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Do You Have More Gear Than You Need/Use?


Mark L

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I have:

 

1 electric guitar, 1 acoustic guitar, 1 bass guitar, 1 multitrack recorder*, 1 drum machine, 1 keyboard, 1 set of headphones, 1 recording mic and stand, 1 capo, a few plectrums

 

I need/use all of the above

 

Over to you...

 

 

*I actually have 2 multitrack recorders, but I don't like/need/use my new one. Therefore, for the purposes of this thread, consider it sold ;)

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I have too much for what I'm doing now... but not for what I was doing a year ago.

 

Now I'm producing my personal songwriting demos. But before, I was producing low budget albums. I needed lots of mics, phones, snake, pres, etc. After amassing my arsenal, I'm inclined to hold on it for a while. Things change and it'd be tough to get back some of the pieces I've acquired.

 

But you make a great point. I'm considering tearing it all down and storing some stuff. Then streamlining the setup for the current job at hand.

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Yes. I still have (don't laugh) a DAT recorder. I keep thinking I'm going to transfer some of the stuff I have on DAT, but of course never get around to doing it.

 

I also have, if this is possible, about two too many electric guitars and one too many acoustic guitars and an analog delay, all of which I need to sell at some point.

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I just bought one of those a couple years ago for 70 bucks with a bunch of tape, used it twice already for clients who wanted to transfer some stuff. Cool unit.

 

Do i have more gear than i use regularly?

Oh yes, oh hell yes. Useless gear, very little.

Some stuff is just vintage stuff that needs a re-build, and is waiting for me to get to it.

I don't imagine a painter uses every color in the pallet every painting or even every 10 paintings, so lots of gear is ultimately useful.

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For music, I use a MacBook Pro with Logic/MainStage, an Apogee ONE plugged into a Blue Sky MediaDesk and an Emu Xboard 61 keyboard controller. It took years to get this streamlined, and I think this is about all I need. I probably don't even need the Apogee ONE or MediaDesk, just some good headphones plugged directly into the Mac.

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Yep I do have too much at the moment for the studio space I have. I won't list it all, but just imagine... I have a hybrid analog-digital studio, still use analog extensively and rarely if ever use plugs with my DAW. Everything is hardware. 30+ years later playing/recording and I have a few things from the beginning that I bought new. And then along came eBay. :lol::facepalm:

 

But I will say this... there's nothing I can't do musically speaking. It's all there. Some things I don't use much, but I never know if I might. ;) Some things I use all the time.

 

 

...and an analog delay, all of which I need to sell at some point.

 

Hey Ken, what kind of analog delay? I might "need" it. :cool:

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iMac: DP7, REASON6, Waves plugs

Avalon 737s (2)

Novation Remote 25SL keyboard controller

Roland FP-3 Master Keyboard

mics: TLM103, AT4050, 57/58

Duet 2

Yamaha acoustic

Martin acoustic

Epiphone Les Paul

Vox amp

Lunchbox with GR pre

 

don`t use...

Roland JV1080 ($125)

Fender Strat, Mexican ($350)

Ibanez Hollow body ($150)

Fender amp ($50)

 

I`m actually trying to get rid of the "don`t use"...

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There's no doubt that I have more gear than I need but I do use most of it at some point. It's nice to have a good selection of guitars and now that I'm gigging again I'll get my money's worth out of two or three of them at least. Having the lightweight Privia PX-3 keyboard for gigging while I leave the much heavier Korg TR88 connected to the home studio conglomeration also seems well justified. Guitar amps would be the easiest thing to get rid of these days but I keep the ones I have around in the event I feel like using them again some day.

 

At home studio land I often feel like I'm not getting the most out of much of my hardware/software but at the same time I don't want to spend all my precious free time reading manuals.

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There's no doubt that I have more gear than I need but I do use most of it at some point. It's nice to have a good selection of guitars and now that I'm gigging again I'll get my money's worth out of two or three of them at least. Having the lightweight Privia PX-3 keyboard for gigging while I leave the much heavier Korg TR88 connected to the home studio conglomeration also seems well justified. Guitar amps would be the easiest thing to get rid of these days but I keep the ones I have around in the event I feel like using them again some day.


At home studio land I often feel like I'm not getting the most out of much of my hardware/software but at the same time I don't want to spend all my precious free time reading manuals.

 

 

I just dug out of exile some of my gear, analog tape stuff

Might as well keep in this economy

Won't get jack

If listed for sale

 

Hookah up your old gear in new ways

sometimes becomes new gear

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I have an audio junkyard of stuff I can't bear to throw away or have the time to fix, but my working gear is bare and just enough.

 

PC

Audio interface

Keyboard contoller

monitors

3 guitars

Korg X3

Oberheim Matrix 1000 rack

Yamaha TX81Z rack

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Yep, no question about it. I'm a bit of a packrat (no need to call HOARDERS just yet ;)), but I would like to pare down. Trouble is, I'm sure most of the stuff I would get rid of wouldn't get much on the market.

 

On a regular basis, for live, I use a MIM Fender Telecaster, Peavey Classic 30 amplifier, a BOSS BCB-60 with a TU-2, CS-3, SD-1, DS-2, CH-1, DD-3, my old Ensoniq ESQ-1, my old Deltex keyboard stand and my Yamaha/QSC PA system.

 

For audio and video recording, well, I haven't done much of that lately, but I do have a Windows XP desktop, a used MacBook I recently acquired, and an M-AUDIO Fast Track Pro USB interface. Whenever I get the recording bug again, I'll probably get more involved with the Mac side of things. I already love working with HD videos on it.

 

The unused stuff are a few electric guitars, an acoustic/electric guitar, a 5-string Ibanez bass guitar I have barely played in the last 5 years since leaving the band I used it in, a bunch of small tube and solid state practice amps, a whole bunch of working guitar effects pedals, some rack gear, old keyboards that need to be retired...the list goes on. Too much stuff for our cozy home environment...

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I'm a cheap SOB so I don't collect stuff too fast. But what I get I tend to keep, except for electronic keyboards. I did get rid of my CP70, though -- it took up too much room & was too big a hassle to move. And ohmigosh, I still have my TASCAM 40-4 tape reel recorder. Anyone want to make me an offer on that? It's a classic!

 

I wish I had more keyboards than I needed. I have two; one (Ensoniq MR76) is usually set up at home and I also gig with it. The other (Nord Electro 2) is usually ready to go for practice, or upper tier at a gig. I'd like to have a DP I could leave set up.

 

I still have a Roland RE-301 Chorus Echo I haven't used in ages. I should let that one go to a happy home. It used to be attached at the hip to my Rhodes (which I still have and hope to set up again soon...)

 

I have a few mixers I don't use regularly, but an extra mixer is always handy to have. Oh wait, I have ONE extra mixer now; the other ones I seem to have lent never to get back.

 

I have more guitars than I use regularly, but not nearly enough since I don't even have a 12-string or a resophonic! Just the basics: dreadnaught, classical, fender electric, gibson electric (copy), archtop, and bass. Which could I do without? Which of your children would you sell into slavery?

 

Oh yeah, I do want one of those little cheapie lap steels too! Only ... I don't think anyone would want to hear the results. :-|

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Like anyone who has been doing home/small studio recording for 30 years, I've collected a few pieces I no longer use. But when I sold my old house, I sold a lot of gear I hadn't been using any longer.

 

I'm happy to say that, in the last 20 years, I bought very little I didn't end up using.

 

One was a pair of Behringer 5 band full parametric EQs --this was before Behringer had dropped their prices and my pro shop was actually carrying their gear as a value line -- I'd had a Behringer Composer (compressor) that actually was decent (again, not cheap) and so felt somewhat comfortable taking my pro shop guy's advice. In this case, though, it was one of the few times he steered me wrong. But the EQ's sounded like crap.

 

(Not too long after that, the Composer suddenly died, still in warranty. But when I went on the then-relatively-new world wide web to see what my repair options were, I quickly found out that many people had sent their gear off to Germany for warranty/authorized repairs, not got it back for many months and then couldn't get Behringer to even respond to inquiries. My pro shop offered to try to fix it for me but I decided not to bother.)

 

The other thing was a BBE 262 I bought on some kind of whim. (I don't even remember where I bought it.) I tried it on a couple things and put it aside. Where it stayed for probably over a decade. But after reading a thread basically titled something like BBE -- what the hell is it good for? I decided to give it a shot. I've been having some difficulties getting the kind of sound I want out of my auditorium size guitar and, on a whim, ran a couple of tracks of it from an instrumental through the BBE and was actually sort of charmed by the bass bump and 'sparkle-ification' of the high end. In a hyped up kind of way. Frankly, all of a sudden, I recognized the hyped up high end from a number of commercial recordings of some notable acoustic guitarists I'd heard and pondered over the years where the sound was clearly hyped in some fashion. So, in this case, I'll probably fool around with it some more. Honestly, it was the number of people in that GS thread saying things like, It's not good for anything -- an opinion I suspected I might agree with -- that pushed me to finally explore its use.

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I got enough gear to equip two digital and one analog studios.

I have a back bedroom with gear stacked up to the point where its hard to get into that room.

I suppose I should sell some of that stuff off and use the money to do some upgrades.

Most of the gear is worth more than I paid for it. Its just not a good time to be selling stuff.

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I have "roughly" 20 guitars (is it sad that I'm not even sure without being at home to count them?) but to be fair, they all get used except for one that I retired from gigging and another that is my lone collector piece. However, my best intentions of diving into home/project recording aren't enough to justify the other assorted gear that I've accumulated. None of it is high-dollar stuff, but my core recording rig - PC, FireWire interface and monitors - has probably logged under 20 hours of use. The little bit I have recorded was for friends' projects, and could have just as easily been done with a $99 USB interface, cheap headphones and my day-to-day home PC. The only redeeming factor is that some of the guest guitar solos I recorded at home ended up on songs that got properly released.

 

Alas, if I were to try selling any of it, I'd just turn around and repeat the process in a couple years.

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I've lost track of how many guitars I have too. :o

 

But I have rooms full of rack mount gear, old floor processors, stomp boxes, electronic parts and test equipment (I used to repair music gear for a living), hundreds of pounds of wire and cable, dozens of large speaker cabs, tons of Par 64 lighting, trusses, you name it. It's ridiculous and it's hoarding and my house would be better if I just put it all in the dumpster. :freak:

 

Anyone want two Altec metal voice of the theater horns? I sold a bunch of crap a while back and no one wanted those. :idk:

 

Terry D.

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I've got way too much around myself. I think back to where i had a set up similar to Mr. Saul's and I got way more done. Think I got in the gearslutz mentality of 'shoot outs' and spent more time doing that than actually being creative. I'm really starting to think mic pre's are like Mr. Tea (you add the tea bag and hot water and Mr. Tea does the rest). I spent years with my only good mic a Sennheiser 441 and sold it and got an AKG 414 so this winter I'm setting up a mini studio with just my music computer, Mackie mixer, near fields and the above mics (which I know like the back of my hand) with a passive pickup bass and guitar out. I'll set up my keyboard and drum pad thing when I need them but I do need to cease the decision anxiety and just get some stuff done.

 

My mom passed last summer and I have some savings but until probate is over times are hard feeding me and my cats and no work bites yet. Not to mention the upcoming heating bills. I've been selling off some stuff, sold my drums last spring and just now got around to selling my cymbals. The Woodpecker has left the building. My little Marshall head and 60's Vibro Champ may have to go as well. My two expensive mic pre's gulp, well we'll see how the Mackie does. I'm putting together some guitars out of parts and will probably sell my Tacoma too. It may end up being a good thing though, less decisions, more creativity.

 

Terry, I sold off all the drivers, but have been putting my huge PA cabs out with the trash each week. Gave my light show away to my old bass bud. Realize I won't use that stuff anymore and don't miss it at all.

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