Everybody loves gear (myself included)... gear manufacturers know that, so naturally they keep shoving their stuff in our faces in every possible way, trying to hook us with gifts, "special" offers and personalized ads... consequentially every now and then we would lose concentration and buy another piece of gear as if it's going to make us better musicians, more productive or happier. Oh and sure, it happened to me too...
Now, I'm not going to argue that your new gear is not going to make you better in any way, I just know that most of the time that is exactly what would happen. What I have come to learn is that more gear is most likely going to make you less productive than anything else. I'm not talking about an electric guitar when you only have an acoustic and I'm not talking about a delay pedal when you only have an overdrive. I'm talking about a fifth microphone a second audio interface and a third delay or plugin bundle. These are probably going to slow you down, unless they are very different, you know exactly how and when to grab each. But that is very unlikely for most of us...
Choices Are Productivity & Creativity Killers
Choices are evil. The explanation is pretty simple actually. Gear choices require your attention and whether you are trying to record or write new material, you want your attention elsewhere in the studio... Otherwise, instead of playing your guts out into a mic, you might find yourself occupied with thoughts about which mic might sound better on which guitar, through which combination of overdrive pedals and amps and lets not forget the angle... That's not very creative from an artist standpoint. Some of it can be very creative from an audio engineer standpoint - sure, but for a musician? no... not really... Do some people excel doing both at the same time? Yes, but most suck doing both separately, so let's try to concentrate doing our best one at a time for now.
Storage
Another surprising problem with lots of gear is storage. Well, storage itself is not THE problem. It can be, but the problem I'm talking about is different. When you have a lot of gear, you cannot have all of it connected and ready to rock at any time, all the time. So, you store it in a closet, the next room or the garage. The result is most probably that you just don't use it anymore, because when you are inspired, you don't want to connect cables and set up patches. You just want to spill it all out... moreover, many times a specific gear setup inspires and idea, but it cannot inspire you from the garage, can it?
Too much gear and before you understand what's going on, you lose the moment to something meaningless that you're going to sell in a month anyway, only to get another one, that's going to compete against several others the next time you try to come up with a cool idea... and your cool idea, it might end up abandoned deep in your unfinished projects folder, just like most of its other cool friends did...
So next time you are out shopping for more gear, take a minute to think about it... and if you decide to spend, at least spend on something new and inspiring. Something that will make you play more and for a long time...
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