Re-cycle of cause and fx…

Reflections on reaching a decision I suspect I may regret.

I posted previously about my experiences of buying / selling / re-buying musical equipment over the years and generally my experience of this process has not been good; I’ve almost always regretted the loss of things I’d sold…

..but here I am pondering a sort of ‘musical life laundry’

I recently asked folks in my social media circle what their views were on ‘recycling’ musical equipment and their responses have ranged from ‘don’t do it, I’ve always regretted it’ through to ‘if you’ve not used it for a year, it’s time to lose it’

I spent a lot of money a few years ago putting together a collection of rack effects units – something that seems to have marked me out among a lot of bass players I know (on one memorable occasion; the first getting together with a new group of musicians; one of the singers, seeing the stack of units by my bass amp, asked me to adjust the level of their voice in the fold-back thinking I was running the PA system!)

Central to my rack’o’lights was three Line 6 units – the Echo Pro, Mod Pro and Filter Pro (sadly no longer in production). Each one a collection of studio-quality modelled-and-new effects, fully MIDI controllable and capable of producing awesome sounds without loss of bassness.

Over the last few years portability[1.

Taking the units out of the rack case I was surprised how much stuff was in there (in addition to the relatively light (2.5kg) Line6 effects units);
6 x mains power lead

7 x jack-to-jack patch lead

4 x XLR-XLR patch lead

4 x MIDI patch lead

just those leads alone add a significant weight and it’s surprising how quickly it all adds up!

] has become more important to me and these units have fallen into disuse and so, extremely regrettably, I’m pondering recycling them.

I’m really sad that I don’t have the space to put a small recording studio together – if I had I would certainly hang on to them; they’d be just as amazing in the recording studio setting they were designed for as I’ve found them to be live – but they’re doing no-one any good sitting in a rack case!

So here I am, teetering on the edge if what feels like a big thing – to recycle or not recycle…

I’ll keep you posted – meantime, what would you do?