#NGNY22 - Happy NoGear New Year!

I’d do what @subduct suggested.

Another option is to let your ”sponsors” know in this thread (please feel free to PM me) and I’m sure we’ll find a way to help you.

Then again I fear the 20,- MDUW will only be a mirage you’re seeing after going for so long without buying new gear. Here’s to hoping the mirages will start coming in November and not February.

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Musical goals:

  • Finish a track
  • Finish… more than one track
  • Learn gear properly (or at least better)
  • Re-learn guitar (It’s going to be thrash, death, doom, speed metal)
  • Work out a live set and practice performance techniques
  • Persuade wife that wardrobe and bed in spare room are not needed anymore and make a proper music room. Probably the toughest goal :slight_smile:
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Would be MUCH easier if 2022 started already! The past 10 days or so and the following 2,5 weeks feels like a weird purgatory to me! I feel like I’m just as likely to cave in the next 19 days as in the 365 days following that. Would think it’d be easy to just flip the calendar in my mind already and be done with thinking buying/trading gear.

For me it’s mostly about ”tying loose ends”, meaning trying to trade away one piece that I haven’t gelled with and probably won’t feel like deep diving. I may be fooling myself cos trading IS a form of GAS (even if the money in and out is the same) but I feel that if that one piece stays, the idea of trading it won’t leave me alone, which will make it harder to even think about completing the challenge.

All this, of course, is a self-inflicted problem with having more gear than I actually have time to use. So even if I started the year happy with everything, there’ll always be that one piece I’m not using THAT much and will start considering trading/selling. That’s the pattern I’ll have to try and break next year.

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Yeah, part of me is already wanting loopholes. Lol.

Like if I’m deep into recording my EP and digging mic’ing stuff up and want some small hand percussion (I was really after a set of bongos this year, but they got back ordered twice so I cancelled).

I guess I’ll have to use samples and play some glass bottles or something. Save the bongos for the 2023 album. :rofl:

Edit: I actually just thought of two solutions. They have loads of practice spaces in Tokyo where you can rent instruments. I could bring my mics and Zoom and try recording stuff, which could be a fun day out.

Or,

I could go on one of those sites where you can pay a studio musician a nominal fee to record something for you, or find someone locally to connect with other musicians. That would most definitely sound better than what I would come up with, and could connect with some people.

Creative solutions and new experiences. That’s what this should be all about.

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Trading is DEFINITELY a form of GAS… part of this challenge is certainly financial, I could do with saving the cash-but I have always been responsible. I think even if you had enough money to ensure all the gear purchases imaginable wouldn’t cause even the smallest dent in finances I still think GAS would be a problem as it can cripple creativity.

I started this ‘synth journey’ in 2019 when I stumbled into it and purchased a drumbrute impact to play guitar along to-prior to that I had zero knowledge of this dark world!!

Pretty soon I had the drumbrute, a microfreak and a microbrute plus a few effects plus TC ditto x4 looper all midi’d up and I recorded loads of tracks into a little 4 track.

I was crazy productive-a tune a day all recorded, some were ok, some were awful some were even quite good. But I was learning the gear, and experimenting and improving….

Then I started GASing… the research, the next great thing, the buying, returning or selling, YouTube-ing…

Since autumn 2019 I have owned 50 plus synths (at least-often multiple times) - spent thousands £, sold thousands £ of gear… and never got that productive workflow back.

Even now-I have just got and set up a new-ish rig with the MC707 and TR8S… it’s cools and versatile and I’ve not even started to learn it properly…… then-inexplicably- I start looking at the Force and the Drumbrute instead of the Roland pair-for NO REASON AT ALL!! I don’t even know what the Roland pair can do!

But the result is I don’t really want to use the MC707 and the TR8S anymore-I’ve tainted them. It is a form of madness-worse still…. I’ve owned both the force and the drumbrute before and sold them!! Why do I think I need them now!?!

That is GAS. It’s the antithesis of art (well for me anyway!)

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Nailed it.

Not directly related, but you made me remember something. I read a book on minimalism once that someone lent me called The Joy of Less. One of the best things in there was the idea of learning to distinguish between the “fantasy you” and the “reality you”.

For instance, it’s easy to get caught up buying way too much for every possibility, but in reality our needs are often much more modest. I’m not a pro audio engineer, so I don’t have the same same needs as someone that does this 8-10 hours a day for a living. In reality, I have at best 8-10 hours a week, so I should always keep that in mind. A much more modest setup is likely to produce much better results than having my attention divided among too many things, all of which need to be learned to be used properly. And as you said, constantly swapping things out puts you back to square one. Sometimes change is good, but not constant change.

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I loved your input, for what it’s worth.

Yep, nailed it like @DimensionsTomorrow said.

A lot of the things you said check with me, even the timeline (I bought a Minibrute in May 2019). As far as the number of synths I’ve owned goes, I’m in the same range as you. 50 synths in about 30 months - everyone can do the math! My productivity for the past year (it took me the first year with synths to really get going, and I definitely slowed myself down by buying new stuff all the time) has been ok, but that’s mostly due to me using just a couple of pieces like 90% of the time.

The bit I wrote about tying loose ends. That’s actually totally laughable. It’s the exact same thing as someone saying they’re that one last move away from completing their setup. LOL.

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Thought about it a lot, and I think I finally am up for this. I got an AK yesterday, and I believe I can call it a day (or hopefully year) for gear. My musical goals for '22 include getting comfortable with keyboard playing (I am taking lessons), work on more structured arrangements for my jams and diving back into books (music as well as non-music).
Checking for second hand gear locally had become a staple (or even impulsion) in my daily life, like constantly checking social media, and I simply want to quit. Next piece of gear won’t fill any need, rather than create another. That said, I am really happy with getting this AK, because it is such a complete instrument in my eyes, I can not think of any holes left to fill.
I sincerely hope all of us get to catch up with our current gear/goals and make beautiful music for ourselves.
Gear to use/master in '22:

  • OT
  • MD+MCL
  • 2x Volca FM
  • Blofeld
  • AK
  • Zoia
  • Neutron & Dysphonia
  • Mother32
  • TR-8 & BassBot

@Joebas sign me up :heart:

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This is exactly how it is for me. Form of insanity just like my drinking was. Well I quit that and I’m determined to try quitting this GAS buying & selling obsession. Accountability helps a lot, I have a feeling this thread will be kept busy next year!

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You are added to the list! :raised_hands:

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I hope so. Could be great, if we can keep each other on track.

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Good impulse (?) for discussion!

I will up my MIDI game! I have two Digitakts and at the beginning I tried to introduce some extra modulation from DT1 to DT2. Opening a filter sustain or whatever, kinda like an extra LFO. Was okay, but I somehow wasn‘t really grooving with what I did. I like to do the sound manipulation myself. Ended up not doing any MIDI at all for a long time, except for clock.

I never really considered the possibility to have the MIDI routing in an X formation, DT1 going to DT2 going to DT1 again. Like the standard MIDI loopback trick, but with an extra Digitakt in the loop.

Instead of manipulating the sound, I’m more focusing on arrangement. Simple mute commands. Had great fun with making some „un-/mute helpers“ that always give me perfect timing with hitting any track mutes in the right order and in the right timing. Or some 8 bar mute sequence arrangement. Two fill modes for even wonkier layers of arrangement.

It‘s only the mute commands that I‘ve used so far, but it‘s that extra pair of hands that gives some progression to my tracks, while I merrily sweep the filters around or do some delay feedbacks, the fun stuff.
And if I want to break away from the predetermined MIDI muting, I can always do that myself.

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My goals in the nogear 2022:

  • find time for music;
  • break the rules with my modular system, find new ways to use it;
  • stay enough time with my DT to finally feel it as my own friendly and trusty car to travel the world with and not as a Ferrari for a single ride on a circuit;
  • try to master technics that I only used few times, as FM, AM…;
  • read some books about electronic music;
  • rearrange my gear corner to improve ergonomics.
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It took 16 euros and an hour of listening intensely to Killing Joke and Einstürzende Neubauten but now one of my main weapons against GAS for 2022 is fixed. It had a faulty touch screen, I ordered a replacement from eBay and swapped it just now. Everything seems to be working now. The synth cost me 350€ because of the faulty screen. Now I could probably double that money, but I won’t.

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That’s so cool! I’d love to be better at fixing stuff.

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you could always borrow some bongos for recording. not sure if that counts as a loophole, but a short or long term loan could help. i ride with a local cycling group. a few years ago, someone offered to let me borrow a tandem bike to ride with my son. it helped free space in his garage, since the bike had been sitting there for years after riding it with his kids. we used it to get to summer camp and some family rides before my son could ride his own bike. everybody wins. i returned the bike to him maybe last year, and he loaned it out to another rider soon after. the deal was if he needed it, he could just call. i’ve considered doing the same with whatever spare parts i have around, like a wheel set or something. having a local community can be pretty nice. you may even know some folks who’d be willing to let you borrow instruments.

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Ok, I did it. I just unsubscribed from the Your Setups thread.

It’s on.

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Yeah, my coworker is a drummer. I’m sure he would lend me some hand percussion to record if I asked. I sold him a few of my old guitar pedals cheap last year when I was slimming my gear down.

The key thing is that I’m not going to rush out and buy anything. Gotta curb the impulses. Definitely not going to do a big spending spree in the last few weeks of the year.

I don’t know if I’ll make it the whole year without new stuff, but I’m really starting to think limitations may spark some creativity and hopefully trigger me to spend more time working on music rather than watching YouTube gear videos and reading threads on reverb pedals. :slight_smile:

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M3m is a beast! Had one as a centrepiece for a while; was really easy to dial in some nice sounds and get to work straight away. Got a heap of music done as a result.

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