I don’t have shares in Amazon or affiliate links; I don’t plan on stopping my day job as a private online music instructor. So why am I writing about the beauty of Amazon? In my case, Amazon Canada, but insert the country of your choice. If you’ve read any of my past posts, you know I’m an amateur home studio enthusiast. I’m into hardware synthesizers, workstations, outboard preamps, compressors, mixing boards and all the good stuff. Owning a studio means continually organizing and connecting gear in new ways. For many of us with home studios, there’s as much fun in connecting and changing up equipment as actually making music. It’s like our studios are living, breathing entities that never really get completed but added to, and yes, sometimes subtracted from, although I haven’t run into that yet. So why am I so happy with Amazon? Let me explain.
In 2018 I taught over 50 students in their homes weekly; the driving schedule was hectic, the traffic was terrible, and it was exciting yet stressful, but I loved it. I’d been teaching professionally full-time for 25 years when 2019 occurred, and the pandemic reared its ugly head. The teaching halted, and the driving stopped. After twenty-five years of teaching students, my job, income, and company were forced to stop because of the pandemic. I suspended lessons for a month while I decided, forced through the circumstance, to switch to teaching privately online. My teaching company survived thanks to fifty percent of the students who stayed with me. I know many other teachers who weren’t as lucky.
I had to make many changes to my home studio during this transition from private in-home teaching to online teaching through Skype or Zoom. Those changes were only possible because of Amazon since the products I required weren’t possible to find elsewhere. For example, I required a camera mount above the piano so my students could see the keys from above; the mount had to be significant because of where it needed to be installed. The camera mount was $60 and delivered in a few days; I couldn’t get this locally, especially for that price. The camera mount would have been useless without the camera; I had the camera but needed a fifteen-foot USB passive extension to connect it to the computer. USB passive extension $30 delivered in a day. I annotated students’ music with a computer mouse, so I got a graphic tablet to make things easier, quicker, and more readable. The graphic tablet was $60 and delivered the next day. I couldn’t find any of these items where I live; not enough demand for stores to even think of stocking them. These were the essential items; however, there were many little items, such as an iPhone holder, so I could record videos and have a third camera in the studio when needed.
Fast forward to summer when I upgraded my studio, I needed a ten-port powered USB hub, sold at the local store for $150, and the same model was on Amazon for $50, and when I say local store, it wasn’t in stock; they had to order it from some other seller. The same thing happened for the other two powered USB hubs I required. I needed lengthy TRS cables to connect my synthesizers to my mixer, $200 for six cords at the local music store, and Amazon two twenty-foot TRS cables for $19.99. For my students running into these same problems, know that if you look around, you can get less expensive versions of what you want. A three-foot TRS snake running from my patch bay to the mixer is $150 at the local music store and $60 on Amazon Canada. These less expensive cables work fine in my studio.
Even though, as a studio owner, it’s great to be able to save money, let’s talk about the real benefit. You can order adaptors, stands, mounts, cables, organizers, trays, straps, USB adaptors, HDMI adaptors, and limitless bits and pieces you need for a studio that you can’t buy elsewhere.
Until the pandemic, I was probably the only person on the planet who had never ordered anything from Amazon. Do I feel bad about not going to the local music store for cables? Not the least, the money I save on cables they’ll get when I buy my next synth. I spend so much time there that they think I’m an employee. Thanks for reading; until next time, I’m just a music teacher having fun; catch ya on the next one.
The beauty of Amazon
