Musings about gear lust; then and now.
I revisit an article I wrote in 2004 about wishing I had more expensive equipment, but how I was still able to make great recordings with whatever gear I had.
I've always said that you can make a decent record on whatever gear you have at your disposal, as long as you're patient and you use your ears. That said, I never said that I wanted to be the MacGuyver of recording. I never said "give me a disco mixer and a Portastudio and I'll give you Sgt. Pepper."
I've always known that certain gear might not make a better song, but they sure can help the process of making it sound good easier. I remember the first time I worked in a room that had a classic Urei 1176 compressor. "Oh, that's what all the fuss is about..." You realize why you read all the same buzzwords in every magazine article (when’s the last time you read a MAGAZINE?…. besides Tape Op!); Neumann, Neve, Universal, SSL, API etc. There is a reason why you'll find this gear in nearly every professional studio in the world.
So here I am. I've been engineering and producing for a living (sometimes just for food) for many years (it had been about 15 years when I wrote this) and I've still yet to be able to stock my rig up with many of the prerequisite pieces that I've lusted after. If I wanted to pick up just three things that I know would change my life, sonically, my top three would add up to about $15,000.
My new (used) car that I can barely afford cost just a little more than that. It could take me across the country. It could drive me to a hospital in an emergency. Great as it might sound, a CraneSong Trakker won't even take me across the room.
I don’t want to sound like a jealous person, but it is frustrating to think that, while it’s my career to be making good sounding recordings, I make it happen by pushing various pieces of low-to-mid quality gear to its sonic limits....making them work for me. At the same time, the bedroom hobbyist with a great paying, non-music related day job totally skips the Alesis and Behringer pages in the catalog and orders up a rack of APIs and a Distressor to record themself singing into their Neumann U87 three times a year.
A lot of the gear that I lust after is not glamorous. It’s not the sort of gear that an indie rock band or a singer/songwriter is going to walk into the studio and say “dude, you’ve got a Neve preamp, we’re totally doing our record with you.” You can listen to a demo and either say “sounds good” or “sounds bad.” At the end of the day, if it sounds good, who cares if it was done on analog tape, ProTools or live to a Nagra?
That said, I’m proud that I am able to make great sounding records on whatever gear I have at my disposal. Not being spoiled by high-end gear from the start makes me feel a little bit like it’s a challenge. I like that. I like having to work a little bit to get things to happen. I like using gear creatively and sometimes the most interesting or inspiring sound comes from the least expensive equipment.
I suppose the bottom line is that one should never let the gear that they currently have stop them from making great music. Great music shines through whatever you record it with.
Epilogue: I originally wrote this article in 2004. That was almost 20 years ago and so much has changed. The music industry is different. The recording industry is different. The world has proven that you CAN make so much great music with a laptop, interface and a microphone. Speaking for myself, I find it interesting to be caught between two eras. When I started recording, there was really no way to make a “professional” sounding recording without going into a studio with certain pieces of gear that pretty much every studio had to have and record in a finely-tuned room, mix in another finely-tuned room and send it off for mastering then pressed to CD. Now you can simulate everything from a Neve 1073 preamp to a Radio Shack Electronic Reverb in your recording software and the huge sounds that used to require a room like the Power Station in NYC to record drums in are no longer in fashion and you can simulate any room on the planet with an IR reverb plugin anyway. Also, no one buys CDs anymore, and ironically, vinyl is back to some extent.
Record companies no longer make the money that they used to so they no longer spend the money that they used to either. Gone are the days of $400,000 recording budgets. In a lot of respects, it’s a wonderful thing because it levels the playing field quite a bit and there is a better chance that subjectively “better” music that is made with heart, passion and creativity, but done by some 16 year old in their bedroom can have as good of a chance, more or less, than a major production released on a major label. You still can’t really compete with the promotion budgets of a label, but if your song catches people on any social media platform and goes “viral” as the kids say, you can have a hit on your hands with very little investment.
Go make music!