Our furniture and appliances have finished being moved into our new apartment. My partner and I were gazing at an array of our musical instruments spread all over the floor in the living room of our empty apartment.
Five synthesizers, two electric guitars, an 88-key MIDI board, two rhythm machines, three sequencers, three sound source modules, many effectors, an 8-track open reel recorder, an 8-track mixer, a 16-track mixer, a drum set and accessories. Those instruments have occupied a large space of our tiny apartment although they haven't been used for over twenty years since a computer became a dominant tool for me to make my music. Today, a person from the used instrument purchase company was coming to our apartment to make an assessment and collect them. The instruments that spent so many years with me were on standby for their last work with a somewhat tense look.
We shared a lot of memories. It was my custom in my old days to carry several heavy instruments on foot and by train into the studio every time my band practiced and rehearsed. I input data of the arrangement I made for my song on the sequencer by staying up all night and the entire data was all gone in a flash when I tripped on the power cord toward morning that got pulled out of the outlet. Technical difficulties were rampant on the live stage since I used so many kinds of electric instruments connected to each other in place of human band members, such as no sound came out of the sequencer or unexpected sound was produced from the synthesizer, which needless to say horrified me and gave me a cold sweat each time. The instruments felt much heavier on my way home whenever I lost a contest or an audition. We had trodden together on a long, endless road of disappointment and cravings. Though I had already stopped using most of them by the time I moved into this apartment, I brought them anyway by paying costly moving expenses because I was too attached to them to let them go.
For this move, however, I decided not to bring them to my new apartment. I was no longer my past self who had desperately coveted success as a band or had focused too much on writing songs and recording them without sleep until I harmed my health. As I grew older and accumulated more experiences, I came to understand things and be mature. That helped me sort out my feelings. I felt it was time to take the next step of my life, thus time to leave my instruments.
Looking back, not all the memories we shared were bitter. There were fond memories as well. An extremely hopeful feeling that I had when I got a new instrument with all the money I saved by working for months on my part-time job. An indescribable satisfaction I obtained when I got the best take after redid recording hundreds of times. Heavenly bliss I felt when I listened to my completed song after a long period of time of making. After all those years, I finally realized how happy I had been and how valuable my experiences were.
The person who came to our apartment from the used instrument purchase company was a young man who undoubtedly wasn't born yet when I bought these instruments. He carefully looked into each of them to decide the price. When he was done, he asked, "Why are you selling them?" My partner replied, "We make music with a computer now and don't use them anymore." Then he said to my partner and me, "It's so wonderful that you have been making music all the way together."
The price he offered was far higher than we had expected. While we didn't have much income from our music no matter how hard we strove with those instruments, they earned a good sum of money for us at the very end. We helped him load the sold instruments onto his van and saw them off. I was a little sad, but somehow refreshed and cleared at the same time. And that made me feel like our new life had just begun.
