home but never played loud. I only attend acoustic gigs these days but even then I use ear plugs. I did attend a tinnitus clinic but frankly when they started talking about contraptions to alleviate the condition it was B.S. I have found the only way to tackle the condition is to learn to live with it which in my case I have done. I do regret as @Gatz says to not be able to experience absolute silence anymore.
Ironically my first memory of having tinnitus was after a gig featuring the Kinks and (wait for it) the Yardbirds (avec le Beck).
It’s come and gone over the years but it’s permanent these days. Haven’t been to a live gig for many years now and probably won’t ever again.
Them’s the breaks.
Pick up my first hearing aids the night after Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats / St Paul and the Broken Bones double bill !
I have had tinnitus for years. I understand that hearing aids can assist because tinnitus only kicks in when you aren’t hearing anything else and the aids mean you hear more stuff for longer.
We will see.
I have a constant high pitch ringing in my left ear which has undoubtedly resulted from all the very loud gigs I attended over the years. It’s all my own fault so I have no complaints. As has been mentioned though it would be pleasant to listen to silence once again but it is what it is. I have noticed that I am aware of it less when listening via headphones and almost not at all when listening through iems. This phenomena may be entirely wishful thinking on my part as I seek to justify to myself spending far too much money on stupidly expensive headphones and in ears. I wonder if I can persuade my sawbones that a pair of ZMF Caldera Redheart should be provided on prescription…
The passage talks about Beck’s “distress”. The Afterword is built of a tougher fibre.
Baron: “the only way to tackle the condition is to learn to live with it which in my case I have done”
Hippy: “them’s the breaks”
Pencil:. “it is what it is”
I’m with The AWers – it’s a nuisance, not a tragedy. You get used to it. Distractions can make you forget it’s even there, and there are worse things to worry about.
On this subject, a friend of mine said that when he worries about something at night, he tries to worry about something more serious to remove the worry about the first one. If that doesn’t work, then he thinks about something even more distressing – and so on. Does it help him sleep ? No – he said – if anything it makes things worse.
As regards nuisance vs. tragedy, it depends upon severity, I would say.
I’ve heard of people who have been absolutely plagued by constant rushing, whistling noise that utterly ruins their enjoyment of life, to the point where some have expressed that they’d rather be stone deaf. A few people have been known to kill themselves over it.
I noticed about 20 years ago a constant low hiss when I was in really quiet places. Since then with the age-related deterioration of my hearing it’s become less noticeable unless I think about it, which isn’t very often. Hardly even a nuisance, for which I count myself lucky.
I have a little difficulty separating individual voices when I’m in places where there are a lot of people talking. It means I find it more difficult to interact in crowds than one-to-one, but then again I’ve never been a very socially expressive person.
About a year ago, I had a hearing test for the first time since the 80’s. This was prompted by family and friends who had noticed that I was struggling to hear conversations in certain situations where there was peripheral noise (pubs, for example). I must say, the test was pretty hi-tech. My main memory of the 80’s test is the audiologist standing behind me whispering ‘sixty six’. Anyway, it was established that there was a ‘moderate loss of hearing’. The rot probably started with that Iron Butterfly gig in 1971. Hearing aids were recommended and I went for the rather expensive in-ear option which made a significant improvement. For anyone who, like me, has been listening to loud music for a number of years, I would recommend a hearing test which is free in UK.
It was only when I was about to leave the surgery that I mentioned to my audiologist that for some time I had been aware of a low-level hiss when I was in a quiet room with no other external sound. She immediately replied that this was a mild form of tinnitus most likely caused by my decades of exposure to loud music. I reckon now that I have, without thinking, been compensating for this condition by almost always having external sound (music, wireless, TV) in the room. It makes me wonder how many of us who have been listening to loud music might actually be suffering from some mild form of tinnitus.
I’ve generally been quite careful about loud music but I noticed tinnitus after a really bad cold about 10 years ago which blocked my nose, ears and sinuses. I don’t notice it all the time but it’s there and shows no signs of abating.
It’ll probably get worse and worse until your ears fall off.
Or until me earsarealight
It’s possibly worth doing a blood test as I started to get tinnitus when I was aenemic. Since having an iron infusion and wearing a B12 patch once a week, it seems to have gone away, along with the pins and needles and most of the brain fog.
I blame Pete Townshend for mine, a very very loud distorted Who concert in 1981. I was right in front of his speakers. Seems to have got worse since Covid vaccination. Have to have sound on all the time if Impossibly can
I have a steady whistle in my right ear and bugger all above 5k in both of them so I have the “not being able to hear people talking in a busy pub” problem too. I put this down to playing in bands at deafening volume and also, I think mainly, to a gig by my mate’s Pistols tribute band where I was near the PA which was blasting into my right ear and the side of my head felt numb for days. Stupid boy. I always wear ear plugs now until I am sure the levels are OK.
I blame the drummer – years of having cymbals just beside my left ear on tiny stages or pubs. Henceforth known as “bass player’s tinnitus”
150 db is a drum kit typically
Yes! I always stood on the left of the drummer so my right ear copped the cymbals and is far worse than the left.
I had some hearing loss in one ear from years of gig-going and one particular Motörhead gig in the mid 90s more obviously. I sustained tinnitus the morning after I got my first Covid vaccine shot. I’m very pro-vaccines but I’m equally certain that there’s a connection. Apparently I’m not the only person to experience this side-effect although it’s rare. There’s no sign of it easing off nearly two years later, mostly in my weaker ear. I’ll give hearing aids a go when I can afford a decent one.
The audiologist I saw says the high pitch stuff is , theory has it, usually replacing a hearing pitch that you have lost. Similarly for lower pitched tinnitus.
Nasty stuff like the sound of industrial grinders which some people get, and which is far more distressing, is usually due to physical damage somewhere somehow.
That’s what he says anyway.
I’m quite surprised I (touch wood, quick sign of the cross) have never had tinnitus (yet), unless it’s been so mild I just haven’t noticed it. I’ve always liked music played loud – but I suppose there’s loud and there’s LOUD. Screechy high pitched electric guitar type sounds have always annoyed me when too loud, but I love a big bass sound you can feel through your whole body. All the loud electric guitar bands I like were around in the 60s and 70s before I was old enough to go gigging (the 90s). Had I been alive to see Hendrix in his prime, for example, I’m sure I would have had the same hearing problems by now.
I’m interested in getting a hearing test, I should try that. I’ve always felt my left ear dominates more than my right ear, so maybe my hearing is slightly imbalanced. And I have problems hearing conversations in crowded rooms, but that’s been the same since I was a youngster, so I don’t think it’s age. Even in my teens and twenties I didn’t really like loud pubs and could never follow the conversations.
Not following conversations, esp competing with other noise, is probably the main reason people incl me resort to aids.
I did the RNID test and passed as fine despite not really being able to hear anything properly since seeing Motley Crue at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1988 .
Your choice of entertainment might call into question your hearing before that night too.
Anyone tried reflexology?