Ten years with a musical gear hobby
Ten years ago I started buying musical gear as a hobby. At the time my intention was to “get back into making music”, something I hadn’t done regularly since college. (And back then “making music” was mostly learning random songs I liked, never writing my own songs.) So my first gear purchase was a digital 4-track recorder. I already had a decent acoustic guitar, so why not give singer-songwritering a go? I only recorded one or two songs, and those were semi-comedic songs about the neighbor’s lawnmower or whatever.
The intervening years are kind of a blur of gear buying and selling. I have a spreadsheet with my current inventory and it’s embarrassing how long it is. It feels like making music became ancillary to buying gear. I haven’t actually written a whole song (verse chorus verse, etc.) since I was in a band in high school, and I haven’t learned a new song in ages. Maybe making music was not what I was actually interested in. Perhaps making music was a cover, and what I was really doing was trying to avoid dealing with my social anxiety? Maybe I thought making music would open a door to workable social relationships that I didn’t have / couldn’t manage. But my ideal of creating honest, impeccable music set me up to fail at making music. Buying gear was part of the avoidance process, as I never settled on a set up long enough to get good at actual music creation. I felt bad, but feeling bad was the cost of not having to change.
tags: month-of-blogs, anxiety, music