I consider myself pretty frugal. I started my studio with minimal gear, and during its two year run I was able to keep things afloat without concerning with the latest and greatest plugins and other niceties that we all like to look at like a kid in a candy store full of studio gear. Most of the plugins I ran were stock, and I had a select few workhorse plugs that I'd implement all the time. If I didn't use it all the time, it wasn't worth my time.
Then my studio closed, and I shifted roles to that of a stay at home dad to special needs teenagers. Often, there are gaps of time where I'm sitting around on my phone because there's not much else I can do at that moment (the girls are eating dinner or something of the like, and I'm with them because they are special needs and require 24/7 supervision). No longer did I have big blocks of time to work on editing and mixing, but I did have time to window shop.
This was a bad move for me, although I've found some new go-to toys by doing this. I hardly bought a plugin for two years, and then out of boredom I began researching plugins and other audio geekery toys. Before long, I was downloading every free plugin I could find and playing with it just to see what it did. There were some that I purchased during this as well. "Ah hell, it's only $12.50 on sale, and I'm not paying studio overhead anymore!"
I was justifying, and bored. From a business perspective, the entire point is to keep your costs as low as possible so that your profits are as high as possible. But as a tinkering geek who was bored, despite having some freelance work on my hands to do from my new home studio, I began to throw my strict business attitude toward it all out the window. I bought plugins from Waves, Joey Sturgis, Native Instruments, Plug & Mix, and more. I bought Harrison Mixbus, Melodyne Editor, I bought Screenflow, drum samples, iPad apps for electronic music making…and I saw money I'd been paid by clients drift away from me and go to the manufacturers of the awesome little "tools" (toys) I'd just purchased.
In reality, I'd done fine for a long time without these cool things I now have. I spent a lot of time learning and understanding the basics of audio, and I implemented them at every turn. These plugins were fun, but they were counter productive to me in some respects. They took away the money I was working for, and since I'm not able to churn out work nearly as fast as I used to (daddy duties have to come first), it takes longer for the next job to replace the revenue I earned on the last job that I spent on the latest "no brainer deal"!
I've made a decision. Outside of saving for a new iMac in the next year, and saving back money for replacing any gear that may break, I'm done spending money on gear. I've got more than enough tools now to do literally anything that I want to with respect to audio mixing and editing. The list of things I'd classify as an actual "NEED" is very small but very important. That list consists of stockpiling money from jobs to pay down debts, replace gear with cash so I don't have to go further into debt if my interface breaks or a hard drive crashes, and try to better my situation financially. After all, spending everything you make from mixing on tools for mixing when you don't need any is illogical. That's like getting a job to pay for gas money so that you can afford to go to the job you got (which you only got to get the gas money to go there to begin with…and around and around we go).
A fool and his money are soon parted. I'm done being a fool. Time to get my head back in the game. I never was one to give in to the pressure of buying shiny things, and I don't know what brought me here really, but it's time to get back to my old way of doing it.
