Gear Slavery!
Song 9 came together in a fresh order (bass/drums first, guitar last), but the real point is: chase the vibe and finish the work—don’t let a $2,000 box turn you into a slave to gear.
Here’s song number 9 for #jamuary2026 . Again—happy with it. Good synth, good arps. Started with bass and drums and then put guitar over the top, which is a little backwards from where I usually come from, but it made it interesting. Kind of pooped out a little bit at the end, but I fixed it with shimmer and delay, of course!
And while I’m having huge personal success with the OP-1, I do want to talk about it—what I like about it, what’s working, what kind of doesn’t work (which isn’t much). But I’m super cognizant of this being a $2,000 device, and I’m not a gear reviewer or a gear simp.
One of the problems now is that with the shops being gone, you can’t just go try stuff, so you have to watch videos if you’re looking for something new. Then when you’re looking for something new, something else comes along—oh, I wasn’t even looking for that. It’s like the old—dating myself—but the candy chute before the register at Blockbuster. You got your movies, but then you load up on impulse purchases.
Now musically, an impulse purchase can be up to $2,000 with all the financing options.
So once you get something, and you don’t get into it, if you don’t get rid of it, you really do become a slave to it—and that’s the last thing in the world I want to encourage.
So just know that as you’re reading this: if I’m sharing the benefits of an OP-1, I’m not telling you to get one. You can recreate these things with a simple audio interface and GarageBand on your Mac. And honestly, you can get a lot of cool stuff with an iPad, even with your iPhone—headphones and the iPhone mic are great. There’s major-record stuff that started as or actually are iPhone demos and voice notes. We all know these stories.
Don’t fall into the gear trap because of what you’re reading here, please. Ideally this here should be about getting the right vibe, finishing songs, doing good work, finding your thing. And your thing isn’t connected to a piece of gear, because I could do this on an MPC, Ableton, on my phone, with a four-track, with a small Zoom mixer and a memory card. All of this stuff works equally.
Don’t be a slave to gear. Nothing good comes out of it.