Interesting video! The final point is the one that resonates with me the most. I got my first double bass at 21, and had no idea what to look for. Later, when I got a teacher, I realized that I had bought a subpar instrument. Made it very difficult to learn in the beginning, and I had to take tools to the geezless thing just to get it playable. Taking someone knowledgeable with you (teacher, luthier, player) is invaluable.
You are right! I obviously have a pretty narrow realm of expertise... buying my piano was so stressful because I had no idea what I was doing, and I still feel sort of guilty about that purchase. I sort of alluded to it in the video- I spent more than I could afford!
Here's what my (amateur) process looked like: Step 1. Try to get into playing piano for a few weeks on a MIDI keyboard we had hanging around, after not having played an instrument in over a decade. Step 2. Wake up one morning with the thought that it would all be so much easier and your practice would be so much more valuable if the notes were arranged in a grid in a way that made musical intervals and spatial intervals coincide with each other. Step 3. Browse the web to see if anyone else had this idea. Step 4. Find out that the Lumatone exists. Step 5. Angrily throw $4k at the monitor, lol. Step 6. Wait 6 months for instruments to be built, which turns into 9 because COVID messes up all the supply chains. After almost a year now since I got my instrument, I can pretty confidently say it's the best $4k I ever spent. Not a day has gone by where I haven't felt inspired to play this thing. Every bit of practice feels super effective to the point that it is almost like cheating. For any scale or chord voicing or musical object of any kind, the muscle memory transposes anywhere. Every mode of a scale will also have the same shape, you just start on a different note inside that shape of course. You decide to try out the melodic minor for example, and let's say inside of an hour or two (though it begins almost immediately) you're shredding in any mode of it in any key, because it's all the same, just move your hands over and/or start on a different note. This is a really satisfying and good property for an instrument to have especially when you also have a full-time job outside of playing music. It's also fundamentally changed the way I think about harmony by acting as a very effective visual geometric representation of theory (in my favourite layouts anyway), and it's let me explore larger tuning systems like 31 equal / quarter comma meantone (my favourite now) or 43 equal / fifth comma intuitively. All meantone tunings play basically the same way, it's just different when you pull notes from out of key or make key changes, because you can put the basic intervals in the same logical places for your hands. I've even explored a little of the super-weird Bohlen-Pierce stuff -- it's tricky having almost none of the familiar harmonic toolbox (no octave, no perfect fourths or fifths, no major or minor thirds...), but I got to the point of making stuff that sounded reasonably good and harmonically sensible to me inside of an hour, even if I was still unfamiliar enough with the layout that I wasn't always completely sure what note I was about to produce (there's a video on my channel of a little improvisation after about 30 minutes to an hour of playing around). With the right keyboard layout, geometrically sensible things are also harmonically sensible, and it becomes way easier to improvise because the instrument is helping you keep track of theory. I feel like it would change the world if more of this kind of thing were available at every price point. It's so much easier and more intuitive to get to the point of just having fun being musical. I haven't had too many people over to my place since COVID happened, but it's been really fun to see the look on people's faces when they hit a few nearby keys randomly on my Wicki-Hayden layout, and it magically sounds nice because it's all arranged logically by fifths and fourths, with whole tones going across, so each key signature is a solid block of the keyboard, and the weirder intervals are somewhat larger gaps (a diatonic semitone is like what a perfect fourth would be in a more piano-like arrangement, and a chromatic semitone like a perfect fifth). Chromaticism and good voice leading is still totally doable with a bit of practice, but it's somewhat less obvious at first than with the more piano-like layouts. In exchange, tertian, quartal and quintal harmony gets more obvious, how keys interlock with each other becomes visually clearer, and you can reach four or maybe five octaves on each hand.
Love this video! It's so daunting to buy an instrument. I'm a college tuba player and knowing what to look for in such a big investment is really tough. It's great to have a nice guide to reference when I look for my next horn!
I’ve been using a Made-In-Mexico Stratocaster that I upgraded the pickups in and it’s perfect for my needs. No PRS or Gibson (which cost more than my current car). I’m using the cheapest used vox half stack which I’ll be upgrading the speakers to Jensens or Celestions. I’d be afraid to bring super expensive stuff to a gig which I couldn’t be able to replace. Great video!
Really great video! One point on financing though is that often you can find a 6 or 12 month no interest deal which is a great way to go if you can’t drop all that cash at once.
Hey Mario! I think "interest-free" promotions are usually false advertising. Like, with Woodwind Brasswind, they claim your purchase is interest free, but you have to make the purchase on their credit card, which has almost 30% APR if you don't make a payment on time! That's insanely high interest, obviously. They also say "These payments may be higher than the payments that would be required if this purchase was a non-promo purchase." So, if you buy with cash, they charge you less. So... in that case, at least, it's kinda false-advertising-trickery. Offering interest-free financing would be bad business.. it's essentially giving your customer an interest-free loan, and a store is not a bank (and banks don't give interest-free loans lol). I can't imagine why a store would do that, but if they do, I guess I would jump on it!
