Try Me

Photo by Artem Beliaikin from Pexels

The year is almost over. It has been the slowest fastest year ever, like living in a mind-numbing space-time continuum vortex. This pandemic has become a home recording “pandemix” for me. I keep wanting to pack the gear and go play the gig. It isn’t happening. Myself, all my bandmates, we’re all walking risk factors. It was already dodgy, because driving into downtown Nashville to perform left you exposed to potential street crimes after the gig when you walked blocks to retrieve your car for load out. Musicians got robbed (sometimes at gunpoint). But I digress…

One of the stranger, but positive things, is having my stage rig upstairs in my home studio. For the past five years it has lived in the garage where it was unloaded and stored after each bi-weekly or so gig, far too heavy for an old guy like me to be safely lugging up and down stairs for the gig. My pedal board and guitars made it to the studio, but not the rack and cabinets. It’s a loud rig. I have a custom made 2-12 vertical cab and 1-12 single cab, “Hard Trucker” style birch plywood, loaded with vintage JBL D-120 speakers. The guitar rig is a vintage McIntosh MC50, the lightest of the MC series, providing solid state power to the SMS Classic-JG tube pre-amp by Sarnos Music Systems.

It lives in an 8U Gator rackmount case with a rackmount power strip. You can understand why these things live in the garage. Most of the time when recording at home, where my studio revolves around a Universal Audio Apollo 8 Thunderbolt interface, I record direct with a pedal or two at best, then re-amping and modding the sound using the vast array of amazing plugins that change up guitar tracks in some remarkable ways. I’m also finally getting the chance to conveniently mic my live rig with the live pedal board setup, and record it as well, or mic up one of the dozen amps in the room, along with the 50-something guitars. I’m ate up with it. Most of you can think of a customer like me, or are like me in these hoarding respects. I keep pressing the G.A.S.

This is keeping me busy, engaged, and still chasing the dream, since we can’t live it now. And in spite of a room literally full of guitars and amps, microphones, even a guitar maintenance workbench, I still don’t think I have enough gear. I’m your best customer and worst customer. I’m at the point where I have to be pretty knocked out by a guitar and the price to buy it, but not at the point where I will ever stop shopping daily. I’m older, still have some disposable income, can write off gear because of work for the most part, and I am bored.

Every night since the world stopped letting me safely gig, a night hasn’t gone by where I don’t open emails from my favorite musical instrument retailers, and probably click a link. I bought a new MD421 II Sennheiser microphone last month. Why? I don’t really remember. I mean, I didn’t really need another dynamic microphone, but they dropped the price to $199 and I didn’t own one so, hey, “impulse purchase!” I get a lot of stuff this way. In the end, I think it was a nostalgia purchase from something I used 30 years ago.

The country – heck, the world – is teeming with bored middle-aged musicians with a “gear jones” stuck at home in front of their toys unable to perform even a weekend warrior gig on the local dead animal circuit of Moose Lodges and Elks Clubs. The smart retailers get my attention with targeting my boredom and nostalgia on top of taking my interests seriously. Most mom and pops can’t produce the vast hands-on training and support content that a Sweetwater can make. But they can do niche. They can do neat-o. They can do “hey, remember this?” pretty well when they get something from the 70s and 80s MI world in stock used or as a reissue. Great photos, and great written descriptions sell me when I’m cruising online retailers, big or small. A little “’memba this?” don’t hurt either.

I’m almost at the end of my workday in my work from home world. It is a beautiful, well-stocked prison. I have some drum tracks to go download from a drummer in the UK that does tracks for me, dinner to make, a new puppy to walk, but when it is time to wind down for bed, I will be online either on my phone or MacBook Pro, randomly follow click-bait sales offers, new inventory listings, and sizing up more stuff I don’t “need” or after I get may not even use much, but I’m still gonna buy it. I wonder what you will sell me on this week. Parts? Accessories? A smoking closeout deal on a guitar I’d probably not look at otherwise? Stomp boxes I’ll play on rare occasion but feel glad to own when I do?

I have very little self-control when faced with cool gear at great prices available immediately. Try me.