“Your studio is not a museum”: Tourist says you shouldn’t be precious about treasured gear
“You don’t want to feel intimidated by it. You want to feel like you can revel in its creativity.”
Musician and songwriter Tourist has discussed the act of collecting studio gear but not using it, making the statement, “Your studio is not a museum”.
The British electronic music producer and Grammy-winning songwriter discussed the topic during the latest episode of My Forever Studio, a podcast on which popular music makers tell listeners about a dream studio.
In this episode, Tourist talks about the preciousness people can have over gear, suggesting instead that it should be used, not gawked at. “This one was owned by David Bowie’s personal assistant,” he jokes. “If you like feeling important, then that’s great,” he says.
“Your studio is not a museum. You don’t want to feel intimidated by it. You want to feel like you can revel in its creativity. I’m not like ‘This one here…’. Like a fucking wine cellar.”
“The emotional value of something sometimes is what you create with it,” says Tourist – real name William Edward Phillips. “To some extent, these things are tools. The tools allow you to make magic, and the magic is what you need to get from these tools.”
Listen to the episode below:
Funnily enough, Phillips’ statement contrasts what The Flashbulb musician Benn Jordan said when he guested on the same podcast last week.
On that episode, which you can listen to Apple Podcasts, Jordan defends synth collectors who don’t regularly use their equipment to make music, saying, “There’s no shame in it at all”.
“The people who buy music gear and are keeping the companies afloat, I would say more than half of them are not really making music on it,” he says. “They’re just collecting it and playing with it.
“Even DAWs and software. They just buy the software, they play with the knobs, they listen to it for a second, and there’s no shame in it at all. Everybody pretends they’re making music, but there are a lot of people who just like collecting synths and collecting DAWs and learning. Because they’re not producing music that people are listening to, for some reason they’re not as validated. I think that’s nonsense because it is a hobby one way or another.”
The My Forever Studio podcast, created in partnership with Audient, sees guests in the form of musicians, producers, songwriters and studio engineers conjure up the image of a fantasy studio. This music-making space – and its contents – must be where they make music forever. The catch? Each guest must pick only six studio items, and that does not include plugin bundles. *sounds ‘no bundles’ klaxon*
Find all episodes of My Forever Studio on MusicTech.
