How much does it all matter?

[grimtraveller]

Sometimes, not having all the gear you would like makes you use things in ways that the manufacturer never intended. Limited gear is the mother of invention.

To me, this is one of the wheels on which the entirety of recording history turns. It's partly true that there's probably no need to be so 'Mother Inventive' these days, but this misses the point. Throughout recording history, things have been used in ways not intended by the manufacturer/inventor. The electric guitar/amp/distortion combo that we love so much was a total accident of history. Amps didn't have distortion. They existed so the soft noodlings of jazz guitarists would be heard ~ just. Then players started turning up all the settings and liked the sound and the feedback.
Half the reasons mic placements became so important was because engineers were trying to capture sounds that at the time were impossible to get. But by trying to achieve one thing, they found something unexpected. Limited gear led to British studios having to break rules that they had imposed on young musicians because the public picked up on the sounds that these guys were making.
The list goes on.
Furthermore, it's fun trying to make the most with the least. Until it's so limiting that the fun becomes frustration.

Don't sweat the gear, until it starts to bug you with its limitations. Spend more time researching gear than buying it. Record on.

Only you can really know if something has become limiting. And if it has......

I'm not sure how clear it was that my question wasn't "does high end gear sound different", which it clearly does but, "does having it matter"?

I still think cheap guitars sound great.

Again I say it ~ it's paradoxical. Yes, it matters ~ to those to whom it matters. And no, if you are happy with what you have that isn't high end and expensive, then no, it doesn't matter. Personally, I'm not on some endless quest to make 'better' music. I do want to make music that I like and that I'll be listening to in my old age, if I make it to there. My recording and mixing however, does need to get better. Most of the gear I have is pretty low rent but it does what I want it to do. Last summer, I was given a £300 mic, which, for me, is astronomical. I'd never spend that on a mic. On a recorder, yeah, but not a mic. But to many other users here, a £300 mic doesn't even begin to make it as a tambourine mic ! And they're right, there's no reason for them to use what, to them, is a shitty artifact.
But I'm also right. I like the sound of what it picks up and I can see that it's different {better} than my old Shure Prologues and so I can see the argument both ways. Having said that, it gives me scope and helps me think in terms of "Ok, I'm going to record XYZ....what mike shall I use".

 

[Richard Monroe]

Thanks to all for your thoughts, I've found this a really interesting debate.

I'm not sure how clear it was that my question wasn't "does high end gear sound different", which it clearly does but, "does having it matter"?

I still think cheap guitars sound great.

Well, you know, it depends on what you are trying to do. Let's say you are playing Scott James, or any other 1920's-1930's classic Delta blues. There were damn few of those guys that had a Martin dreadnought with brand new strings, or a D'Angelico archtop. Much of that music was played on cheap guitars, because it's what they had. As a rule, if you play that music on a current top shelf acoustic, it just sounds *wrong*. I've got an $80 Mitchell with slightly dead strings that will give me that sound when I want it. But- it has to have a straight neck and hold its tune. If it doesn't, it's not a *cheap* guitar, it's a *bad* guitar. That's different.-Richie

 

[Hakea]

Thanks to all for your thoughts, I've found this a really interesting debate.

I'm not sure how clear it was that my question wasn't "does high end gear sound different", which it clearly does but, "does having it matter"?

Matter for what? If you want to capture a certain sound in a certain way then yes it can definitely matter. If you're talking about whether you can make recordings that you'll be happy with, then the answer might well be no. As we've said before, it's a personal choice - your choice.

I enjoy hearing old recordings of Robert Johnson, Son House and the like. You can still appreciate what they did, despite the poor quality of the equipment. But I might well enjoy it a lot more if we had decent recordings of them. To reverse it, I wouldn't want to take a good modern recording and reduce it to that level of quality because you'd lose so much that it would become hard to listen to. Once you know what you're missing it's harder to go backwards.

The other day I was listening to some music on a laptop, through good quality headphones. There was a particular piece of playing that I wanted my wife to hear, so I unplugged the phones and played it through the computer's built in speakers. Not only did it sound hugely worse all round, but the instrument that I wanted her to listen to had completely disappeared from the mix. I don't mean reduced in quality, I do mean gone! The crummy little speakers weren't up to doing the job on that particular frequency.

To use the car analogy again. If your aim is to get from A to B you could:

• 1. Buy a cheap car, perhaps made in Korea, that will do the speed limit and get you there with a reasonable level of reliability. That might be all you want.
  
  2. Spend twice as much on a car. You may get there faster, but it wouldn't be twice as fast. It probably wouldn't be twice as comfortable or handle twice as well either, but it wouldn't be hard to appreciate that there was a quality improvement. Worth it? Your choice.
  
  3. Spend a hundred times as much and buy an individually built supercar. The improvements in acceleration, speed and handling would be huge, but not fifty times as much as car 2.

The point is that, whatever you're buying - cars, recording gear, home stereo, guitars, or whatever - there is a version of the law of diminishing returns. The higher up the chain you go, the more you have to pay for increasingly small improvements. If you want them enough then you pay the price.

So there's no possible objective answer to the question "does having it matter?" because it's entirely personal. If your current gear satisfies you then that's all that matters right now. If you outgrow it later, or take on a project that requires better quality, then maybe you will want to upgrade later. It's all good.

Chris