I don’t know how many times I’ve been frustrated by some grumpy musician or a musical instrument/sample library/effects plugin company, whether or not it was directed towards me.
Too many musicians think they need expensive equipment or computer programs to make good music. I’m sure many other musicians like myself would agree.
I own a 1950s Silvertone acoustic guitar, given to me by my grandmother, who got it from my great-grandmother. You can still see wear on the fretboard where her long 1950s fingernails formed basic open position chords.
One time I brought it to a bluegrass festival, where a lot of players simply wander around and jam. Some stranger came up to me and said I really ought to upgrade to a “good” guitar.
This phenomenon is particularly incongruent and irksome in the folk music community. American folk music is founded upon dirt poor railroad workers and cotton pickers, who could only afford what guitars they could get their hands on, or built them out of cigar boxes or cookie tins.
And yet it seems like you can’t play bluegrass music nowadays unless you sound like Doc Watson or Earl Scruggs. As amazing as those guys are, it makes folk music feel like a place only for virtuosos, which isn’t true.
It happens in rock music too. I remember when Jack White and his White Stripes were rising to stardom, loads of people wrote to the guitar magazines in the letters-to-the-editor section sneering at him, calling him “amateurish” and “primitive”.
To me, the White Stripes were a revelation. I discovered that you didn’t need a $3,000 Les Paul Standard or Ibanez 7-string with EMG pickups with a boutique amp with a million billion knobs to sound good (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with those things). You could use a cheap dinky fiberglass guitar that you picked up at a pawn shop and sound fantastic.
I am very poor. Most of my guitars are neglected and damaged 1960s Japanese guitars that cost me $50. But I think they sound great. My amp is a $50 solid state budget amp, which broke several years ago for unknown reasons, and I can’t afford to get it repaired or properly replaced. My only option was to buy a battery-powered Danelectro Honeytone, and I can’t afford to buy the batteries all the time. I haven’t played electric guitar regularly in years.
I remember researching a tape echo stompbox to buy in the distant future. Fulltone makes an honest-to-god magnetic tape echo unit, and as amazing as it sounds, I remember reading their FAQ about it, and how they said that you shouldn’t buy it unless you already have experience maintaning a vintage tape echo unit from the 1960s, which cost thousands of dollars. “Well,” I wanted to tell them if it wasn’t a fruitless endeavor, “what if I can’t afford one of those things? What if I want my first tape echo to be relatively inexpensive?”
Luckily there’s the Strymon El Capistan dTape Echo, which can do ten times as many things at a lower cost, and all without needing to constantly replace the tape.
Too bad I still can’t afford it.
But I’m cursed with a creativity and an imagination that’s seemingly boundless- I’m utterly fascinated with pretty much every instrument ever invented, especially the obscure and the bizarre. And I want to compose music for all of them.
So what am I to do? My midi keyboard is something one of our neighbors gave away to us. It doesn’t have aftertouch, a mod wheel, or even a stand. I have to hold the 40-something-pound thing in my lap if I want to use it. The pitch wheel is barely useable.
So I have to rely on the Robin Hoods of the internet to get sample libraries of the instruments I want, and the effects plugins that I want. Not all of them are going around.
Because of my lack of decent hardware, I’m forced to resort to music almost solely based around samples and the occassional acoustic guitar. I had to teach myself to play keyboard. So as much as I love making electro-folk music, I wish I could be recording proper rock and metal music.
It’s ridiculous what some of these programs require of your computer. I’m thinking in particular Universal Audio, whose plugins require their own custom hardware to run. There are plugins by other people that do the same thing and more, and cost much less and don’t need fancy extensions to work.
The same goes for Pro Tools. I use GarageBand and Adobe Audition mainly.
My computer is about ten years old, and it only has a dual processor and not nearly enough RAM to run some of these programs and plugins. I have to run GarageBand all by its lonesome to run at a reasonable speed.
One of my GarageBand projects became so complicated it wouldn’t load anymore. I need to wait until I can afford a new computer before I can start working on it. I’ve thought about switching to Logic Pro, but I don’t know if that would run any faster.
And yet there have been people online who’ve harassed me for not knowing about some pointless digital mixing technique that “professionals” supposedly use. They couldn’t be bothered explaining what it was or what it did, and when I learned a small portion of what they were, they didn’t create any results that I could possibly want.
I suppose there’s always going to be people who don’t understand that there isn’t a single, indespensible method to making music. I don’t need a “professional technique” to make professional sounding music. IMO, my music sounds just as good as professionally-produced music despite the shortcomings of my equipment and computer. I’ve figured out how to overcome these shortcomings and create a listenable result.
On top of everything else, I have difficulty recording my acoustic guitars and my voice. My one good microphone, a ribbon mic, broke several years ago, and so I have to resort to my iMac’s internal mic, which doesn’t sound very good- I always have to fiddle with the recording afterward to get it sounding nice. I tried buying a new ribbon mic, but then I discovered my preamp, which is required for recording anything with an external mic, is also broken and I can’t afford to replace it.
And yet one jerk online had the nerve to criticize my using a ribbon mic in the first place, as if ALL ribbon mics are crap.
