20 YEAR VETERAN GEAR SLUT SELLS EVERYTHING; STATUS DEMOTED TO JUST SLUT

Wife On All Time Euphoric High As Chronic Compulsive Knob-Turner Directs Bored Fingers Towards Her

You read it right. I’m done. I just force quit a life long passion. An obsession. My quest of owning every single piece of cool music gear ever made is done. Blasphemer! The end is near! (perfect timing since the end of the music business is here too – cool!) But, really, I think it’s just the beginning. Who woulda thought there’s a life to be lived out there? A world full of wonder. A world without a room full of musical equipment. The search for the Holy Grail is over.

Not that the Holy Grail has been found, mind you, just that I’ve stopped looking for it.

I’ve stopped flipping through Keyboard, Remix and Electronic Musician magazines like a 16 year old with a Playboy and a chubby. Yes, the articles are still informative. The reviews a must. But that craving, that drooling stare at all those gorgeous spreads of sexy new gear? They are nothing to me now. I’m above it all – like a drummer who can read music. I’ve sold all my gear. Not most of it. All of it. It sounds like I quit the music business. I didn’t. I downsized. I cleaned house. And I’m a richer($) man for it. (snort, hike up britches.)

A month or two back, I actually stopped writing music. Took stock, assessed and analyzed my work method in the studio. A full day just for that. I noted how much I used different pieces of gear. I wrote down how often I repeated certain tasks. I contemplated a world without so many buttons, knobs, switches and keys. A simpler life. A life as head music Quaker in LA.

As composers and musicians, we are on the brink of a new age. The time has come to break our chains. We are free! I say to you, rise up. Unburden yourself from unused gear and over abundance. I did it. And now I have more time for the important things in life - family, friends, socially responsible drinking.

Is it scary? Even more than that 10 Day Thai Sex Travel Tour you booked yourself on.

Are our collective dick sizes (girls graciously included here) tied to how much gear we have? Only from our own skewed personal perspective.

Should our talent be measured by our latest and greatest finance-threatening acquisition? Be brave – don’t fall into that trap.

Does it go against everything you’ve been taught as a cutting edge musician? Stabs it in the heart. Dead.

Does it make those pictures of Keith Emerson in front of a thousand keyboards kind of silly? No. Well, kind of. Those pics document another age. Another time when abundance and complexity were the norm. It’s called THE PAST. Today, we can be leaner and meaner. It is time to be the Lara Flynn Boyle of music.

Instead of looking at it as “what I have to lose” we must think of it as “what I have to gain.” And that, is FREEDOM!

Kick The Shit Out 101:

Took stock of the synths I had. Rolands, Korgs, Yamahas, Nords, Emus. Yes, each in their own right has served me well over the years. There are killer sounds on each and every one of them, but as I noted how often and for what purpose I was using these, I realized it wasn’t much as I’d thought. I ordered some new soft synths to cover those; Arturia’s Jupiter-8V, FabFilter’s Twin, all of the Rob Papen stuff, the Native Instruments bundle. (Complaint Alert!™ – why isn’t every great classic synth a plugin already? I’ll buy ‘em all! Here I stand cash in hand, waiting, wondering . . . ) Hey – I need some advice, should I drop $2500 for the newest hardware synth or buy 12 plugin synths for the same amount?

Added Bonus Alert™ - I was also able to hurl my four (4) midi interfaces (i.e. doorstops).

Next, my beloved Yamaha 02R96 mixer. Impeccable design. Easy to use. Handles every format under the sun. When we’d switch from Protools at 96k back to my normal 24bit 44.1 working mode – it was literally a push of the button. But again, when I noticed how much I was actually utilizing its incredible features – nada. I was already moving towards “mixing in the box” and hadn’t accepted it. Toss it. Because it’s like the rule in your closet – if you haven’t worn it in over a year, you’re not going to wear it (that doesn’t mean the leather pants. Because if you even claim to be in the music business you better have a pair hanging in there or you’re just a poser. And preferably they should be 2 sizes too small – you know, the size you USED to wear. The size you swear you will wear again as soon as you figure out a way to quit that Popeye’s dependence.) And what about that big ol’ Mackie Midi Controller? Chuck it. One word. Faderport. Or AlphaTrack. Or Goatse. Why do I need 8 faders? If I’m controlling all of my BG vox, I’ve already bussed them to a single fader in Logic. Now I control them with my middle finger on my only fader. (Please note aggressive physical insult thrown towards all manufacturers of multi fader midi controller systems. In your face!)

Next up – cutting the dark side completely from my life. I don’t mean Scientology. I mean I had a rack of 6 PCs running a variety of things from Gigastudio to Kontakt 2 to Forte running various VST plugins. Again, I found, at most I was using only one or two of these at a time. My new “Titanium Testicle” Mac Pro 8 core can handle that! Fuck Microsoft - again! Had them taken away - like Britney’s children.

I barreled on like a spring cleaning suburban mom amped up on prescription meds.

Video playback. WTF. DVD. DAT. VHS. Video switcher between all this caveman shit. My Canopus box. Now with each job, I tell them “Quicktime” – that’s it – no other choice. And they do it. Because I said so. Or I asked politely. 42” Plasma TV - Poof! – I bought two 30” Mac monitors.

Cassette (sure, I still had one - in case by brother showed up with that Honk “Five Summer Stories” soundtrack and we wanted to reminisce over some medical cannabis.) CD Player – why?

And suddenly, it all began to snowball. Multiple Big Ben word clocks – don’t need ‘em. Blackburst generator – unnecessary. Computer monitor switcher for all those damn PCs – Can you spell Goodwill donation and exaggerated tax write off??!!!

Furman patchbays! I was tired of shaving them every week. Ewww! Cables? How 2006! Cabling of every type and description on the planet running the perimeter of the studio. Hundreds of feet of this shit – vanished.

In addition to Protools I was running a MOTU 2408. Finished! What was I thinking with all this stuff?

I bought big “Hungry Man” size drives for the computer. Got rid of all those small “Fun Size” ones I was collecting over the years.

And I stood there looking at a near empty machine room. A lonely Apogee Rosetta 800, Furman Power Conditioner (with five o’clock shadow) and my Mac Pro. Oh, and my beloved Neve mic pres. And instead of feeling like the boy with the smallest dick in the locker room, I felt liberated. I felt comforted.

First Glaring Conundrum™ - whether I should put a stripper pole or a wine rack in the rest of the machine room. Vote online now!

I started working. Yes, there were some moments of pause where I sat there and said “OK, I used to do it this way, I need to find a new way.” And I did. And it all felt rather new and different. Fresh and exciting, if I may be so bold as to quote Kool & The Gang. (BTW™, is that bass part loud enough in that mix or what!!!???) The whole writing experience seemed, well, actually more about writing than technology. I got a call the following day about some changes the producer (wanker) wanted to the music I had written (already perfect). I toweled off from the pool, and opened the sequence – WHAM! – it was up in seconds. My old setup template took FOREVER! to load. All that extraneous bullshit needed to make all that extraneous bullshit work = sit around with thumb up ass. I hit play on the keyboard – and I’ll be damned. It sounded exactly like it did yesterday. I don’t know about you, but in my previous setup when I brought a mix back up it sounded “kinda” like it did before. There’s no instant recall when you have 15 other sound sources going through 3 other devices in addition to the rumored “total recall” elements in your computer. I would have had to spend valuable drinking time, tweaking the mix to get it right and then making the changes. This time, I muted the unwanted (although very hip and really, quite musical Autotuned chainsaw & trombone duet) sound the producer “hated.” Hit “Bounce” and in 90 seconds was emailing the revised cue back to them and heading back to the pool where 3 supermodels with margaritas awaited me and my thong.

This never would have happened in my old, archaic, complicated, clusterfuck™ system. There’s a rule, it’s not Murphy’s but some other Irish dude’s, and it says “The more shit you have, the more shit breaks.” I might be paraphrasing. And shit did break – or kinda not work – or got a buzz in it – or wouldn’t read midi today – or – or – or. And I would waste time. I would stop writing. I would don my NTGH (Nerdy Tech Guy Hat™) and attempt to fix it. I was convinced I couldn’t live without this piece of gear. When it got bad, I gave up and called in a tech guy who wears a VSNTGH (Very Special Nerdy Tech Guy Hat™). I shit money into a bucket for him while he tried to solve said problem. And I wasn’t writing.

I sold all of my gear. Got lots of money for it. Enough money that I could have bought another complete system like mine and had it standing by – just in case my main system blew up. Fortunately, I was smart enough to invest it all in hookers and blow. C’mon, we’re in the music business – who needs a savings account? I’m gonna write a hit! Like Hey Jude or some catchy shit like that.

Now there’s nothing short of an infuriatingly itchy STD or a massive earthquake that can keep me from working.

OK, I’ll admit, if you took the guitars and my keyboard controller out of the studio, my new setup looks like I do graphics for a living. And we all know how much graphic designers don’t get laid. Who cares? When I sit here, it feels like this system is all about the music. The notes. The sound. It ain’t about mixed marriages of PC/Mac, or Protools/Logic, or Midi/LAN/Word Clock/Lightpipe group sex animosity.

This is the future and it’s yours. Sell your shit. You don’t need it. From now on, the only things I will buy are new plugins and a new Mac. Oh, and tequila. My yearly expenditure on gear probably dropped 90%. Think of it as a pay raise.

Go forth and write – and give yourself a pay raise.


P.S.
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