Disk errors!!!!

Ah, I don't think so. I think it comes down to the fact we live in a consumer culture and we think of our tools as more than just tools. There's nothing wrong with a little gear lust.

I think there's EVERYTHING wrong with gear lust! If a poor craftsman blames his tools then a poor musician blames his instruments....

Too many people spend all their time wanting gear porn instead of concentrating on learning theory or even just making beats with what they've got.

I agree. In this interview with Jake One he says, "I keep it simple because it's not the gear you have but what you do with it." "If I have'nt mastered the FIRST piece of equiptment I bought yet, Why do I need to go and get a bunch of other shit?" And that's comming from a cat that's produced hits for DE LA SOUL & 50 Cent down to underground crews like Old Dominion. He uses an ASR-10,a Motif rackmount(barely), and Protools to make beats. Not dickriding him, but I respect his outlook.

^ no doubt, i have gear lust but i hold myself back. Cuz i know I'll be right back to the basics on the 404, rnc compressor, realisic eq, phillips cd recorder. Look at the illest producers, a lot of them have less gear than 15yr old soundclick heads.

I like looking at equipment, buying equipment, and I make beats too. Just because you like to look at / talk about equipment does not mean you are a poor craftsman...it just means you like to look for better tools for the job...not an excuse for poor craftsmenship. You can hate my music, but still... it's not poor. All of your favorite producers may use a small amount of equipment, but they have engineers / mastering techs that make their stuff sound alot better than when it comes out the box... and those people are using very expensive equipment. The equipment does matter... it's just that cheap equipment has gotten alot better over the years. That said, all the equipment in the world will not help you if you have no skills at all...and most of us here do better work with a less is more approach. I mean, we all love the SP series and are using them for a reason. Most people who blame equipment for their shortcomings would not be caught dead with a Roland SP.

True that! It's good though because their lame beats don't sully our beloved SP's.

Double Co-sign.

getting the equipment......havent got mine yet!!!!

i have tons of drum machines and samplers , but i love making beats and i love figuring out all the features without reading the manual. best beats i ever made were on a 303 . the thing i hate most is getting trapped in the loop and not moving on and just getting brainwashed by a 4 bar loop when i should be looking for more samples. i love digging thru records , i also smoke alot of weed while working so im pretty stoned all the time .

oh yeah disk errors for sure. i've cursed the heavens, hit the walls, and wanted to throw my machine into the street (poverty prevents me from doing that! thank goodness)...damn near almost cried over loosing sounds that took hours to make. i hate trying to recreate sounds, it's never the same. now i'm gonna back it up like a mf. but you always learn the hard way!

Wow, old thread. But on topic, recording's a bitch.

I can't remember who exactly said it first, but someone once said 'the best music, is the music playing in my head'. (When I come to think of it, I think it was RZA of the Wu-tang clan.)

That's the thing I dislike about making beats. It's incredibly difficult to convert and process a musical idea, flawless music in my head, to good music in reality.

Everyone here must have those moments that they think, hey 'do do du da du di' sounds awesome as a bassline. 20 minutes later banging pads on your fav machine it's still not quite 'there' when it comes to the original idea. Something is missing. Be it the style of the samples, the timing / rhythm and so on.

That can be frustrating.

But apart from that, there's really absolutely nothing I'd hate. Except maybe gear dying on me, like my MC-505 basically did. It's about 40% broken.

As for gear lust, I'm with the people that try to find gear what they feel most comfortable with and stick with it. When it comes to my sampler, the MV8800 seems to be a good end station. I'm basically only using vinyl, MC-808 and MV8800 now and mostly just the MV.

Word. I always have some other awesome melody I come up with in my head. That's what sucks about sampling. It's more like improvising with a sample to making it sound good than making it sound the way you want. That's why I'm trying to save for a microkorg.

Yeah, that's exactly my problem too, but I'm beginning to get used to picking my samples with songs in mind, instead of picking samples and then trying to make a beat out of them. The latter works like 6 out of 10 times, but doing it the other way works much much better.

I must say though, I felt the same limitations with the Microkorg. I don't feel the same limitations with a guitar though. But I'm sure this has loads to do with me not being a keyboard player.