I have this one annoying habit of mine and it made me spent a lot of money over the years. It’s called Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS). It’s not a real medical syndrome, rather a compulsive desire to acquire as many equipment and plugins than necessary.
I’ve been trying to learn writing music on and off for more than 5 years, mostly off than on. The amount of money I’ve spent buying plugins and equipment was probably more than $1,500 already. I have two DAWs, several quite pricey plugins, a few MIDI keyboards, and some real instruments. Judging by my current skill, those are probably not really worth it. I don’t even remember some of the plugins I bought because I never actually used it. I think the one I actually used the most after buying is Bitwig Studio, just because it fits my workflow and I found it very interesting to use, especially their upcoming Bitwig Studio 6.
I remember the last time I bought something out of compulsion was Analog Lab Pro. Yes, you could say that this is a worthwhile purchase. But I already had KORG Gadget collections plugin for PC. That Analog Lab is totally unnecessary, because KORG Gadget probably took years for me to exhaust all their soundscape options. Speaking about KORG Gadget, I also have them on iPad and Nintendo Switch as well just for the sake of having them in all my devices. That alone took around $300 out of my pocket, excluding extra add-ons such as KORG iM1 which I also purchased because I “needed” that old school sounds. I also purchased several gadgets which amounted to around $100. Did I use them? Sparingly I guess, just like how much I actually sit down and write music.
This year, I vow to stop this thing from happening again. Impulsive buying is going to hurt me in the long term if I don’t put an end to it. I have enough gears and plugins for me to actually start writing music. In fact, I tried writing a song using only one plugin (iM1) with KORG Gadget on my iPad and it was sufficient for the most part. That was the time I learnt I don’t need a lot to actually write stuff that I wanted. Hopefully this will work in the long run, plus I have to save money because life happened and I can’t afford to spend more anymore.
That is, until I purchase the next gear.
