How Much Is Too Much?

At what point does having more equipment stop helping us make music and start getting in the way?

When I was first getting started in recording, I had very little equipment.

And I knew every piece of it inside and out.

I knew what every switch did. I knew how to get the sounds I wanted. I knew the limitations of the equipment, and I knew how to work around them. I didn’t have to spend much time thinking about what to use, because there wasn’t much to choose from.

I just got on with it.

As I progressed through the recording industry, and eventually into owning my own studios, things became increasingly complicated. More equipment, more microphones, more outboard gear, more sophisticated consoles, more routing possibilities.

And, of course, more options.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I love equipment. I’ve spent a substantial part of my life working with it, collecting it, evaluating it, repairing it, and occasionally just admiring the engineering that went into it.

There are some truly wonderful pieces of audio equipment, and I appreciate them as much as anyone.

But there’s a question I’ve increasingly found myself asking.

How much is enough?

The Problem With Having Everything

There’s a phenomenon commonly called option paralysis, and I think the modern recording studio may be one of the finest examples of it.

Consider what we have available today.

You can have hundreds of plug-ins installed on your computer. Dozens of equalizers, compressors, reverbs, delays, tape emulations, channel strips, and virtual instruments. You can have multiple versions of essentially the same processor, each promising some subtle improvement over the others.

You can have a microphone collection large enough to equip several studios. Racks full of outboard equipment. A dozen different ways to record a guitar. More synthesizers than you could possibly learn in a lifetime.

And that’s before you even open a session.

Now you have to decide what to use.

Which compressor? Which equalizer? Which reverb? Which microphone? Which virtual instrument? Should you use the hardware version or the plug-in? Maybe there’s a newer plug-in that’s supposed to sound better. Perhaps you should download the demo and compare them.

And suddenly, an hour has gone by.

You haven’t recorded anything.

You haven’t mixed anything.

You haven’t made any music.

You’ve just been choosing equipment.

When the Tools Become the Distraction

This is something I think we need to talk about more openly, particularly in an industry that depends so heavily on selling us new things.

Every week, there’s another plug-in, another microphone, another interface, another piece of equipment that promises to improve our recordings.

And sometimes those improvements are real.

But the constant suggestion that we’re missing something can become a problem in itself.

We begin to think that the reason our work isn’t quite where we want it to be is that we don’t have the right equipment.

Maybe we need a better microphone. A different compressor. A more expensive converter. Another virtual instrument. A new monitoring system.

And sometimes, perhaps, we do.

But often what we really need is to spend more time making music with what we already have.

There’s a tremendous difference between buying something because you’ve identified a genuine limitation in your equipment and buying something because you hope it will somehow make you more creative.

The first can be a sensible investment.

The second can become an endless pursuit.

This Isn’t Just a Problem for People With Expensive Studios

It’s easy to imagine that this is an issue reserved for people with large studios and substantial equipment budgets.

It isn’t.

In fact, the affordability of modern recording technology may have made the problem considerably worse.

Today, someone working entirely on a laptop can accumulate hundreds or even thousands of plug-ins, instruments, samples, presets, and processing options.

Some cost money. Many are free.

And while it’s extraordinary that so much capability is available to virtually anyone, there’s a downside.

You can spend an astonishing amount of time collecting tools, installing tools, organizing tools, updating tools, and learning just enough about each one to decide whether you like it.

All without actually producing anything.

It’s possible to overload not only your studio, but your computer and your mind.

And the irony is that someone with a modest setup who knows it intimately may be considerably more productive than someone with every conceivable tool at their disposal.

The Value of Knowing What You Have

I sometimes think back to those early days when my equipment was so limited.

There was a certain freedom in that.

If I needed compression, I used the compressor I had. If I needed equalization, I used the EQ that was available. If I wanted a particular sound, I figured out how to get as close as possible with the tools in front of me.

I wasn’t constantly comparing alternatives.

I was learning.

And that knowledge accumulated. I understood what my equipment could do, what it couldn’t do, and how to get the best out of it.

There’s enormous value in that kind of familiarity.

When you know your tools well enough, they stop demanding your attention. You don’t have to think about the process of operating them. You can concentrate on what you’re actually trying to accomplish.

Which, presumably, is making music.

More Isn’t Necessarily Better

I don’t believe there’s some magic number of microphones, compressors, or plug-ins that constitutes the ideal studio.

Different people have different needs. Someone recording orchestras has very different requirements from someone producing electronic music in a bedroom. A commercial studio serving dozens of clients needs flexibility that a private studio may not.

And there’s nothing wrong with enjoying equipment for its own sake. I certainly do.

But I think we should be more conscious of the point at which acquiring additional tools stops making our work easier and starts making it more complicated.

If every creative decision requires sorting through fifty alternatives, something has gone wrong.

If you spend more time looking for the perfect plug-in than using the ones you already own, something has gone wrong.

And if you’ve convinced yourself that you can’t make good music until you buy one more piece of equipment, something has definitely gone wrong.

So, How Much Is Too Much?

I don’t have a universal answer.

I’m not even sure I have a satisfactory answer for myself.

That’s part of what makes this a difficult subject. I’ve spent much of my life acquiring and learning about equipment, and I still find new technology fascinating.

But I also remember what it was like to have very little, to know it thoroughly, and to get things done without having to consider a hundred different possibilities.

And I wonder whether, somewhere along the way, we sometimes lose sight of that simplicity.

Perhaps the question isn’t how much equipment we can afford, or how much we can fit into a studio.

Perhaps it’s how much equipment we can actually use effectively.

So I’d encourage anyone who makes music, whether they’re working in a world-class studio or on a laptop at the kitchen table, to ask themselves two questions:

How much is enough?

And how much is too much?

Because the purpose of all this equipment is to help us create something.

Not to keep us so occupied with the equipment that we never get around to creating anything.