If you've ever stood next to a snare drum from hell and a guitarist who thinks "stage volume" means "as loud as possible," you know the problem. Your ears are ringing, you can't hear yourself clearly, and you're either overblowing to compensate or stuffing in foam earplugs that make everything sound like you're underwater.
For decades, floor wedges were all we had. Recently, in-ear monitors have become standard for wedding bands, touring acts, and church worship teams. The question is whether it's time to make the switch.
Here's what I learned after two decades playing both: for most gigs, I still prefer a good floor wedge. The feel is natural, the room feedback is there, and I can hear my section breathing and articulating together. But when you're stuck next to that snare drum or in situations where you need ear protection anyway, IEMs are definitely better. They give you both protection and a clear mix, which beats trying to hear through foam earplugs.
The problem is that switching to IEMs hits brass and woodwind players harder than anyone else. Something called the "occlusion effect" makes your own sound boomy and distorted when your ears are plugged. Set them up wrong, and you'll feel isolated and disconnected from everything around you.
In this guide, I'll break down the real pros and cons of both systems specifically for trumpet, trombone, and saxophone players, so you can decide what works for your gigs.
The Floor Monitor: Why Most Horn Players Still Prefer It
For most of my career, a floor monitor has been "home." It's what I expect to see on stage, and frankly, what still feels right for about 90% of my gigs.
The Natural Feel
Brass and woodwind instruments project sound forward, but our ears are behind the bell. We rely on room reflections to gauge our intonation and tone. A wedge monitor simulates that natural reflection, bouncing your sound back at you. It moves actual air. When you play into a wedge, you feel the vibration in your feet and body, which connects you to the music in a way earbuds simply can't replicate.
This matters more than most people realize. That physical feedback—the air moving, the floor resonating—is part of how we monitor ourselves. Take it away, and something fundamental feels missing.
Section Blend
When you're standing in a horn line, you tune by listening to the lead player next to you. With wedges, you hear the person next to you acoustically. You can hear them breathe, you can hear their articulation style, and you can adjust your phrasing to match theirs in real time.
You're not just matching pitch—you're blending tone, articulation, and vibrato. That's nearly impossible to do when everyone's isolated in their own ear mix.
The Downside: Volume Wars and Hearing Damage
Here's where wedges fail us. To hear yourself over a loud drummer, you need the wedge turned up. But microphones have a feedback threshold. Eventually, you hit a volume ceiling where you can't get any more "me" in the monitor without that painful squeal.
This leads to overblowing—forcing air through the horn just to hear yourself—which destroys your endurance. Worse, it creates a dangerous cycle where everyone on stage keeps turning up, trying to hear themselves over everyone else. Before you know it, stage volume is at 110 dB, and you're damaging your hearing with every rehearsal and gig.
Research confirms what we all feel: musicians performing at 94 dB risk hearing damage after just one hour, since sound exposure follows a 3 dB exchange rate where every 3 dB increase cuts safe exposure time in half. Concert levels regularly hit 110-120 dB, and brass instruments can reach 110-115 dB at the bell. Professional musicians face 3.51 times higher risk of noise-induced hearing loss compared to the general population.
This is where wedges lose the argument. If you're playing loud pop, rock, or musical theater gigs multiple nights per week, you're accumulating dangerous noise exposure. In those situations, IEMs aren't just better—they're essential.
In-Ear Monitors: Better Protection, Steeper Learning Curve
Switching to IEMs is like stepping from a noisy construction site into a quiet recording studio. Everything changes.
Precision and Consistency
With in-ears, your mix is consistent. It doesn't matter if you're standing center stage for a solo or have moved back to the riser; the sound in your ears is the same. You can hear the click track, the cues from the bandleader, and subtle dynamics that get lost in stage volume.
Custom-molded IEMs provide 25-34 dB of noise isolation, which means dangerous stage volume gets blocked before it reaches your eardrums. You control the volume knob, so you can keep the mix at safe levels (around 80-85 dB) while still hearing everything clearly.
This makes IEMs genuinely better for marathon gigs—four-hour wedding receptions, week-long theater runs, or tour schedules where you're playing six nights a week.
Hearing Protection That Actually Works
This is the real selling point. Stage volume in rock bands regularly exceeds 110 dB, and drums alone can hit 130 dB. At those levels, you're risking permanent damage after just a few minutes of exposure.
With IEMs, you're getting professional-grade hearing protection while still maintaining the ability to hear your mix clearly. This is fundamentally different from wearing earplugs—with IEMs, you're not just blocking sound, you're replacing dangerous stage volume with a controlled, safe audio feed.
For musicians who already need ear protection at loud gigs, IEMs eliminate the compromise. You don't have to choose between protecting your hearing and hearing your mix clearly.
The Occlusion Effect: Why Trumpet, Trombone, and Sax Players Struggle
Here's the elephant in the room: most brass and woodwind players hate IEMs when they first try them. The reason is something called the occlusion effect.
What Causes It
When you plug your ears and play a brass or woodwind instrument, the vibration of your lips or airflow travels through your jawbone and skull directly into your ear canal. Because the ear is sealed, that low-frequency energy has nowhere to escape. It bounces off the earbud and hits your eardrum, creating a boomy, underwater sound.
Research shows that shallow-fitting earplugs create the largest occlusion cavity, amplifying low frequencies by up to 25-30 dB at 250 Hz. This makes it nearly impossible to monitor your pitch accurately. It feels like playing with a head cold.
Trumpet players, trombone players, and saxophone players experience this more severely than other musicians because we generate significant internal sound through embouchure pressure and constant airflow. String players and drummers don't create the same kind of bone-conducted vibration, so they adapt to IEMs much more easily.
Studies confirm that brass players show the most significant changes when wearing earplugs, with trumpeters experiencing 5-15 dB drops in high-frequency output as they compensate for what they hear internally. Vocalists and wind instrumentalists consistently report occlusion as the primary barrier to using hearing protection.
How to Minimize It
You can't eliminate the occlusion effect entirely, but you can manage it. Here are three approaches that actually work:
Get a Deeper Seal: It sounds counterintuitive, but a deeper canal insertion often reduces occlusion. Custom-molded IEMs that extend past the second bend of your ear canal leave less room for low-frequency resonance. The deeper the fit, the less cavity space for that boomy sound to build up.
Cut the Low-Mids: Ask your monitor engineer (or use your mixing app) to cut frequencies between 200-500 Hz on your specific instrument channel. This clears out the mud without killing your bass response. You're essentially compensating in your mix for what your bones are adding internally.
Volume Masking: Sometimes the simplest solution is to turn up the rest of the band in your ears. If the mix is loud enough (but still at safe levels), it masks the bone-conduction sound, and your brain stops noticing it. This requires careful balance—you want masking, not dangerously loud levels.
Custom-molded IEMs help more than universal-fit options, but even the best customs don't completely solve the problem for brass and woodwind players. And they are expensive.
The Control Factor: Who's Running Your Mix?
Your experience with IEMs depends heavily on who's controlling the sound.
Large Productions: Dedicated Monitor Engineer
On tours or large productions, there's usually a dedicated monitor engineer whose only job is making your ears sound good. You build a relationship with them over the course of a run. You learn to communicate what you need, they learn your preferences, and the system works.
This is the gold standard. With a skilled engineer, IEMs become transparent—you forget you're wearing them and just focus on playing.
Small Stages: You're the Engineer
At weddings, club dates, or church gigs, you're usually on your own. You might be using a mixing app on an iPad or a personal mixer like an Aviom. In this scenario, you're the sound engineer, the performer, and the troubleshooter all at once.
If you're not comfortable with technology or don't understand basic gain staging, this becomes stressful. You need to know how to set levels, adjust EQ, and balance your mix while thinking about the chart in front of you. For some players, this extra cognitive load is a dealbreaker.
The learning curve is real. Try to get comfortable mixing your own ears before you take IEMs to a paying gig.
The "One Ear Out" Trap: Don't Do This
This is critical enough that it needs its own section: never remove one earbud to "hear the room."
When you take one ear out, you create a dangerous situation called binaural summation imbalance. Your brain naturally combines volume from both ears. With one ear getting an isolated IEM signal and the other ear getting full stage volume, you'll instinctively crank your bodypack to compete with the ambient noise.
Without realizing it, you might be blasting 100+ dB directly into your monitored ear to match what your open ear is hearing from the stage. This is a fast track to permanent hearing damage.
Research confirms that when musicians remove one IEM, they lose both the protection benefit and the improved signal-to-noise ratio, often resulting in higher overall exposure levels than if they'd worn no protection at all. Removing one IEM negates the binaural loudness summation effect, causing performers to increase volume in the remaining ear to compensate.
If you feel isolated with IEMs, the solution is to add ambient mics to your mix—not to remove an earbud. Many professional systems now include audience microphones specifically for this reason. Wear both, or wear none.
Be Ready for Both: The Freelancer's Reality
As a freelance musician, you don't get to choose your monitoring setup. You use what the gig provides or requires. The key is being comfortable with both systems so you can adapt to whatever situation you walk into.
Small jazz groups—quartets, quintets, acoustic settings—typically don't use monitors at all. You're hearing everything naturally. Big bands, on the other hand, almost always have wedges. And when you're doing rock, pop, or musical theater work, you might encounter either wedges or IEMs, depending on the production.
The smart approach is to keep a set of IEMs in your gig bag and be comfortable using them when the situation calls for it. Here's when you'll need them:
I still prefer wedges for most of my work. Jazz gigs, big band dates, acoustic sessions—these all sound and feel better with a floor monitor when stage volume is reasonable. But when I'm doing a loud pop gig or a multi-night run where my ears would be ringing, I don't hesitate to pull out the IEMs.
The point isn't choosing one system over the other. It's having both skills in your toolkit and knowing when to use each one.
Practical Tips for Making Either System Work
For Wedges:
- Position yourself strategically—don't stand directly in front of the drummer if you can avoid it
- Communicate with your monitor engineer about what you actually need to hear (less is more)
- Keep high-quality earplugs in your case for when stage volume gets dangerous
For IEMs:
- Budget time to learn your mixing system before taking it to a gig
- Get custom molds if you're using IEMs regularly—the improved fit reduces occlusion
- Add ambient mics to your mix to reduce the isolated feeling
- Never remove one ear to "hear the room"—adjust your mix instead
For Both:
- Have your hearing tested annually by an audiologist
- Learn to recognize dangerous volume levels
- Take breaks during long rehearsals or multiple-set gigs
- Remember that any hearing protection is better than none, even if it's not perfect
The Bottom Line
After 20 years of playing everything from quiet jazz clubs to outdoor festivals, here's what I know: there's no one-size-fits-all answer to the wedge versus IEM question.
For most gigs, I still prefer the natural feel and section awareness that wedges provide. But for loud gigs where hearing protection is essential anyway, IEMs are unquestionably better. They offer genuine protection while maintaining clarity, which beats trying to hear through foam earplugs while fighting feedback from a cranked wedge.
The key is being adaptable. Keep both options in your toolkit, develop skills with both systems, and choose based on the specific demands of each gig. Your ears are irreplaceable—protect them wisely, but don't sacrifice musicality in the process.
The modern horn player needs to navigate both worlds. Master both systems, and you'll be ready for whatever the bandleader throws at you.