Shit, I'd settle for 30 and knowing what I know now...
Tyler, that last comment about the producer thing - you should edit your posts, or nobody will EVER take you seriously. Here's a bit more of a reality check -
I think almost all of us daydream about winning the lottery and calling up Roger Nichols or Walter Storyk or George Massenburg or hell, all of them, and saying, hey guise put me in a $2 mil studio, put it right there, and call me when it's ready -
REALITY TIME - It's been my experience that you get a lot more familiarity and use from each piece of gear in a studio when you get one piece and learn it, get a second piece, etc - every time I've bought multiple pieces of gear at a time, NONE of them ever got full usage according to their abilities, unless I went back and cracked the manual again after the new wore off. (I usually do, sooner or later)
It's one thing to look at Dream-N-Drool books and read all the descriptions and specs and put together a studio in your head/on paper - if you've studied enough, you will usually get the FUNCTIONS of each piece of gear right. It's quite ANOTHER thing to actually buy all the gear and expect it to work like you thought it would. There is ALWAYS something they don't tell you that you usually end up assuming, usually INCORRECTLY, that bites you on the ass. This is true of nearly EVERY piece of gear you get, with the possible exception of actual musical instruments, which only require years of practice to be useful.
Tyler, look at it this way: Do you know why a BASIC college education takes at least 4 years? It's because no HUMAN can learn all that's required in 5 minutes, or even a month!!! It's the same with a studio. To get the most out of a complex system of gear, each piece must be operating at its optimum. That means that the operator must know each piece of gear nearly as well as its designer, so he can set up all the conditions it takes for that piece of gear to shine. When you multiply the effort that takes by the number of pieces of gear it takes to put together a complete recording/mixing facility, with all the attendant details, it becomes an incredibly daunting task (meaning it's really HARD) - normally trying to do all that at once will result in one of two possibilities - either you will fry your brain and end up in a rubber room, or you will say fuck it, sell the stuff for less than half what you paid for it, and spend the money on crack or some equally detrimental shit, which (if you're lucky) will also fry your brain and you'll STILL end up in that rubber room...
If you took a different kind of poll (I can't believe I suggested that) you would find that those who post here who actually KNOW their ass from a fur-lined gopher hole, almost without exception have been poor enough to HAVE TO get their gear a piece or two at a time, so that they were FORCED to learn as much as possible about each piece because (1) there was nothing else to do while saving for the next piece, and (2) They wanted the best they could get out of what they COULD afford, and (3) that extra WAITING time has been put to good STUDY and EXPERIMENTING time...
I personally think that the "wait til I can get it all" part of your plan will be GREAT, for all of us here EXCEPT YOU - What it will mean, is that when you finally DO get everything at once, you'll be so OVERWHELMED that you'll be SELLING it all here at 30% of wholesale, and when you do, I GET DIBS ON THE HIGH DOLLAR PREAMPS... :=)
Seriously, Tyler, READ THIS POST 3 OR 4 MORE TIMES and think about it. Being "in your own little world" is cool for fantasies, but REALITY has a nasty habit of throwing REALLY COLD WATER in our faces. It's been a while since that's happened to me, but that's partly because I have a really good memory for things that bit me in the ass, and generally no two scars on that part of my anatomy have been caused by the same weapon... Steve
(Bdgr snuck in while I was writing the above short story - besides, I WAS playing nice. I meant every word in a helpful, constructive way, except maybe the preamps...)
