Why are so many musician snobs? (long rant)

I don’t know how many times I’ve been frustrated by some grumpy musician or a musical instrument/sample library/effects plugin company, whether or not it was directed towards me.

Too many musicians think they need expensive equipment or computer programs to make good music. I’m sure many other musicians like myself would agree.

I own a 1950s Silvertone acoustic guitar, given to me by my grandmother, who got it from my great-grandmother. You can still see wear on the fretboard where her long 1950s fingernails formed basic open position chords. One time I brought it to a bluegrass festival, where a lot of players simply wander around and jam. Some stranger came up to me and said I really ought to upgrade to a “good” guitar. This phenomenon is particularly incongruent and irksome in the folk music community. American folk music is founded upon dirt poor railroad workers and cotton pickers, who could only afford what guitars they could get their hands on, or built them out of cigar boxes or cookie tins. And yet it seems like you can’t play bluegrass music nowadays unless you sound like Doc Watson or Earl Scruggs. As amazing as those guys are, it makes folk music feel like a place only for virtuosos, which isn’t true.

It happens in rock music too. I remember when Jack White and his White Stripes were rising to stardom, loads of people wrote to the guitar magazines in the letters-to-the-editor section sneering at him, calling him “amateurish” and “primitive”. To me, the White Stripes were a revelation. I discovered that you didn’t need a $3,000 Les Paul Standard or Ibanez 7-string with EMG pickups with a boutique amp with a million billion knobs to sound good (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with those things). You could use a cheap dinky fiberglass guitar that you picked up at a pawn shop and sound fantastic.

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For anyone who’s interested, many of my problems regarding music/recording technology have been solved. First of all, I was incredibly lucky to have my old, dying computer (which was refusing to turn on unless I repeatedly switched the power bar on and off for several minutes) replaced by a new 4K iMac with tons and tons of RAM. By incredible coincidence, my dad had gotten just enough money from a bonus check to pay for it. What this means is that I can finally download and use the more sophisticated, RAM-intensive DAW and effects plug-ins I’ve been wanting for so long.

So I got Logic Pro X and a bunch of plug-ins by Waves, mostly the Abbey Road stuff like magnetic tape simulation and old school artificial double tracking and flanging. I also got a simple USB microphone, because my ribbon mic is unusable without replacing an expensive tube preamp. It’ll sound WAY better than the iMac’s internal mic.

I was gonna get the Spectratronics Keyscape sample library, mainly for that elusive Baldwin Electric Harpsichord I’ve been wanting for so long… but as it turns out, both the library and the host Omnisphere would’ve taken up around 125GB of space. For all the advancements our new computer has, it still has only 2TB of disc space. We’ve got our eye on a 8TB external hard drive so we can put all our humongous sample libraries on it, as well as have room for libraries we plan to get in the future (such as orchestral strings).

But possibly most significantly, I got myself a Behringer Guitar Link UCG102 for recording guitar directly onto my computer. If you read the post above, you’ll see how I have a broken amp and a tiny 9-volt battery-powered amp, with no practical way of recording either of them. I bought the Guitar Link and mic with an Amazon gift card I got for Christmas. Then I downloaded Amplitube 4, the amp and pedal simulator. With it comes access to dozens and dozens of virtual amps and effects, probably more than I could ever use.

So now I can record almost any kind of electric guitar music I want. …But what I need to do next is get a pedal that will control the virtual wah, volume and whammy pedals! (And I still need a better keyboard.)

So I decided to go all in and get a new keyboard! It isn’t our “dream keyboard” with 88 weighted keys and aftertouch, but the old one had become almost impossible to work with.

What happened is that the MIDI-to-USB cable we were using had been damaged and was almost completely unresponsive. This was because the keyboard’s MIDI jack was too loose a fit, which meant we had to jiggle the cable around to make it work. Eventually this made one of cable’s prongs come loose, which made it even harder to get it working. After spending what seemed like a half hour of jiggling the cable and absolutely nothing happening, I decided I’d had enough. So we went online and looked for an inexpensive MIDI keyboard that came with a USB cable.

What we got was the Midiplus AKM320. It’s small, with only 32 keys, but it’s actually an improvement over the old 66-key keyboard because it actually has a mod wheel. Things like vibrato and real-time filters on our soft-synths were previously only available to us by editing the MIDI modulation in post- but now we can do it live, and even do a few aftertouch effects if we tell the mod wheel to control it. The only drawback really is that if we record something with parts for both hands that need to be wider octaves, we have to move the notes after we’ve recorded them. Otherwise the limited range is no problem since it has handy octave-transposing buttons.