by Serguey Shinder
There was a period of two or three years where I got noticeably better at buying things and no better at playing. I did not experience it that way at the time. Each purchase had a reason, and the reasons were real. The tone I wanted was not in the instrument I had. The recordings sounded thin because the interface was cheap. The pedal everyone I admired used was, in fact, the pedal they used.
What I remember most clearly is the feeling of the week after each one arrived. It was the same feeling every time, and it was not the feeling of playing. It was the feeling of possibility. I would set it up, try it for an hour, hear something new, and then spend three evenings reading about how other people had configured it. That was the part I actually enjoyed, and it took me a long time to admit that, because it looked so much like being serious about music.
The instrument I already owned was fine. I know that now because I still have it, and everything I can do today I can do on it. It was never the limiting factor and had never been, at any point, for any of the things I could not play.
The honest mechanism, I think, is that buying is a decision and practising is a process. A decision resolves. You research, you weigh it, you commit, you feel the small clean satisfaction of having moved. Practice never resolves. You put in an hour and you are marginally less bad at one passage and there is no moment where anything closes. So when I was tired or discouraged, I reliably drifted toward the activity that ended.
There was also a quieter thing underneath it. If the gear was the problem, then my playing was not the problem, and I got to keep believing in a version of myself that was only ever a purchase away from sounding like what I heard in my head. Every new box preserved that belief for another few weeks. Practising would have tested it.
What broke the pattern was not discipline. It was a friend playing my old instrument, unplugged, badly set up, and sounding like himself immediately. Nothing about the sound was coming from the equipment. I had known that as a fact for years and had never once believed it.
I still buy things occasionally, and some of them are genuinely worth it. But I have one rule now that has held up better than any resolution about practice hours. I do not buy anything to solve a problem I have not first tried to solve by playing more. Most of the time the problem quietly stops existing during the attempt, which tells me what it actually was.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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