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!)