It’s really common advice to not start with the cheapest gear. Yes a lot of us learned to play on dime store guitars but would have suffered less with a quality instrument. The same is true for just about everything.
Exactly. I started learning harmonica on those $20 pack of 8 and struggled for weeks to get anything to sound close to what I wanted. When I spent $60 on a decent instrument, I could suddenly do what I’d been practicing. There’s a sweet spot for getting good enough equipment to actually learn without blowing the budget on something you may not continue doing
Woodworking planes.
You can go to Home Depot and get a plane for $15-20, and it will - mostly - cut wood. Spend $50-60 and get a decent name brand tool that gives a lot less grief. Spend $500 and get a Lie Nielsen that’s just on another level.
Here’s the thing, though: you have to be pretty competent to appreciate the difference between the $50 and $500 tools; and if you know what you’re doing, you can easily tune the $15 so it works almost as well as the $500. Buy cheap to get started; upgrade if it turns out you stick with the hobby. I’ll never know if I could have learned easier/faster starting with a $50 plane, but my guess is that I’d still have been gouging the shit out of everything.
The setup thing is no joke. I made a sub $200 mandolin play well out of its league with just some sandpaper to lower the nut height. I still got the nicer one but for the time inbetween it was great. Now the friend I bought it from for $50 has it on loan since she can actually physically play it now with the lower string height.
I’ve learned that the ROI on most expensive stuff just isn’t really there unless you’re deep into it and want to treat yourself or you’re a professional(which is kinda the same but I’ll keep it separate). The caveat of course is that you have to start at a semi-reasonable place like you mentioned.
I don’t know why we want to believe that the high-end stuff is made with fairy dust and that we’re not capable of these things with just a bit of effort and trust in ourselves.
Absolutely agree with you, it’s about finding that value curve, where quality scales well with price. Say the cheapest ‘something’ is $10, the $20 one is twice as good, the $40 is maybe 70% better again but the $80 might only be 10% better than that.
As a beginner, I’d go for maybe the $20 option or the $40 if I were confident I’d stick with it. But yeah, it’s a pain when your ability to enjoy or succeed at a hobby is hampered by buying the cheapest option off AliExpress, haha.
You have to adjust the price of harmonicas (assuming you’re talking about diatonic ones aka blues harps) to scale for this discussion. A $2.50 harp isn’t a beginner’s instrument, it’s a child’s toy. A beginner one would be more like $20. That’s where I started and it would bend notes just fine. You can’t really spend much more than 60 bucks on a top end harp.
The OP sceenshot is phrased negatively, but the basic premise is in a lot of hobbies people don’t need the top gear because beginners won’t actually be able to tell the difference. Mid tier gear is a different story.
No not to start with cheapest gear, but get the cheapest one that makes sense, then upgrade it to the best you can afford once you like it.
Makes sense as in the recommended entry level equipment, not the cheap waste from aliexpress/amazon.
This way you can get the feel of the hobby before you plunge a huge load of money on it.
Eh. I’ve been playing an $80 no name bass for five years. No one has any idea, because it sounds fine.
You don’t need to go all out. Ability is more important than name brand.
It must have some decent machine heads to hold tune. Did you buy it used?
It’s pretty great actually. It rarely goes off tune. Takes about 20 seconds with a snark.
It was brand new, off Amazon of all places. I did have to buy a new strap though, the one that came with it broke immediately.
To be honest it does have a “trumpet” sound that I’m not fond of.
I think with many hobbies there’s a two-sided trap:
If you buy the absolute cheapest, you can end up hamstrung and unable to progress. On the other end, you can get caught up in having the very best, and miss out on actually progressing because you’re convinced you just need to buy a better one.
eh, i think in photography you actually learn better habits and skills on older, more limited gear. it’s easy to nail exposure when your camera can handle work at 3,000 iso, but then when you’re at the edge of what your camera is capable of you’ll be less able to tease out the performance you need. it’s why i will keep my old canon rebel t2i. whenever someone wants to learn a little i toss them that thing. it can still take great pictures , you just have to work within its limitations. it’s why my broadcast school made me learn to do reel to reel tape editing. when you know how much tape you have and how much of a pain it is to edit you will be way way better about getting your shot right the first time and every time.
these days, instead of using these tools as a crutch to shoot sloppier knowing that the gear can handle it now, i use them as a booster to do when more than i would have been able to before. i still shoot at the minimum viable iso every time on my a7siii, the difference is now i can keep shooting until the stars are plainly visible without needing a tripod.
ironically, this doesn’t seem to hold quite as true for video now that i think about it. video is so tech and tool based. often it’s newer guys that embrace the new tech and techniques that the old heads snub their noses at that end up doing the best. maybe not in Hollywood, but Hollywood is a totally different animal from what 99% of videographers do. I’m talking about video outside of Hollywood. often these newer tools will be lower quality less professional tools for quick turnaround. the kind of thing that corporate America is all about these days. quantity over quality is the name of the game in today’s video world more often than not.
a video camera from 15 years ago is likely almost useless today for any real work, a stills camera from 25 years ago could be used to make a billboard ad right now.
Skateboards with no pop. Guitars with shit intonation. More broadly: consumables that wear through too quickly and cause people to nope out of the hobby because it is ‘too expensive’, the list goes on.
There is something reassuring about quality gear because beginners don’t always know or properly understand this stuff.
With that said there is a point beyond which those returns begin to diminish.
I don’t typically see people advocate for the cheapest gear, just not to go all-in. There is something to be said for how much you can learn from stuff that requires a bit more tuning or customization.
In airsoft we had people who didn’t even know there were other options show up with $40 clear plastic guns from Walmart (they’re awful) and guys with $2000 air-powered guns from the best brands show up all the time, and both of these people sucked. Typically, they both also had a bad time, because neither could realistically learn anything from their guns considering they were already as good as they were ever going to be.
My advice was always to start with a low-mid range electric rifle that can take a high-capacity magazine. Having like 400+ shots in a match is more than enough. Pick a design that is easy to get parts and accessories for so you can build on it. Someday you grow out of it and then you drop the real money on an airsoft rifle, but you can run a good starter rifle for a long time. I only replaced mine because it catastrophically broke after years of rough play: I learned a lot from modifying it and it made my next gun choice much more educated that I ever could have managed as a newbie.
Yeah fuck this guys (OP, not the person I’m replying under) take. Hobbies need less gatekeepers and if I want to do research about gear, make nice purchases as a way to deepen my investment into the hobby so be it.
Example: I just got into fitness. I have almost no need for some of the products ive been buying, however through the research ive stumbled across some excellent articles and a few YouTube channels that inspire me. Even if the gear / gadgets do nothing more than inspire you to show up and try them out, its worked.
gearsluts
Why do you think you’d need to not sensor yourself with whore, but can’t say queer?
On a side note, it rhymes, but it doesn’t really make as much sense as slut or whore.
I used one but not the other because my best interpretation of modern social sensibilities is that “whore” is not considered terribly offensive when it’s directed outside of its more literal sense, whereas “queer” is only acceptable in positive discussion of non-heteronormativity.
The second gear- usage just comes from a time (and communities behind the times) where the slur is used more broadly to mean “anybody I don’t like.”
Eh, slutshaming, misogyny vibes
what about gear guzzler or something, i dunno i wish gear dragon or gear god didnt make the sound cool
also gear geek ig
Men are the biggest gear sluts so I’m fine with turning the misogyny around.
How about this?
You bought the most expensive gear for a hobby you don’t yet know much about? I’ve met many in this hobby, and have never met anyone this dedicated! Good on you, mate! Can you keep me posted on your progress? I’m genuinely interested! Let me know if you need any help or advice, as I’d be ecstatic to help!
I hate these ~/mike types of gatekeeping bullshitters. People in a hobby being excited about newcomers to the hobby, is the reason we still have hobbies.
In some cases a hobby becoming more “mainstream” can also find it being suddenly overwhelmed by those that make it less fun - or less affordable - for others. Sometimes more people can make it more affordable later on (mass production) but supply and demand is also a thing in the mid-term.
If a kinda niche hobby becomes more popular temporarily, there’s also the chance that waiting it out will score you some good barely-used gear for cheap as those that buy and try decide it’s not for them.
If a kinda niche hobby becomes more popular temporarily, there’s also the chance that waiting it out will score you some good barely-used gear for cheap as those that buy and try decide it’s not for them.
Thats exactly what’s happening in Germany with indoor weed growtents at the moment. We legalized homegrown weed in April, which caused a huge wave of people buying new equipment for double the regular price because of such high demand, and now suddenly people realize how much work it is and that small mistakes can easily ruin your harvest. So now the marked is slowly starting to be overflow with used equipment
But if they get into it, it will make it less likely I’ll be able to buy their equipment from them later for cheap.
Also, the same type of people who go out and buy the most expensive crap in their new hobby are also usually the ones who talk like they know everything about the hobby and want to explain it to you.
Depending on the hobby, this is some fucked up gatekeeping.
My first thought was riding a motorcycle as a hobby, and that is one activity that many people severely underestimate how much expensive gear you should be wearing for your safety before you even consider doing it.
Helmet? What are you, some kind of weakling who has a brain to protect? Get a Harley, that’s a motorcycle for us big overcompensators, and we don’t do helmets, because there’s nothing up there to protect!
Oh that’s that new “x”?! Tell me about it?!
Be excited people are joining your hobbies. Without people hobbies die.