A Re-introduction to Critical Thinking

I would like to introduce a rule of thumb that should help greatly whenever considering a purchase, an upgrade, maybe even a fader move.

Ask yourself this question:

Will I ever hear, "if only (insert gear name here) was used on this song, instead of (insert whatever here) it would be a hit" ?

Substitute some pieces in there and you can get an idea whether or not something really matters much, if at all. For instance:

If only I had recorded at 192khz instead of 44.1khz, that song would have been a hit

or

If only i had used a Distressor on that guitar, the song would have been a hit

or

If only I had blindly followed the advertising/"articles" in Mix Magazine, that song would have been a hit.

So ask that, and keep asking it. Your wallet will thank you. What you may not realize is that your SONGS will thank you! That's right. Spend time and resources on the things that matter instead of the things that don't and you will always be that much further ahead.

Of course there are a few counterarguments to this rule, here's one of them:

I like to call this the "Accumulation of burrito wrappers over time leads to used diapers clogging up the Salt River"

Another way to look at this is to say "well, maybe that crappy thing by itself won't make much difference, but when there are a bunch of stages like that, of course it'll be worse!" Bad enough to spell the difference between a hit and a dud? Maybe, maybe not.

So lets follow this line of thinking. Let's say you had the noisiest, most distorted mic, feeding a severely bandlimited, noisy mic preamp, going into an 1/8" adapter on a consumer soundcard. You record and mix it in who knows what and record it to a cd player by running out the analog 1/8" jack into the CD Burner's RCA inputs after a radio shack adapter

That would be pretty bad wouldn't it?

Well, yeah, but that is an absolutely CATASTROPHIC chain of failures. Are you really going to do that?

Worry about the things that actually matter, and you stand a lot less chance of getting Jacked