this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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It's really common advice to not start with the cheapest gear. Yes a lot of us learned to play on dime store guitars but would have suffered less with a quality instrument. The same is true for just about everything.
Exactly. I started learning harmonica on those $20 pack of 8 and struggled for weeks to get anything to sound close to what I wanted. When I spent $60 on a decent instrument, I could suddenly do what I'd been practicing. There's a sweet spot for getting good enough equipment to actually learn without blowing the budget on something you may not continue doing
Right and top end is several hundreds or thousands. So $60 is cheap just not cheapest.
Woodworking planes.
You can go to Home Depot and get a plane for $15-20, and it will - mostly - cut wood. Spend $50-60 and get a decent name brand tool that gives a lot less grief. Spend $500 and get a Lie Nielsen that's just on another level.
Here's the thing, though: you have to be pretty competent to appreciate the difference between the $50 and $500 tools; and if you know what you're doing, you can easily tune the $15 so it works almost as well as the $500. Buy cheap to get started; upgrade if it turns out you stick with the hobby. I'll never know if I could have learned easier/faster starting with a $50 plane, but my guess is that I'd still have been gouging the shit out of everything.
Another thing that works really well is buying old when it comes to some tools.
I have a handful of 80 year old Stanley planes that are all the same quality as the expensive Lie Nielsen options, but I got them for about 50 bucks each.
Ohhh youuu
I don't disagree with what you're saying. But learning to tune a plane takes skill and time. People get into woodworking because they want to build things out of wood. The love of adjusting tools comes later.
The setup thing is no joke. I made a sub $200 mandolin play well out of its league with just some sandpaper to lower the nut height. I still got the nicer one but for the time inbetween it was great. Now the friend I bought it from for $50 has it on loan since she can actually physically play it now with the lower string height.
I’ve learned that the ROI on most expensive stuff just isn’t really there unless you’re deep into it and want to treat yourself or you’re a professional(which is kinda the same but I’ll keep it separate). The caveat of course is that you have to start at a semi-reasonable place like you mentioned.
I don’t know why we want to believe that the high-end stuff is made with fairy dust and that we’re not capable of these things with just a bit of effort and trust in ourselves.
Lowering the string height on my guitar made it so much nicer to play. Didn't need to spend thousands, just needed a little work.
Absolutely agree with you, it’s about finding that value curve, where quality scales well with price. Say the cheapest ‘something’ is $10, the $20 one is twice as good, the $40 is maybe 70% better again but the $80 might only be 10% better than that.
As a beginner, I’d go for maybe the $20 option or the $40 if I were confident I’d stick with it. But yeah, it’s a pain when your ability to enjoy or succeed at a hobby is hampered by buying the cheapest option off AliExpress, haha.
You have to adjust the price of harmonicas (assuming you're talking about diatonic ones aka blues harps) to scale for this discussion. A $2.50 harp isn't a beginner's instrument, it's a child's toy. A beginner one would be more like $20. That's where I started and it would bend notes just fine. You can't really spend much more than 60 bucks on a top end harp.
The OP sceenshot is phrased negatively, but the basic premise is in a lot of hobbies people don't need the top gear because beginners won't actually be able to tell the difference. Mid tier gear is a different story.