I got cured of my stalking habit. It took more than six months of de-programming, but it worked.
It was November 2019 when I decided to "downsize' some leftovers from my recording studio outside of Boulder. When we moved from that area to a more rural location and built our house, I had packed up miscellaneous unsold items, some of which are still here, mostly stored in the basement. But I started playing guitar again on an impulse, and was very pleased to find a few guitars I had thought I had sold - two sixties Gibsons, a 1979 Schecter (turns out it is very collectible) and various amps, speakers, monitors. But the only place for them besides the basement was my office, already crowded. I set up a Musicman 210 and a Fender Bassman ... both needed some work (as is the case with those old tube amps and both took up a ton of space.
Saw an ad for something the likes of which never existed in the 80s when I had the studio - an amp called a Spark 40. Interfaces with an iPhone via Bluetooth, can emulate literally dozens of different amplifiers, has every effect imaginable and takes up about 1 square foot of space. Plus, it came with a free "basic" version of
Studio One. Best of all, the whole package was like $275 - a fraction of what I could the old Bassman for. So I ordered it and sold the Bassman and the Musicman. It was a pre-order Special (Christmas was coming) with delivery promised in January.
January 2020 rolled around and I got an email advising that due to demand, it would be coming in February. I kept checking with them ("stalking") and didn't get any new info until mid February, when I was advised that "due to COVID" it wouldn't be coming until April. In Late March they advised (after I called several times and pressured them) that it would ship in the third week of May. I got the "shipped" notice in the last week of May. Two weeks later there was still no tracking info - just the proverbial "label created". More stalking.
Turns out the shipping label was generated by the customs broker in LA, and the unit was on a slow boat from Indonesia or somewhere in Asia. FINALLY, late June, the tracking said "in transit" and it arrived two days later.
Set it up, tried it out and it was phenomenal. Went to download the basic Studio One, and it wouldn't download. I contacted the mfr (Presonus, a dfferent Company) and they advised that the free "basic" version had been discontinued, but they were extremely apologetic and gave me a link and a code to download the professional version - usually selling for $400.
I have been blown away. All the outboard stuff I used to have in giant racks, the 36-strip board, the 120-point patch bay - a whole control room full of literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hardware, is now a few hundred bucks worth of software!
Still figuring it out - you can only do one thing at a time with the software, but it has full automation so in theory you can do everything that it used to take two people to do in the actual physical studio... you just have to have your shit mentally organized a lot better than I do at this point...
The best thing? I don't worry about shipments - period.
