The parcel arrives on a Thursday.
That weekend you play for four hours.
The following week, three.
By the third week
you are back to the twenty minutes
you were doing before,
and you are exactly as good as you were before,
with a nicer object on the floor.
The gear did not fail you.
It did what gear does.
It bought one week of novelty,
which is a real thing to buy,
and it is not the thing
you believed you were buying.
I know the feeling that comes before the purchase.
You come off a rehearsal
knowing something was wrong,
and it is far easier to locate the wrongness
in equipment than in playing.
It is almost never the equipment.
The bridge you never learned properly
sounds exactly as unlearned
through a better amplifier.
Shopping is the most comfortable form of practising.
It has reading in it, and comparing,
and deciding, and a sense of progress,
and at no point
do you have to be bad at something
in front of yourself.
There is gear that matters,
and it is not the gear people buy.
It is whatever stops you playing at all.
An instrument that will not hold its tuning,
so every session opens in a bad mood.
Headphones you cannot hear detail through.
A cable that cuts out mid phrase.
A guitar in a case under the bed
instead of on a stand in the room.
Fix the friction that sits before the session.
Not the things that would flatter you during it.
The test is cheap
and you can run it on yourself.
Before you buy anything,
write down the thing it will let you do
that you cannot do today.
If the honest answer
is that you will enjoy practising more,
that is allowed.
Say it in exactly those words,
and you will find you need it
a great deal less often.
Whatever you did not play
in the week the parcel arrived,
the gear was never the reason.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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