Today's young musicians actually understand their gear quite well

Good evening! It's me again!!

Young people aren't interested in gear.

That's something I hear often lately.

I myself previously wrote that "young people have no obsession with gear."

But in reality, artists like Ohzora Kimijima, Lovely Summer-chan, and Kyosuke Takano from Gesu Band use RME audio interfaces.

In other words, it's not that they are "not interested in gear," but rather,

"they actually understand exactly what matters."

Perhaps that is the case.

Unlike in the past, where people would spend hundreds of thousands on rack gear,
build massive pedalboards,
or collect vintage equipment.

That "culture of making gear itself a hobby" does feel like it has diminished a bit.

But instead,

"gear that ensures production and performance never stop"

is something they choose quite strictly.

Especially today's young musicians, who do a significant portion of their own DTM, streaming, and recording.

So if an audio interface is unstable, everything just stops.

You can't record.
The stream drops.
Latency becomes an issue.
The drivers are unstable.

That kind of stress, while subtle, slowly chips away at your creativity.

As a result, they end up with "gear that isn't flashy but is highly reliable," like RME.

This is actually quite rational.

In our generation,
we often talked about gear using terms like
"thick sound,"
"glossy," or
"vintage feel."

Of course, that's fun too.

I still find it genuinely fun to talk about guitars, amps, and effects pedals.

I'll talk endlessly about things like Metal Zones, modified SD-1s, or vintage capacitors.

But it feels like young people today look at gear more in terms of the "distance between daily life and creation."

It works properly,
it records immediately,
it doesn't crash,
it lets me focus on the song.

They prioritize those things.

I've been looking into various audio interfaces myself lately, and I've started to think that what really matters in the end,

more than "the sound is amazing,"

might actually be,

"not stopping the creative process."

I've started to think that.

It's not about outfitting everything with high-end gear.

But you spend money properly on the parts where "if this stops, everything stops."

That's not just being frugal; I think it's actually a very modern and smart way to choose gear.

It's a bit different from the gear-geek culture of the past, but
this might be a world that truly "understands gear" in its own way.