In Short
When we buy some equipment to use in our studio it needs to be gear that’s going to make the creative process as pain free as possible. Specifications are important, but we neglect the psychological part at our cost, often creative inertia is the biggest problem.
In Depth
I was about 15yrs of age when I went on an adventure weekend at a Youth Hostel with a group of my peers, in the UK they are called Outward Bound courses. The course included walking up mountains, builing a raft to get across a lake and abseiling. This is where you come down a mountain on a rope backwards, hanging at 90 degrees to the rock face as you effectively bounce down it.
I’m not a fan of heights. In fact I’ll go as far as saying I have a serious fear of heights, which doesn’t seem to have improved over the 40 or so years since.
We all stood in line, there was about ten of us in the group. I watched the first one go, then the second, and before I knew it I was up. My stomach started to churn, I could feel the beads of sweat on my face. Did I really have to do this? It was a good time to run. I had a number of questions about the whole thing. Despite most of the group descending down safely, irrationality had kicked in. What if the rope couldn’t hold me? What if the instructor didn’t know what they were doing? What if they went mad and decided to drop me for fun? I did say I was being irrational.
In fact what it came down to was confidence. Not my own, but confidence in the gear, the person and the process.
I’ve written in detail before about a concern I’ve had for many years, in my article “Has The Home Studio Dream Become A Nightmare?” I write about how hard it can be to get anything done in a studio, often because we are fighting with the gear. This is a modern downside of the home recording revolution. In the good old days of recording studios, the engineers worried about the gear, while the talent concentrated on being the best creative they could be, on the performance. This has changed, and for many of us, it’s a creativity killer.
Confidence
I’ve used the term confidence in a number of articles and reviews. I’ve used it about my monitoring system, the Kii Three. Although the actual gear, is irrelavent to this article, your choices may be different.
I described that as ‘mix confidence.’ In other words, I know that when I use them that what I’m hearing will translate to the outside world. In the world of movies and TV, they have colour calibrated displays, so that when they grade the picture, it should look right outside of their grading suite.
I used the same term when I reviewed the Slate VSX headphones. Again, meaning that when I take those out with me, I’m confident that what I’m hearing is pretty close to my studio monitors, or at least a fair approximation. Again, the gear to illustrate this point isn’t important.
However, I don’t think this just applies to the end part of the chain.
I recently got hold of an Avid Carbon to try. Within minutes of using it, I realised how much difference it could make to the tracking part of my creation process. Yes, I know HDX has been doing this for years, I had an Omni for a few years, but the Hybrid engine and the simplicity of the workflow, takes the inertia out of the recording process for me. I’d battled with all sorts of recording solutions and nothing had given me the inertia free workflow that Carbon has. I’ve recorded more in a week, than I have in the previous six months! Opening up old sessions to retrack keyboards and guitars. If you missed it the first two times, the gear to illustrate this point isn’t important.
When It Isn’t Working
When gear lets us down, or we’re knee deep in trying to figure out why something isn’t behaving as it should, then we are dealing with friction in the creative process. Just yesterday I set out to do something which should have taken me 10 minutes, 2 hours later I was still battling with technology.
There’s a number of reasons for this. Perhaps we tried to do something on the cheap, and then we find out that by trying to save money on the cheap alternative, it ends up costing us more to do it right in the end. An example of this was when I purchased an iPhone 12 Max a couple of years ago. I decided that Apple MagSafe cases are a rip off and I’d buy one for £10 from Amazon. I also decided that a Belkin MagSafe wifeless charger was too costly, so I’d get one, yes you guessed it, off Amazon for £10. Then I spent a couple of years wondering why I could never charge my phone on this wireless charger. In the end I bit the bullet and invested in the right case and charger, now my daily charging battle is over.
We’re in the middle of a cost of living crisis, so buying the premium isn’t always possible, but sometimes buying the cheap version costs more in the long run. I’ve found this out with USB hubs, cables, mic stands, you name it, I’ve tried to do it on the cheap… and failed.
The second reason is that we try and do something fast. We ignore the user manual, or we don’t label audio tracks, or files in a session. After all, organisation is for accountants, not creatives we think. Then we find ourself battling with some software that ‘doesn’t work’, not because that’s the case, but because we’re too busy to read the manual. Then we go into a forum, or YouTube, or on social, get frustrated, have a rant and now we in no place to try and be creative.
Confidence Is Key
I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that confidence is a really important part of our gear choices. Are we confident this mic will do what I need? Is this interface going to be the one that just works? Are my speakers telling me the truth? If there’s anything to celebrate about modern music, the choice we have is enormous, there’s no reason to buy the wrong thing. Remember that the best is the best one for you!
It may be cost, or not taking time to investigate things thoroughly before we purchase AND learning them after. It may of course be a case of having the humility to admit we are wrong. No one wants to have bought the wrong speakers or interface, we’ll argue until we are blue in the face, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that it’s not working for us. Whatever it is, I hope I’ve learnt my lesson and moving forward I’ll understand how important to have confidence in the tools we use to do our work.
It might not be a rope we’re hanging from, but if it’s the way we make our living then we need to know that it’s something we can trust!