In my studio closet there is a rack of gear that I have not powered up since I moved to Texas. This tells me something. It tells me that it’s time for it to go. Some of the stuff doesn’t work any more. Some of it is experimental and home brewed. There are a couple of cassette decks that I will need one more time to transfer the last of my tape media to digital. Most of the equipment is junk that just has to go because it has outlived its usefulness. In a world of flash recorders and endless hard disk space, who needs DAT (more so one that doesn’t work)? No one in a home studio, that’s for sure. So I will be purging the closet. This is fairly momentous.
There’s a lot of history in there. I’ve lugged around a ton of that gear since my college days. The K2000 is a good example. It was a great synth in its day, but I can get better results with my laptop and GarageBand. There are effects in there that can go as well since I do most of my guitar tweaking through massive plugin arrays and digital constructs of my own again on the laptop. Getting rid of this stuff will be a big deal.
If you know anything about musicians, you know that in our hearts we’re all gear whores. Especially the ones who swear all they ever need is a tape deck and a guitar and one mic and one pre-amp and… See? Even if the setup is as bare bones as it can get (and I have strong opinions about what a wonderful idea that is) we all still get the Musicians Friend catalog and flip through it with long, spindly webs of drool forming at the corners of our mouths. It’s the nature of the beast. What great things could I do with THAT widget or doodad?!? Think of the “Sonic Possibilities!”
In the end, it’s just more crap to haul when you move.
I would like for my studio to be focused on things that make sound. I have more instruments than I probably should (but I will never admit that to my wife) and that means that I should keep the rest of the gear as slim and trim as I can. It will make an entertaining pile at the electronics recycling center. Again, most of it hasn’t worked or been powered up in years. It’s the end of the era of big gear. It’s the beginning of the minimal phase. Soon enough, everything will be done on an iPad with a single mic or mixer anyway. I’ll try to get ahead of the curve on this one.
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