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I keep telling myself to stop lusting over gear and just start making music, but…

EDIT: Saw that it’s pretty much a fixed-key device, which makes it much less appealing. Still pretty damn cool, though.

GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome = buying stuff you don't really need is a serious problem in the synth/eurorack community.

Doesn't every musician with money have this problem? Every rockstar owns like 50 guitars. And they don' like to admit they're just collecting. They always got some story about why they need to buy the nth guitar that's missing from all the other tens of guitars they already own.

Almost all of them own instruments and gear they'll touch once and never do anything meaningful with ever again. Then it becomes a fixture on their walls or den.

It all seems wasteful.

But still, by rich people standards, it seems cheaper than other things like buying a huge boat.

Yeah I mean many people with disposable income seems to be doing this, it's just that the music community has a name for it, GAS, and it's a bit of a meme in the community.

I have a friend who seemingly collects mechanical keyboards. He keeps saying he needs them for various purposes, but always seems to be using the latest one, then the old ones go up on a shelf and sit there.

Another friend is obsessed with football, so he has a bunch of shoes, also "depending on the grass/ground" yet keeps using 1 or 2 the most, the others seems to in some cases be "collectors items" and never gets used.

Another friend is a avid golfer, literally has a wall in the garage with clubs, but seems to mostly stick with the clubs they have in their go-to bag.

I'm sure I could come up with more examples, it just seems pervasive among all people who can spend money on their hobbies.

I have a friend who plays tennis. He literally has like 100 tennis balls, all neatly packed and sorted on a shelf. Of course, all you need for a tennis match is like 3-4, since more won't fit in the pockets anyway.

If you're practicing your serve alone it's convenient to have a lot of tennis balls. It's quicker to gather all the balls in a big batch than individually.

I don't currently have any physical instruments while I have had quite a collection and nice studio in the past.

I think it comes down to the fact that it is fun collecting gear and a lot easier than actually making music. Making music is really hard.

I also don't think it even cost me $2k when it was all said and done with all the gear I bought. So much of the gear held its value and one piece of gear I had I sold for 3x what I bought it for so that paid for so much depreciation on gear that didn't hold its value.

Some gear heads I know have money to burn but others just have their savings in gear instead of a savings account at the bank.

This goes to 11!

Or any community that involves conspicuous consumption. There's always what feels like a majority of people who collect/buy/show off more than they use things

and that's fine in some sense if you're honest about what you're doing.

I have at least one guitar that I rarely play but I keep because I consider it a work of art and a collectible. But, I have others which are workhorses and I play daily.

It gets awkward when collecting is presented as a way to be a better musician, which is clearly false.

It also percolates into reviews, too. When a nontrivial fraction of the community is buying dreams and is about collecting as opposed to using whatever it is, some reviewers style their content towards that crowd and overlook issues or benefits that pop up when actually using the gear.

I don't have a problem with collecting, but I'd love for the distinction to be more upfront.

On that note I absolutely love Matt Johnson (Jamiroquai)'s youtube channel because you can tell he likes gear but spends a huge amount of time actually playing it and making his own patches. So much of the review market is just GAS-inducing paid promo stuff.

> It also percolates into reviews, too

It's kind of easy to detect though. I usually read three/four paragraphs before I realize that the person reviewing doesn't actually make music and doesn't consider the music making parts of the hardware, and instead focuses on very generic stuff that basically the manufacturer handed to them and said "make sure this is included".

Problem? Buying what makes you happy is keeping the entire synth industry afloat!

He explains it quite well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81fMDyNCljM

Could mount a guitar pickup under the tines of a kalimba and get much the same effects.

I think that’s actually pretty different. In this case the tines are being electronically “plucked” - in the kalimba + pickups case you have to do all the plucking

You might an internet search for "Array mbira" entertaining.

Actually you can change the keys up so much you can do microtonal scales on it, but at the end of the day its a metallaphone so not likely to ever be the only piece of gear you'd want to use, you'd want to mix this with other gear to make a full sound.

“Essentially” in the sense you can’t really change the 8 frequencies you have to choose from quickly. Kinda impractical to do if you wanna play a set that spans different keys/tonalities.

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