Buying Gear vs. Making Actual Music
So I did buy the new EP-40 Teenage Engineering Riddim sampler. It’s reggae-based, and I’m a huge reggae fan. I learned to love it through The Police and my old buddy Doug, who I did my first recordings with back in middle school. He was deep into reggae. I didn’t really get it at first, but I sure did a bit later. I’ve told him how influential that whole time was for me.
I think that was the first time my love of The Police sent me back to the source material. The feel was so far outside anything I knew that I had to figure out what the hell was going on. There’s no “basis” for it in rock. Same way the old studio cats couldn’t figure out the emphasis on the three when they were cutting early Bob Marley sessions.
Younger me would have frozen and not made any music until I “figured out” how to use this thing. That’s a danger with buying gear: it’s a way to not work on actual art. There’s so much out there about how you have to get everything perfect before you make anything.
But the truth is, I bought this sampler out of pure desire. I didn’t need it. I have the first KO, which now lives at the office and is perfect for that. These things are cheap and cheerful, and honestly, just looking at the EP-40 plugged into the OP-1 (which powers it) makes me think: this is going to make a lot of music.
The difference now is I don’t stop and wait. I don’t think, “I need to learn this whole thing before I can make anything.” The thought process now is: what can I make today, with what I know right now? I’ll figure the rest out later. Same with the MPC. If I’d stopped every time I didn’t know enough, I’d never make anything.
Same with guitar. I don’t know all the jizzy jazz chords. Maybe someday. But the last song I wrote — one of the best things I’ve done in years — was just G-C-D. B A S I C The only chords some people know! Honestly, maybe the only chords a lot of people ever need to know. There are people making way more, way better music than me with just G-C- D and a capo.
Meanwhile, I probably wasted a good two hours today that could have been two more songs. But that’s the point: gear is fun, but the work is the work.
The song only exists if you sit down and make it.