It used to be that all my gear was thrift store, pawn shop junk. Or people would know I made weird music and give me old and half broken instruments, tape recorders etc.
I made a whole album using an old speaker as a microphone. I had two half broken tape recorders. One could record but not playback, the other could playback but not record.
I have some pretty good gear and a half decent home studio now, but I always try to keep some junk around to keep things interesting. Know what I mean?
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I love the opening scene of, It Might Get Loud when Jack White nails a string to a board, hooks up a guitar pickup, and jams.
Playing with junk is a choice. The base level of gear these days is so inexpensive that making music with toy keyboards or recording through some 1970ās headphones ear cup is no longer a matter of necessity or even integrity, itās just artistic license.
We can make music with pots and pans or broken typewriters, but itās no longer an excuse that artists canāt afford to buy instruments that stay in tune.
At this point in time, making music with junk is a luxury that I guess Iām glad to be able to sustain, but I probably wonāt think of it as anything other than that.
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Yeah, itās basically a stylistic choice at this point in time, since pretty much everyone already has a computer in their pocket. āJunkā gear is probably a slightly different thing than the old DIY days, post cassette revival, Hainbach etc. But tons of possibilities of course.
Iād be well up for the idea of a cheap gear year. Say, everything to play and record has to total a hundred euros or whatever. Without fail Iāve always been more creative when Iāve been broke
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Oh, we have a fulu miziki thread 
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My music is junk made with expensive gear!
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Any way you decide to make music is a choice (what is your point here?) but circumstances and aesthetics certainly play into it. Iām sure there are still kids out there who have the urge to make music, arenāt interested in making it on their phone, and are lucky to have $50 bucks to spend on gear every now and then.
Your point is lost on me as well.
I got excited about building a sound box with contact mics over Xmas. Went to hardware store bought a bunch of springs and wire and crap, and dug out the contact mics Iāve had for 20 years in a bag. And there it sits while I try to build Harry partch scale patches on the tempest.
A cheap Hohner guitar (tonewood: chipwood), an old 80286 PC with a Soundblaster (because OPL2), cassette deck (crucial!) with speed control hack, broken reel to reel, a piece of wood with a guitar string on it, ā¦ what sounds like an actual guitar on track 3 was originally a distorted (also ultra cheap) acoustic guitar, but I replaced that later with a bass guitar, ā¦ and so on ā¦
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Spent a lot of time when I was younger making music with whatever stuff I had lying around - yard sale acoustic guitar (carefully glued back together), old oddball brand electric guitar, 10 watt amp, weird little aluminum body microphone that needed a preamp but I didnāt have one, so Iād just put it in my mouth and yell into it, literally bells and whistles, shakers, and second or third-hand guitar pedals, run into an old (but decent) cassette deck. Bought a Boss loop pedal from an acquaintance for what felt like my life savings at the time ($200) and it felt like I opened up an entire world. Sometimes it actually sounded alright. But the most important thing was that it was fun
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My first reaction was, āI donāt do thatā [make music with junk] ā¦ but then I realized that most of my initial recorded musical ideas (progressions, melodic phrases, grooves) are captured either by singing something, or drumming on my legs, or grabbing the orange Casio mini-keys by the bed.
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Yeah, you can really learn a lot about how to push gear, how to use things āthe wrong wayā to get particular sounds, how to produce strange accidents that take things in unplanned directions. I know that I still put a lot of that to use with the nicer gear I got now.
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