I keep telling myself I am not a musician. Call it imposter syndrome, but despite having all the music-connected skills that I have, I still just think of it as eclectic side-hobby.

Here’s the thing tho. 

I’ve been playing in a real orchestra for the better part of my 40s. (Second violin, in case you didn’t know that about me.) I am literally in a kind-of-band with a chair to sit in and a part  to play and a rehearsal schedule to follow. It’s a real thing.

And those bona fides extend beyond a bit of bowing too: I read music, I played the alto sax in grade school, can plink out the basics on a piano, own a chanter, used to consider myself something of a penny-whistle enthusiast, and definitely pay a mean recorder. 

On top of that, I have done some loose digital composition of electronic music, exclusively in software of course (and as will become clear in the next few paragraphs) and never really more than dabbling in vibes and personal entertainment.

I like music. I make music. I play music. I perform music. I buy music. I am kinda, sorta a musician. Self-doubt be damned. 

I bring this up now because I have been sporadically poking at product and functional research around hardware synths. About five years ago I found a channel on youtube where this guy would collect, restore and review retro keyboard synths. It’s a weird hobby, really. And yet watching all those videos took me down a rabbit hole of interesting related topics, most of it looping back to the fact that I have been a electronic music fan all the way back to my CD-buying years and have a respectable collection of collected tracks and more. Simply, I like this stuff and found the art of it fascinating. There is no bottom to that rabbit hole, but my five years of bumbling, fumbling research of course had me playing around with software composition on my computer again and ultimately realizing that what I really wanted was something more physical—tanglible, real. The answer to that bit of musical envy, of course, is a hardware synth with lots of buttons to press and knobs to turn and samples to shape, sitting in a dark basement as one does when composing electronic music. I’ve been researching my options to buy one for the better part of a couple years, watching vids and reading reviews and trying to understand the technology with enough expertise to buy one that makes sense for me as a kinda musician diletante.

Synths tend to look like pianos and can imitate them, but even in their most simplistic beginner formats are all manner of gateways to electronic sound manipulation, creating digitally aucoustic sound patterns, linking them to an input mechanism, looping mechanism, and other sound enveloping technology things. It all outputs as something we all would recognize, from dance to trance to ambient chill to 8-bit game soundtracks.

The problem is that we already have two pianos in our house. And. And. And! And I hear you folks who know what I’m about to explain rolling your eyes: synths are not pianos, even tho they often look very much the same.  My point here tho is that if were ever to invest a couple hundred bucks into a synth I would need to make it very clear to the other members of our house that no, I was not buying another piano, I was actually buying a synth and it’s almost as much to explain to someone who ask why are you buying those new pants when you already have a toothbrush at home? You get it or you don’t. 

The other (not so minor) problem is that I am currently between incomes. I hope to be gainfully employed again by the end of the summer if all goes well, but these things are couched in vast levels of uncontrollable uncertainty that have almost zero correlation to the effort involved. If I had a regular income a new synth wouldn’t even register as a purchase: it’s a couple tanks of gas or a week of groceries, and even jobless we are just fine financially thank you very much anyways. Yeah, it’s a bit more money than splurging on a new video game, but only marginally more—and definitely a better investment. 

(Look at me talking myself into this.)

And yet, after multiple years of research on synths I find myself in a hot spot of a dilemma: I have pretty much decided on the particular synth I want to buy—eventually or sooner—and yes I do have money set aside for mad irrational purchases, and oh it turns out its on sale this week even as speculation about store stock repleshiment dwindles on the verge of tariff-related price increases and—well— you might even recall that I am kind of sort of actually a musician and it’s would be a fun new instrument to play around with, no?  

I’m going to go into the store to look at it later this morning. And it would be something like an impulse buy, but too, one that I have quietly researched and pondered for at least the last two years. Still a guilty pleasure. A musical guilty pleasure. 

So there’s the rub.

People who define themselves as things should invest in those things, right?

I am an artist, so I buy paint and paper and take classes.

I am a writer, so I have lovely keyboards and document management skills.

I am a musician, so I play music and explore sound.

We each and all of us define ourselves by a such a finite list of attributes in our life. My relatives camp and so they buy expensive RVs, htings to stock them with and rent lots at the lake.  I have friends who buy and maintain expensive sports cars. I have other friends who travel the world, cost be damned, because they are enthusiasts for such things. I have friends who pay too much for tickets to sports games or concerts because those things are how they define themselves to themselves and to the universe. These are not all things I would buy, but who would begrudge any of them for indulging in their hobbies and shaping their lives around non-functional investments of time and money? 

We work, or don’t, and we can too easily live our lives in a purely functional way. And even those of us who nary can afford to do so sometimes allocate money that would best be spent on other things, smarter more functional purchases, to these pieces of equipment or supply or training or content that help us better define ourselves as something less purely functional and bound to sheer survival: these things that define what we call our hobbies or interests, perhaps even our humanity.

And those are the things that let us explain to the world that we are more than even what we sometimes believe to be true ourselves.