Eggster
Ha! Loads of great answers - Its what makes this forum great!!! I'm off to chain smoke a pack, have a whisky or two, play online poker while I consider my next purchase...

Thanks for the witty replies and the serious ones!

There is the Mental Health Clinic in the Coffee House. Just spill your story.

It is real easy to become addicted to buying plugins and softsynths. The companies push their products into your mailbox in mass quantities and they sell your email address to others in order to make additional money. Every day my mailbox is flooded with offers from these software distributors and peddlers. They have tracking cookies which make offers appear on your favorite websites and you wonder why your credit card bill is growing. I had to add rules to my Outlook mailbox to keep from getting the offers I have no intention on ever investing in. I also set my web browser to delete tracking cookies at the end of using the browser.
JUST SAY NO.. 😁

I used to be really bad at collecting toys, most of which I didn't need. FX more than instruments. I fancy catching that disease again for a while, just for fun. Where's the best place to ogle these things now? I used to spend a lot of time on KVR. 

Say no more.

There are a lot of uglier/nasty things you can invest in...I've gone thru phases of "no coffee", "no beer/wine" phases to justify spending the duckets on some intriguing new thing.  This can be a very positive refocus, as music is beyond all the bullsheist we are urged to become slaves to.
 
I went thru a phase... bought all the big stuff... Spitfires, HeavyOcity, SL, EWQL, etc... It provided an AWESOME foundation NO studio had available to it a decade ago. I have 6 hard drives full of this stuff... This kind of ended last year as I realized I was overwhelmed and overstocked with clutter I'll never use...
 
Along the way I'd consistently supported the "little guys"... people I felt a connection with... Like Greg from Orange Tree, Skippy from Plug in Guru, many sound designers like Matt, Luftrum, and Arksun... these folks do amazing things and are just like you and me, strugglin' to survive by doin' what they're compelled to do... I will NEVER stop supporting and connecting with such humans... they are special... Little folk like Dmitry Sches, creating Diversion and Tantra... oh, I love these people and am soooo glad to have come across them and supported them in my meager way.
 
Looking back, all the IK crap, and lots of the stuff from EW, SL, and many others are totally irrelevant to what I am doing today.  But in the end, I have few regrets, as I love the realm we are in and wouldn't trade my choices for all the coke in Afghanistan.  I spend duckets on decent stuff... Many don't!

A lot to think of for sure ... I had the exact same discussion yesturday with Ayan Zahev ( the sound designer) via skype in a visio conf. For my students and on the menu was advises on investements in gears ... He told me exactly what we all know and experienced : he have a lot of pkugins he don t use , he can t sell many because of how dirt cheap some are getting sold by manufacturers several time a year .... And he finished by telling me that he s slowly back to hardware because of at the end even if taking lonely it s no cheap , hw was less expensive , more inspiring , a better investement ( for resell) ...

Some other stuff to meditate on ....

All the interviews and discussions i had with pro s , one thing is key is limitation , and i experience this myself ....
The limitations forces the creativity while having stuff overhelping you and eillions of stuff is just gonna lead you in a no surprise land mostly.... I always warn my students about crack , only because of this at first ... They have too much and are lost most the time ...

But they be like "zo you tell to limit but you have zillion of plugins" .. And we re getting to the point i wanted to share here ...yes i have a lot of plugins but those are " options" , as some here might know , atvleast twice a years , i go in south of france or in the Alpes , no internet , no phone , healthy food and sport ,laptop , arturia minilab , and go producing , and during that , i rarelly use more than 3 plugins ( instruments) in my production ... In search of inspiration , all those components (limitation, technology deconnexion , nature reconnection ect) help me like crazy , i m super productive like 2 or 3 songs base a day !!! The fact also that i force myself during the year to do very few production is like a cure to be then super creative when i can ...

My plugins ( i m talking instruments here) are like sonic lands combinaison option , i have a lot but use few at the same time and projeçt to get a sonic coherence and for creativity ....

Some of this , i can apply it to FX , i like to go one land in a mix , another land in another .... At the end i hate repetetive , i hate stuff to easy ( i m not bashing stuff that let you go fast , easy and fast are not the same in my book ) so it skipp my creativity , and i m so creative that i hate spending to mutch time on a song and i want go to another ...

Sorry for the long post but this thread is real interesting and so are all the comments ...


So at the end , it a tuff one , but like a everything in life , exess is bad ...the key here is to find when from options you re starting to go in exess ....

I have solved the problem for myself by demo any plug-in first (and ignore everything I can not demo). Most of the time in 5 minutes I think "hm... I am not sufficiently professional to understand for what that can be good" or "everyone say it is perfect, but it sounds like a crap for me". By occasion the result is "eh... really nice", but than I strictly follow the rule "I will buy it during the next sale!"

Wanted to mark one of Zo's perspectives as helpful but no go from the dashboard.
Anyway Zo, helpful...
 
John
 
and yeah, like Rain said...