Gear obsession

I've certainly heard things done on mackie mixers that sounded fine.. for the type of song that was mixed.  Sometimes you just get the right combination and it works.  

However, I also believe that professionally proven gear just gets you further, faster.

I've told the story many times here, but the short version is that I once believed that I could produce the level of audio quality that high-end studios get, but using low-end gear instead.  I just *knew* that I would be the one to finally make it work where so many others had failed.  After many years of failing this, I decided to start buying or building time-proven professional level gear.

I decided to make a list.

On that list I placed every mic, preamp, compressor, and other effect that I read/heard the pros using.  Overall, it's the same handful of mics, preamps, compressors and other effects that they all use, and an overall extremely small portion of the pro-audio marketplace.

U87, U47, 57, 421, 414, R121..
1073, 1084, 312..
1176, LA2A, LA3A, 160VU, SSL g..

..And so on.

So these professionals, with just about any brand/model of gear to choose from, always end up using the same gear?  That's the question I asked myself..  I was forced to acknowledge that it comes down to one major point.

They deliver known results that have been tested by many over decades of use, and always work in the majority of situations.

I also was forced to acknowledge that most of the lower-level gear out there generally portrays themselves as "getting you close" to some other professional gear.  Lots of mics "sound like a U87" while lots of preamps "sound like a neve", etc.   However, it's almost always a case of those "sounds like" products work OK on a much smaller number of sources that have been carefully picked for marketing purposes..

Case in point:

When I first got my Gefell M930's, I actually thought they sounded kinda boring.  Up to that point, I had a couple SP B1 mics that I had bought because they were marketed as audio wunderkind, and they were cheap.  They had a lot of HF sizzle, which I mistook as "detail" at the time (I had nothing else to compare to at the time).  It took a while before I had monitors and other gear good enough to realize that what I thought I knew about mics was a big, fat, LIE. 

It really drove home that I needed to focus on using professional gear to get professional results, and for the most part, getting rid of any gear that wasn't on my list and obtaining stuff that was on my list.  Once I started doing that, things really started getting easier for me.

It turns out I was doing a lot of fighting the problems with the cheap gear, but not realizing it.  Muddy bottom end?  Gone.  Sizzling top end?  Gone.  Being able to clearly identify frequencies?  YES.  Being able to identify and work on placement of instruments in the sound stage?  FINALLY.

This whole process set me back years and years.  I'm finally to a place where I worry more about getting bands to rehearse before coming to the studio, and where I worry about getting the vibe of the mix right, before worrying about the gear.  I rarely even think about the gear now.