One thing that having ‘High End’ gear has taught me…

Like most of us I started recording/engineering with less than stellar equipment (Mackie, Fostex, M-audio) but early on I knew to do this work professionally, I would need to start thinking about studio pieces with some higher quality. That being said, I had never felt restricted with the handful of mid level mics and pres I had acquired. As to say I never thought about the quality, I just pointed the mic and turned it up. It was a simple, and a song first approach.

Once I started amassing better gear I expected a large jump in the quality of my recordings, it didn’t quite work out that way. It took time to learn those new pieces of gear, and during that time I spent too much time focusing on recording the song, when I should have been focusing on the song itself.
When I was short on top shelf gear, all I thought about was making things sound interesting. I couldn’t just throw a U47 on the acoustic guitar and call it a day. I had to use a c1000s and move it around to different rooms and try odd things like bathrooms and kitchens. Once I got really good mics, I thought I wouldn’t have to work as hard. While that was true in some cases (vocals) I started expecting the mic to do all the work; which sometimes it did. I wasn’t searching anymore; I wasn’t covering up for marginal sounds by creative micing and performance. To be honest I actually got worse at recording for the period after I invested quite a lot of money on gear.

So what have I learned?

Gear lust is fine, dreaming about having this or that and then venting about it on Gearslutz is fine. Just remember to end that lust/fanaticism when the session has started. If you listen to nothing but the song and you know your gear, you will know right away what mic or comp to grab for, and it will have nothing to do with how much it costs.

Ok I’m done.

great post... learn to use the gear you have in the moment....then get some high end and do the same thing...wash...rinse and repeat

Perfect post. I agree completely.

Learn what you buy intimately, as you go.

It's one reason I mentally shake my head when some poor soul, usually out of excitement and new interest in recording, decides to purchase two hundred grand worth of gear they have never used or heard.

Even though, when I first started there wasn't Maudio (come to think of it there wasn't even solid state), I could not agree with the OP more, I could never understand why mates from other studios kept changing out their monitors every few months.
It takes a long time to really learn to use a room, an instrument and a mic, if time is money all gear is like that, smaller and smaller increments of improvements as the price range increases, can be a bit disappointing, no more chalk and cheese so as to speak.
We humans generally like accurate reproduction, so as disparate brands work hard on sonic accuracy they tend to end up sounding more and more similar the harder they all try.:-)

All true. Having said that, I think a complicating wrinkle is that not all high end gear makes getting good sound easier. My KM84s are pretty easy to get a good sound out of. Some tube LDCs (I won't name names) are a pain in the ass.

There is a threshold of quality that, once crossed, ensures you have a decent quality tool for recording music. As you go from there up the price chain, some products veer off the path and become less functional as they try to be something in particular. I am trying harder these days to make sure I insist on functionality from my tools as a baseline, and not get seduced by the pizazz of the cool stuff. This particular endeavor (recording) can pretty easily nudge us into buying expensive specialty items with low overall utility.

While I agree with the OP, I would like to add that a lot of times highend stuff can force you to experiment, because it takes out the "if I only had a better this"-thoughts and you know that the sound is now up to you to capture.

hit it on the mark man.

i had been thinking about this for the past few weeks. I dropped about 27k on gear this past year alone, which i noticed while doing taxes.

i went back, and listened to one of the first good records I had produced/engineered in a basement with 6 ft ceilings about about 2000 dollars worth of gear - the cost of ONE or TWO of my many pre amps now-a-days.

that record, tracked on a cheap PC with pro tools 7 and a busted up soundworkshop console, using shure sm57s and rode nt5s, sounded better than anything i've done in the past 4-5 years.

not sure if it pissed me off or made me proud, BUT i know what you're saying!!!

Totally agree. It takes time to learn how to mix with new tools. Even with high end stuff. I feel once you do learn on more capable tools though there is more end result potential. One thing about high end though, it gives you a piece of mind that its not the gears fault when you cant make it sound good.

Having started with a Radio Shack Budget, I have to say learning what each piece of gear is capable of is paramount.
The thing about "The High End", is that you quickly learn its about what the gear can do not price. There are plenty of times a SM57 trumps a UM57 !
As you come up you quickly learn that at some point that awesome guitar/ vocal / drum/ bass/ recorder sound you got years ago was all about that cheap POS you abandoned at some point, and as you hunt for another one you learn everybody has that old low buck Highend trick of their own.

+1

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, especially when discussing $2500 A/Ds, $2000 mic preamps, etc.

Back in 80's Bruce Springsteen recorded tracks for one of his albums on a Tascam Portastudio (cassette tape!). Someone like Adel could probably sing into a $50 Radio Shack microphone and still sound awesome.

Talent and quality starts at the source. A $10,000 microphone won't make a bad singer sound good. Ever.

Couldn't agree more. Learn the gear you have. Then push yourself to get the most out of it. Enjoy.

You know I always find it funny, there are so many guys chasing the Tchad Blake sound and he admits so much of his early kit was what he found people throwing out!

There is no substitute for talent.

Cheers

Ian

Sshh in my gear pimp days it was " there's no sybarite for throwing money at it"

Hey it paid the bills

Are there not two sides to this though?

Most obviously 'High End' we take to mean expensive stuff that sounds good, really good.

But folks are also prepared to drop more on 'High End' gear for its construction quality and reliability - i.e. stuff that is built to last.

Often the two go together, but not always!

Exactly! If I drop $3K on a mic I am also paying for the build quality as well as a lower noise floor as compared to a cheaper $500 mic. Not to say that you cannot get a good sound with both, and one thing you learn from one piece of gear can transfer to another. However the mic with the lower noise floor should by all accounts give a much better result, for a much longer period of time (in theory anyway).

Having been buying gear for the past 25+ years I have t say that cost is always the very last factor I consider. VALUE is always the very first thing I consider.

EXAMPLE: If I need a compressor and I have $1000 to spend I am not going to buy 1 DBX 160 compressor just because of the lower cost and save the remaining money for something else, but I would buy one used Distressor!

While both units can do a job, the Distressor is much more functional for more sources and therefor a better VALUE. At a certain point we should really be judging the VALUE of what we have spent our hard earned money on, Not the just the name or the price of what we have spent it on.

Better gear in my opinion means better possibilities and better control.

However if you're delivering my food I don't care what you drove in. I care the results of the food.

That was perfect! Also if you are the one delivering the food you probably cannot afford to buy high end gear...Just saying...

Technique and tools are independent from each other to a large extent - tools don't force you to be less creative, only talent and imagination (or lack of) do. If a c1000 sounds great 15 feet away in the bathroom, then the potential for a Schoeps or AEA to sound great in the same place is exponentially increased IME. Once you get to a certain level of skill, you hear a piece of gear for 5 minutes and you know its place (again IME).

Buying mics is the worst. After buying an expensive mic, I will end up using it on everything just because it's new/expensive, not because it's best. Nobody wants to drop 2k on a mic and leave it in it's case for a month because it hasn't "won" yet. So, the recordings suffer from using the wrong tools.

This was closer to my experience. Once I had worked with some better quality gear, it gave me a point of reference from which I could judge the cheaper stuff. I got rid of some of my older gear, but there are a few pieces that I gained a whole new respect for.

I've experienced this at times. The thing is we're capturing music and trying to make it sound its best. But the music doesn't change with the gear, and the fidelity is very dependent on the listeners equipment as well.

I started out (198?) with a Tascam porta studio and no microphone. I used a pair of headphones as my mic. I learned a ton about performance first, to say the least. Now I have an API 3124 among other awesome preamps and a ton of great microphones, I love them ALL. I might still pull out a speaker or a set of headphones to record trashy but hey, experience is the best first line in a great sound. If you feel trapped by great gear I wouldn't blame the gear, but perhaps you feel uninspired. Try locking up all the good stuff like being grounded and challenge yourself to go back to the beginning. Recording is super frigging FUN!

Yeah - it mostly works the other way for me, too.

Worked super hard, back in the day, to get good and interesting and 'pro' sounds out of less-than-perfect gear. But pushing gear way beyond where its limits are 'supposed' to be sure teaches you stuff, but at the end of the day there are a few inevitable compromises.

Times change and these days I have access to high end gear - which makes me work at least as hard because there are *no* excuses. If anything doesn't sound exactly right, the way I envisioned, or fully up to par in whatever way, it ain't the gear.

Many of the "industry standard" tools are highend pieces, but not all of them (like the SM57). Heck, even some "workarounds" have become standard practice (Kleenex over NS10 tweeters, anyone?)

But what I appreciate about them most, is their dependability: if you know what you're doing, they deliver the goods, and you don't have to worry about them anymore, or wonder about how they're gonna behave in certain situations.

So for me, usually High End = Peace Of Mind.

I wonder whether it is common for people to upgrade to more expensive (which is not to say more better) gear, and realize that it made their sound take a step backwards.

This is such a true post. I keep getting great mics and preamps, and getting bad sounds. It turns out the good stuff has right and wrong uses just as much as the cheap stuff. It does kind of take some of the mystique away from "GEAR" and when you sort it out in your head, back into technique, which should never be strayed away from unless you want to get bit by bad tracks. I made that mistake of getting lazy, too. In a way I don't look forward to learning new gear any more. But it's just a little chore if you do it one thing at a time, and the results can be worth it. Yeah, imagine the amount of trial and error you'd have to go through if your "dream studio" were to just fall in your lap. Almost daunting.

The technique-free gear is exempt to this, though. Converters, speakers, room treatment, headphones, maybe even instruments, stuff that's always working and you don't change. Yeah I guess you have to learn how they sound, but in my estimation, you can get obvious and permanent upward gains with gear like this by going for better quality.

Never,but i've often been dissapointed after spending so much money and realizing that my sound didn't take a step forward.

Double post.

The weakest link in my recording chain is currently (and likely will be for some time) my own sorry ass.