Creating With No Cash

One of the great myths that I believed in while younger in my musical journey, is that I needed the latest and greatest gear to be successful. I was constantly wanting to upgrade all the pieces of gear that I had, and I was never happy with what I had in front of me. I was always browsing Sweetwater.com, telling myself if I had that guitar or that amp I would be successful.

I think this happens for a few reasons, but there is one I want to draw attention to. I think we like having an excuse sometimes. I think that we like having a fallback, that if our music doesn't turn out as well as we'd hoped, we could always use our gear as an excuse. We don't release music because we didn't have the right plug-ins to mix it well, we don't have an amazing microphone so we think our recording quality is so low, or we don't play shows because we don't have a professional live-sound setup. These are all excuses that get in the way of our musical journey advancing forward, and we need to get rid of these excuses as musicians.

The truth is hard, that if our music isn't good enough, it's because we didn't spend enough time crafting it, carefully perfecting the details that make a song great. If our mix sounds bad, it's because we didn't give it the sonic qualities that make a mix great, not because our plug-ins are all stock plug-ins (many amazing songs get mixed on stock plug-ins).

Once we free ourselves from the idea that if we just had more money we would be great, we will actually start to create more art and grow as musicians. So put down the Sweetwater catalog, and get creating.