ilovefuzz.com

god damn I hate when cables fail...finally found the culprit...was ln denial.

So many cool robotics and programable kits at Barnes n nobl3...all kinds of robot kits, robots that draw, code your own video games..build an fm radio...Polaroid camera re release for 110.00

I've been considering a huge change in how I approach music gear. A bit of a "gear purge" scenario, but not minimalist focused. More an attempt at GAS killing. I'm thinking about holding on to my best/irreplaceable/most used pieces of gear, liquidating everything else and only buying straight forward, readily available, "industry standard" type gear in its place. With the idea of not focusing on gear collecting anymore and just viewing them as tools to make music. So if it's something totally unique or that I don't have, but want to use (crazy noisemaking modulation pedal, organ, drum kit, etc.), that's fine, but no more endless buy/sell/trade of guitars, basses, amps, cabs, etc. chasing a tone or gear lust.

Corey Y wrote:I've been considering a huge change in how I approach music gear. A bit of a "gear purge" scenario, but not minimalist focused. More an attempt at GAS killing. I'm thinking about holding on to my best/irreplaceable/most used pieces of gear, liquidating everything else and only buying straight forward, readily available, "industry standard" type gear in its place. With the idea of not focusing on gear collecting anymore and just viewing them as tools to make music. So if it's something totally unique or that I don't have, but want to use (crazy noisemaking modulation pedal, organ, drum kit, etc.), that's fine, but no more endless buy/sell/trade of guitars, basses, amps, cabs, etc. chasing a tone or gear lust.

Boss SY-300?

My GAS for pedals went away with the DD-500, but then got some synth GAS...

tremolo3 wrote: Boss SY-300?

My GAS for pedals went away with the DD-500, but then got some synth GAS...

My relationship to the kooky noisemaking pedals that ILF tends to love is...admiration based. I think it's all so cool and fun, but I really pretty much never use stuff like that when actually writing music. I really like weird stuff for use with recording for fx sends and whatnot, but even then, it's pretty sparingly used. I'm really very basic when it comes to gear needs. I do have a very well developed ear, so I tend to have extremely particular tastes, but I do fundamentally believe it's possible to get good tones out of almost anything. I've rocked really highly custom gear and garbage pile stuff and gotten blind compliments from people on tone in bands and recordings. I've owned a lot of gear too. I think pretty much every piece of mojo, hyped "cvlt" gear that's cool now, I've owned 10-15+ years ago and probably bought for $200 or less. I've bought pedals for $35 and sold them for $300 and not cared, because I can always find something to make sounds with. Since making music and recording bands has been sidelined by soft rebooting my adult life in the past year, my only connection with music has been buying and selling gear and it honestly it makes me feel kind of shitty. No judgments on anyone, the thirst of GAS is real and powerful and FUN sometimes. I think I'm kind of over though or want to be at least. I am definitively NOT COOL, so buying "cool" gear seems totally pointless and I feel like I should shift my focus to just having/acquiring things that only move my creativity forward and not be seeking some perfect ideal piece of gear for a tone or look.

Corey Y wrote:

tremolo3 wrote: Boss SY-300?

My GAS for pedals went away with the DD-500, but then got some synth GAS...

My relationship to the kooky noisemaking pedals that ILF tends to love is...admiration based. I think it's all so cool and fun, but I really pretty much never use stuff like that when actually writing music. I really like weird stuff for use with recording for fx sends and whatnot, but even then, it's pretty sparingly used. I'm really very basic when it comes to gear needs. I do have a very well developed ear, so I tend to have extremely particular tastes, but I do fundamentally believe it's possible to get good tones out of almost anything. I've rocked really highly custom gear and garbage pile stuff and gotten blind compliments from people on tone in bands and recordings. I've owned a lot of gear too. I think pretty much every piece of mojo, hyped "cvlt" gear that's cool now, I've owned 10-15+ years ago and probably bought for $200 or less. I've bought pedals for $35 and sold them for $300 and not cared, because I can always find something to make sounds with. Since making music and recording bands has been sidelined by soft rebooting my adult life in the past year, my only connection with music has been buying and selling gear and it honestly it makes me feel kind of shitty. No judgments on anyone, the thirst of GAS is real and powerful and FUN sometimes. I think I'm kind of over though or want to be at least. I am definitively NOT COOL, so buying "cool" gear seems totally pointless and I feel like I should shift my focus to just having/acquiring things that only move my creativity forward and not be seeking some perfect ideal piece of gear for a tone or look.

AMEN

I hear all of that. I don't really have time to collaborate and "write music" or "write ""music"" .. but what I do have time to do is sit in my living room after dinner and make shitty noise with strange devices everyone would assume are broken. I build 90%+ of my shit so it's not like I'm spending thousands .. but if I were to be buying all the weird kooky shit I do absolutely nothing with.. I would be broke as hell.

All that being said, I love me some evening noisy time

Corey Y wrote:I've been considering a huge change in how I approach music gear. A bit of a "gear purge" scenario, but not minimalist focused. More an attempt at GAS killing. I'm thinking about holding on to my best/irreplaceable/most used pieces of gear, liquidating everything else and only buying straight forward, readily available, "industry standard" type gear in its place. With the idea of not focusing on gear collecting anymore and just viewing them as tools to make music. So if it's something totally unique or that I don't have, but want to use (crazy noisemaking modulation pedal, organ, drum kit, etc.), that's fine, but no more endless buy/sell/trade of guitars, basses, amps, cabs, etc. chasing a tone or gear lust.

This sounds like a very admirable approach to gear.

Most of my GAS has revolved around getting really specific pieces of a puzzle, as opposed to just sort of having fun playing music and finding sound in the gear. If you translated how I interface with music/band stuff creatively over the decades, it's less sculptor or painter and more carpenter or brick layer. Any amount of weirdness is just from my tastes and sensibilities (arrangement, presentation), never really technique based.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about musicians like Prince. He's known for the weird guitar shapes, but those were more visual performance aids. His actual gear, he would just have a MIJ Tele, Boss pedals and a Mesa amp that he played forever and all his recording engineers always talk about how his approach was just to walk into the studio, plug in and start writing music. He dialed in his sounds and then he never really messed with them. The creativity was all in the writing and execution, maybe some production, but not really the tone and gear.

To an extent I like SOME unique aspects to particular gear, but I think I dove too deep into it and now I'm a gear person more than I am a musician. I'm not a crazy gear person either, I don't buy weird and outlandish stuff, so there's no point really in having that kind of focus. I moved from cheap gear, to name brand gear, to custom gear and all I really did was make it so that I had gear that only did one specific thing perfectly (because I never used 8/10 of the features on name brand gear) and looked a very particular way. It's nice, but it feels like it's hit a bit of a dead end.

Corey Y wrote:.Lately I've been thinking a lot about musicians like Prince. He's known for the weird guitar shapes, but those were more visual performance aids. His actual gear, he would just have a MIJ Tele, Boss pedals and a Mesa amp that he played forever and all his recording engineers always talk about how his approach was just to walk into the studio, plug in and start writing music. He dialed in his sounds and then he never really messed with them. The creativity was all in the writing and execution, maybe some production, but not really the tone and gear.

This, all the way. Especially that el cheapo Hohner MIJ Tele knockoff that his mom bought him & always played, which is still pretty humbling & inspiring.

coupleonapkins wrote: This, all the way. Especially that el cheapo Hohner MIJ Tele knockoff that his mom bought him & always played, which is still pretty humbling & inspiring.

I was talking to my wife about this and mentioned that it's probably easy to overlook the possibility that Prince probably had the opportunity to play literally ANY instrument on stage for free. If his people called up any manufacturer, custom or production, and said that he wanted to play their guitar on stage (let alone recorded/televised) and the brand would be prominent and publicized, I have to imagine pretty much anyone would have straight up given it to him. Not to mention I'm sure he could have afforded pretty much any piece of gear he ever wanted and one gig, appearance or tour would have paid for it easily. So there's something to be said for the fact that he used so much gear consistently for decades. He cycled in some notably modern things like Line 6 pedals (the blue modulation one I think) and a Whammy pedal and that sort of thing. Which goes to the point I was thinking about. Staple gear...cool unique pieces as desired.

Corey Y wrote:Most of my GAS has revolved around getting really specific pieces of a puzzle, as opposed to just sort of having fun playing music and finding sound in the gear. If you translated how I interface with music/band stuff creatively over the decades, it's less sculptor or painter and more carpenter or brick layer. Any amount of weirdness is just from my tastes and sensibilities (arrangement, presentation), never really technique based.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about musicians like Prince. He's known for the weird guitar shapes, but those were more visual performance aids. His actual gear, he would just have a MIJ Tele, Boss pedals and a Mesa amp that he played forever and all his recording engineers always talk about how his approach was just to walk into the studio, plug in and start writing music. He dialed in his sounds and then he never really messed with them. The creativity was all in the writing and execution, maybe some production, but not really the tone and gear.

To an extent I like SOME unique aspects to particular gear, but I think I dove too deep into it and now I'm a gear person more than I am a musician. I'm not a crazy gear person either, I don't buy weird and outlandish stuff, so there's no point really in having that kind of focus. I moved from cheap gear, to name brand gear, to custom gear and all I really did was make it so that I had gear that only did one specific thing perfectly (because I never used 8/10 of the features on name brand gear) and looked a very particular way. It's nice, but it feels like it's hit a bit of a dead end.

Yeah I understand this a lot. I've spent loads of time obsessing about gear rather than playing and I've been trying to dig myself out of that hole more recently.

I've got my bass setup absolutely sorted recently and it's not complicated. Admittedly it involves a couple of non-cheap pedals and a non-cheap bass, so if I really wanted to I could swap them out for cheaper ones but that just feels like more effort than it's worth now I have this stuff. Not coincidentally bass is the instrument I'm actually playing in bands right now!!!

Guitar, I have too many pedals but if I was gigging regularly I much prefer the prince approach of a simple setup with the essential options and doing everything else with playing.

I do like having stuff for recording because I do enjoy incorporating modular and other electronics into my music, but I really try keep it to things I find musically useful for the songs I write (which obviously is a great justification that does not hold up if I examine my buying habits).

Could I do better? Hell yes. It's sometimes so difficult to look at my 10 (probably not the real number but an illustrative one) fuzz pedals or however many and say "ok, I never use all of you at the same time. But which five do I keep???". And that's so stupid! If I'd never acquired 10 in the first place I'd be happy with one probably. Beyond some pretty fundamental differences (light OD vs heavy fuzz, things that actually put out enough bass) the minutiae of the tones don't matter. I play the same, they sound the same to an audience, I don't care all that much on record I'd rather just play.

Recently I've bought 3 delay pedals to keep the one I like the most. But I probably could have been fine with just one that was cheaper than any of those.

I think these days I do a relatively good job of playing and practicing rather than just buying to chase the tone dragon (clearly with some exceptions...) but I still buy way more stuff than I need. Got to change these habits and declutter.

tl;dr I ranted for a while and probably contradicted myself.

I'm the same with bass. Bass is the instrument I've played in bands the most and for the longest. I have my preferences for bass locked for a long time, I'm gold there. No need to sell or buy anything and I have tiers of different gear for it, for different uses (home recording, jamming, loud gigs).

Guitar, I'm all over the place. Probably because I don't really focus on one genre, since I haven't had a regular band in years. So I'll play some surf rock, some pop punk, some doom metal, some noise rock, some shoegaze. Whatever I'm into and feel like, I might just demo a few songs here and there or just do tone experiments without writing anything for weeks or months. Consequently, my gear is all over the place for guitar. It's also almost exclusively pedal platform, I don't have any gainy amps for guitar anymore at all. I used to pretty much only have Marshall style amps for guitar, then slowly got interested in fuzz pedals and drifted toward that big clean tube amp zone. I had a ton of gear centered around that for a while, then sold a lot of it off when my wife stopped working as we started having kids. So now my guitar gear is a very weird, kind of spotty mix of stuff.

haha yeah I know what you mean. I've had my guitar amp 10 years though, I'm not huge on amps, just buy more pedals than I need. I used to get all sorts of weird noisemaking things but like you found I never used them in music.

Pretty much any time I was in a band I played one amp unless it broke. Outside of being in bands I think I've never played a single amp consistently for more than a year or two in the past 20. Although some come back around a few times. 15 years ago I bought a Marshall full stack, a Gibson Les Paul Custom, a Big Muff, a Crybaby and a Gigadelay and assumed I was done with guitar gear forever.