WHITE PEOPLE PROBLEMS

I have a TC Electronic Reverb 6000. I bought it at the Todd Soundelux auction.

See that fancy touchscreen? Mine doesn't work. It shows white. The device is fancy enough that you talk to it over the network and use an HD15 out to monitor it, though, so I know the brain and the 'verb itself are fine.

Reverb 6000s are way more dope when they are fully functional than when they aren't. It'll cost me ~$600 to get it fixed, which is $600 less profit I'll get out of the box when I sell it.

BUT

The box has just about every license under the sun. It's probably got $12k worth of options. It was recently gone over by TC. And if I'm willing to spend $2500 before December 31, in addition to the $600, it'll be a fully functional, fully loaded TC Reverb 6000 Mk II.

Which includes another year of warranty and an operating system that will take new plugins. A Mk II is about a $12k gadget.

But my sunk costs suddenly become over $5k.

And I'm not sure I'll be able to sell it for more than $6k.

And I'm really worried that I won't have the discipline to sell the stupid thing because Holy Fuck are Sys6000s cool and a Mk II fully loaded will actually allow me to do stupid shit like this:

But I'm not at that level. I've seen Atmos once. Nobody's asked me to mix anything in it. I haven't even had any surround work this year. And the biggest post-production facility in LA just shut down, in part because of pikers like me, except the pikers like me are a lot further along than me and besides, I'm moving back to Seattle.

I realized the other day that I no longer have any friends in Seattle. They all moved away.

So what started out as a "how much do I have to spend to fix this fucking thing so I can sell it" problem has become a fully-blown existential crisis about what the fuck I'm doing with my life. It didn't help that my agent fucked off last month after five months of footsie and trying to find a new agent is an awful lot like trying to find a job, and this is the wrong time of year to do that shit.

I'd like to say that having a fully dialed pro tools studio with a 6000mkII will encourage the universe to find me work up in Seattle but the money I spend on this gadget is literally money that isn't feeding my baby.

Most people don't have agents to lose, system 6000s to upgrade and businesses to move. Compared to the shit demure posted yesterday I'm rawkin' it. But deliberately spending tens of thousands of dollars in order to not make a living for a year while you restart your business?

It's fucking scary. And the choices matter.

Anyway. That's my little boojie, overprivileged problem of the week. Not so much spending money to make money as spending money to make money back because I did that daring shit that all the books tell you to do and here I am with a fancy Danish tarbaby with a busted touch screen.