Gear. And more gear. Music gear forums. Arguments about gear. Zillions of YouTube videos on gear. Sure, people get excited about new cars, new shoes and even new watches—but do everyday consumers connect the term “lust” with products as much as our industry does?
So I asked AI to find examples of people using the term “computer lust,” but it came up empty. It also couldn’t find references to “big-screen TV lust,” “wristwatch lust,” or lust associated with other products that nonetheless inspire passion or even obsession. It did find examples of the term “shoe lust,” but ChatGPT added that it “might not be as common as gear lust among musicians.” (It’s not.) The closest find was a blog post about “5 Lust-Worthy Kitchen Accessories.” Perhaps the ubiquitous use of “gear lust” is unique to our unique industry.
Why? Is it just a clever phrase that caught on…or is there more to the story?
The deeper you dig, the more it looks like the latter—and that’s because shiny new gear and shiny new music have a lot in common when they’re rattling around in your brain. This might explain why people can’t resist downloading just one more compressor plug-in even though they already have 47 different compressors. It might also explain why people spend hours on forums obsessing over new gear instead of, I dunno, perfecting a song’s mix or practicing an instrument. It almost seems that, for some people, gear can substitute for music. What’s surprising is that there’s a biological reason for why that may be the case.
Of course, there are reasons other than biology for gear lust. With a capitalist economic model, growth is essential to the model’s success, so manufacturers need to entice us with new products, and then convince us that any new features are not just desirable, but necessary. Some marketing uses the time-tested strategy of inducing fear—“without this gear, you won’t be successful, everyone will laugh at you, and before long, you’ll end up scavenging for food in the dumpster behind McDonald’s.”
The biological factors are difficult to dismiss. What happens when you acquire new gear is not that different from what happens when you create new music. The brain’s reward system that drives motivation and behavior is hard-wired into us. Different areas of the brain form a network that processes rewards. It then reinforces actions that bring pleasure or satisfaction by releasing dopamine (aka, everyone’s favorite “feel good” chemical). The reason I enjoy working in the studio, playing an instrument or writing a song is because it brings pleasure and satisfaction. Hmmm…I guess I just love that dopamine.
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Yet when it comes to dopamine, new gear and new music have much in common. Part of the reward process is anticipation. The excitement involved in thinking about creating music, or acquiring new gear to further your art, primes your dopamine pump and levels start to increase. When you actually acquire the gear or start the music-making process, the dopamine levels spike. This creates a high that, because we’re human tortillas wrapped around an animal burrito, we want to repeat.
There’s also a key difference compared to lust for other things: gear’s intimate involvement with making or recording music. There’s probably no big-screen TV lust because once you’ve bought the TV, you don’t do anything creative with it. (Although you can use it to solve challenging puzzles, like Prime Video’s streaming service hellscape of a user interface.) You might like showing off cool shoes, but, come on, their mission is simply to buffer your feet from the ground. They’re not involved in creating your day. Over time, the reward process trains our brains to associate music making and music gear—in which we use the latter as a vital partner in the former—with a related feeling of well-being.
Ah, but all good things must come to an end, and eventually the dopamine rush dissipates—and like monkeys who’d rather push a button to get an orgasm than eat a banana to fend off starvation, we want our next musically related dopamine hit. Now.
But what if the muse is having a spa day on Mount Olympus and you’re not inspired to do something musical at that moment? Problem solved! Gear lust! We get our dopamine hit that may not be music per se, but it revolves 100 percent around the music-making process. We like to experiment with new musical ideas and techniques, and the gear can inspire experimentation. Gear is not an independent element compared to music, but an integral part of giving you that dopamine hit. If you can’t get it by playing music, play with shiny new gear.
I think there’s a lesson to be drawn from this. When gear lust comes over you, pause and prioritize. The goal of being in the studio is not to play with gear; it’s to make music. Fortunately, the two get along very well, but you’re probably better off if you think of playing in the studio as your gear, and direct your lust to that instead. Okay, maybe you’re not inspired. But maybe you will be if you start playing an instrument, or call up a project that needs mixing.
If all else fails…you can always fall back on the dopamine-laced rush of jumping on a pro audio substack and sharing your own version of gear lust.
