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I once heard the advice "Consider buying gear once you're productive. Don't buy gear to become productive." Once one has the bare essentials it's very solid adv

I once heard the advice "Consider buying gear once you're productive. Don't buy gear to become productive." Once one has the bare essentials it's very solid advice. Having a dozen well-understood parameters to play with is often more useful than a hundred poorly understood ones, which can quickly become paralyzing. I feel like the older model of accumulating physical gear helped put some limits on how complexity grew in small studios, but that has all been upended by software. There is definitely a balance to be struck between the capabilities of the setup and what will actually result in the best creative output. Creativity often thrives within constraints, and it can paradoxically become harder to work with objectively better equipment.

52-6F-62 6y ago
I've experienced this tangibly. Recorded an EP with a guy who had rebuilt a bunch of used gear by hand so nothing even physically made it into the studio unless he could afford it and fix it. He had plenty to work with, but it was largely just the staples ... and one beast of a tape machine for mastering. Funny thing, is he found a lot of settings that just worked and kept most of them. There would be some tweaking, but mostly with the levels more than anything once we found the sound. Recording on our own, digitally, had my pal tweaking various parameters until all hours—introducing different EQ's and reverbs and then pulling them and replacing them and tweaking them and trying to find the minutiae of what would make it just right to him, but he was rarely ever satisfied. I don't think it was just him, it's that there were so many options available to us—even without paying for premium VSTs and the like. And we were recording what was essentially folk-rock or roots-rock. There's a lot of leeway in recording demos and EP tracks in that space. Recording, like software, I've grown to like to keep it as simple as I can, when I can.
gebl 6y ago
I'm not a musician, but a photographer. I think the gear craziness is probably similar across both areas. I've adapted the don't just buy gear, get out and do stuff to "Don't buy gear until you have a particular problem that gear would solve. If you can, borrow gear to validate." Because, lets be honest, sometimes the gear actually helps - but unless you have the problem it helps for its gonna sit in a corner.
- grugagag 6y ago
  Sometimes people hope the gear would help their creative problems and keep on buying new gear but the satisfaction is short lived.
deleted 6y ago
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52-6F-62 6y ago

I've experienced this tangibly. Recorded an EP with a guy who had rebuilt a bunch of used gear by hand so nothing even physically made it into the studio unless he could afford it and fix it. He had plenty to work with, but it was largely just the staples ... and one beast of a tape machine for mastering. Funny thing, is he found a lot of settings that just worked and kept most of them. There would be some tweaking, but mostly with the levels more than anything once we found the sound. Recording on our own, digitally, had my pal tweaking various parameters until all hours—introducing different EQ's and reverbs and then pulling them and replacing them and tweaking them and trying to find the minutiae of what would make it just right to him, but he was rarely ever satisfied. I don't think it was just him, it's that there were so many options available to us—even without paying for premium VSTs and the like. And we were recording what was essentially folk-rock or roots-rock. There's a lot of leeway in recording demos and EP tracks in that space. Recording, like software, I've grown to like to keep it as simple as I can, when I can.

gebl 6y ago

I'm not a musician, but a photographer. I think the gear craziness is probably similar across both areas. I've adapted the don't just buy gear, get out and do stuff to "Don't buy gear until you have a particular problem that gear would solve. If you can, borrow gear to validate." Because, lets be honest, sometimes the gear actually helps - but unless you have the problem it helps for its gonna sit in a corner.

grugagag 6y ago
Sometimes people hope the gear would help their creative problems and keep on buying new gear but the satisfaction is short lived.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]