Playing Guitar With Hearing Aids

I've been diagnosed with high frequency hearing loss and now have a set of hearing aids, Oticon Jet PX1 miniRITE R is what they are. From what I understand these are entry level.

While I hear conversations and the TV better I don't like the sound of the guitar (electric if that matters) when wearing them, sounds better without. I'm going to make an appointment with the audiologist to see if she can make up a separate program for the guitar. I suppose I could also use the EQ on the amp to boost the higher frequencies and play without the hearing aids.

I would be interested to hear what others have experienced regarding this and how they dealt with it.

Thanks,

Ken

I have a hearing aid for my left ear. When I first got it I didn't like the way my acoustic sounded. I couldn't get the guitar in relative tune without using a tuner and even then it sounded messed up. My audiologist thought it might be from the slight noise cancelling the hearing aid provided so he created a setting without noise cancelling and that did the trick. He's never heard (heh) of someone having this problem before. Anyway, that did the trick for me.

The main reason is that hearing aids like your Oticon Jet PX1 miniRITE R are primarily tuned for speech clarity, not musical fidelity. To make conversations easier, they typically apply strong compression, noise reduction, and frequency shaping. Those same features can distort the natural dynamics and harmonics of music, especially guitar tones.

I went through something similar. The biggest surprise for me was that hearing aids are usually tuned for speech clarity, not for music. As a result, guitar can sound overly bright, compressed, or just unnatural at first, especially electric guitar with lots of harmonics in the frequencies being boosted.

Definitely talk to your audiologist about a dedicated music program. Many people have much better results once the noise reduction, speech enhancement, and compression settings are adjusted specifically for music. In my case, that made a bigger difference than changing amp EQ.

I would avoid simply cranking the treble on the amp to compensate, as that can end up making the overall sound less balanced. A custom hearing-aid program designed for playing and listening to music is probably the best long-term solution. Give yourself some time, too—your brain is adapting to hearing frequencies it may not have heard clearly for a while.