What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into?

plactagonic@sopuli.xyz to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 705 points –

Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.

Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.

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Making electronic music. You can get lots of software tools for free, so I started out with those.

Then I realized how many details get lost, depending on what speaker/headphones you use, so bought myself higher quality headphones. As in, quite high-end for normies, but obviously, I'm at the lower end for music production hardware.

Now I'm considering buying a MIDI keyboard, because those software tools don't quite emulate proper piano playing. Although, you could obviously also spend money on getting different software tools. And of course, on a quadrillion plugins for these software tools, to produce different sounds.

I'm just glad that my other hobby is programming, so when my music-self gets excited about an idea, my programming-self will want to solve it.
...and then never finish what music-self wanted, but at least we're distracted from spending money.

what headphones did you buy?

These ones: https://www.sennheiser-hearing.com/en-DE/p/hd-560s/ckyy9r5q0016i0c96sk5d9tog/

They're generally said to deliver the sound-quality of medium-grade studio headphones for the price of low-grade ones. But that also means, aside from the sound quality, these are really basic headphones.

You should also mind that they're open-back. So, they have no noise cancelling, neither active nor passive. You have to use these in a silent room.

nice choice. i had the 6xx but had to sell it

Beats by dre

Ah yes, Beats. When you want your music to sound like the artist fell down the stairs with a microphone shoved up his arse 😂

I'm wondering, what's your current set of tools? Both, digital and analog (any of your software/hardware)

If you're wondering, because it doesn't sound like I've actually spent much money yet, yeah, I'm generally quite frugal. I'm mostly just intimidated by all the options to spend money.

But well, my setup is:

  • Laptop running Linux (that already rules out buying most VST plugins, as those are often Windows-only).
  • Headphones: Sennheiser HD 560S (←only real money, I've spent so far)
  • For a DAW, I've been dabbling with LMMS. Felt more approachable to me than Ardour. I also enjoy dicking around with Surge-XT as one quite powerful VST/LV2 plugin.
  • I'm a traditionally trained musician, so I also enjoy creating electronic music via sheet music. And me being a programmer/weirdo, I like Lilypond for that (basically LaTeX for sheet music), despite it not being built for that...

I like the free version of waveform 17 as my DAW, but I’m not sure if it supports Linux. Vital is a good free synth with tons of presets.