Sounds like you just want to play some guitar. Nothing wrong with that. You shouldn't have to force yourself to make Trance or EDM if you're not interested. If you like playing the guitar, you can focus solely on that. Nothing wrong with it.

If you feel like you're missing out and want to include other instruments, you can always mix the guitar with other gear like a drum machine and some synths. You can make some cool experimental guitar music. I've wanted to do that with the piano a while ago - like mix some hard 909 beats with piano. Never got around to it, though.

But if all you want to truly do is only play the guitar, you shouldn't feel guilty about not using your other gear.

It occasionally feels the same way with me too bud...a lot of trance producers only make a couple songs each year. I think it's because whereas rock musicians seem to kind of do their own thing usually, trance musicians have the mindset that we have to match the quality of our favorite tracks, so producing can often seem very tedious. I release something every month or so, but I have literally hundreds of wips and abandoned projects.
The tough truth is, you don't have enough time to play around with everything that's available. You will never have the time, energy or resources to work with it all. What you have to do is learn to make do with what you've got...like ideally, I'd have a personal studio with high quality speakers, packed to the ceiling with various synthesizers but I haven't got the money nor space for it, so I work with vsts and a pair of Technics. I think once you learn to accept what you've got, you can become GOOD with that stuff and start making music you're proud of.
I'm fairly satisfied with my work...could be better, and like I said, my setup is nowhere near my ideal, but can I make a song I can listen to over and over and still find something enjoyable about it? Yes.
It's all a matter of acceptance around the board...accept that you'll never experience everything musically, that most of your stuff is going to flop, that you'll rarely be completely satisfied with your work...it's a sucky process, but once you can get over those things, you'll feel better about your music.

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nice thing about playing the guitar is that it can be social - and you can leave all the knob twiddling to an engineer and mixer if you ever start recording music.

Go with what you love..

T

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quote:

Originally posted by The Mysterious Stranger I respect a lot of sounds that originally got me in to EDM and synths, but I feel like I have too much to focus on. I feel like I don't really have time to master everything and in a way I want to reboot and just focus purely on guitar, but I feel like I'd be hard on myself over the possiblity I'd want to use some piece of gear in 10 years. Plus where does one draw the line. Keep all the gear/keep just the desk+fx/get rid of it all?

Welcome to the world of musical ADD. I'm 46, have playing since elementary school, and still feel like I can't stay focused on all the things I want to learn or improve upon. It's a constant struggle for most people, especially with everything that is so readily available to us these days. But, I agree with the others and think you're on the right track. Go with your gut and focus on guitar. I'd suggest keeping at least one keyboard, since it's such a commonly use instrument and you'll probably pick up a lot more than you'd expect over the next few years just by having it in front of you. Also, I think you'll find that learning guitar will help improve your keyboard skills, or at least some of the things you learn from the guitar will transfer to keys.

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cryphonic makes good points - especially regarding keeping your gear, I really regret selling some of my kit and miss a couple of synths almost daily.

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If you just want to play guitar then do that. DOn't worry so much about all your gear, sometimes I guess you have to take numerous routes that are wrong to find the one that is right. So then don't worry about all the wrong routes, just worry about the right one....then follow that one. Maybe in the future it will have an offramp onto one of the old ones.

Y'all rock. Thanks for the thoughts everyone. More helpful than I expected to run this through the filter of other artists.