I love guitar gear—always have. I’m fortunate to own a lot of it, including some higher-end, expensive stuff, and yeah… collecting and swapping gear is part of the fun for me. But it took me about 30 years to really learn (and actually accept) the simplest truth: it’s not about the gear. The real fun is playing music—jamming with friends, playing gigs, and doing the whole “band relationship” thing that’s basically the most difficult marriage imaginable… with three or four other people. In this video I prove that point with a recording that, in my opinion, came out shockingly good using simple, inexpensive, “unsuspecting” gear. I tracked it with a used Peavey Bandit red stripe combo I paid about $175 for, boosted with a $50 Joyo Taichi overdrive, and my favorite cheap delay—the TC Electronic Prophet Digital Delay. The guitar was a Kramer Baretta Special that cost me around $179, and I even used one of those $8 Kirlin cables. The takeaway is simple: use what you already have, because your ears change over time—and that old pedal in the closet might be exactly what you need to make something cool right now.