General question - How do you decide what equipment to buy?

When you're looking to buy a new piece of musical equipment, how do you make your choice? Do you read reviews? User reviews or "professional" reviews? Do you limit yourself to things you can try in person before you buy? Do you talk to friends or people who work at guitar/drum/etc. stores? Do you trust certain brands over others?

I guess I'm specifically asking about items where you don't already know a lot ... like e.g. if you're primarily a guitarist and you're looking to buy a drum set, which you know nothing about, how do you educate yourself before you buy?

admittedly i have kind of a different perspective on this, but ive whittled it down to a few magazines that i trust, for the most part.

the best rule of thumb is (wrt guitars) the more song transcriptions the magazine contains the more laughably on the take/full of shit it is.

i guess i mostly ask friends for advice, and maybe scan a bunch of online reviews to see if there is a consensus.

i've been wanting to get together a new home recording setup, but the thought of making all the necessary decisions (and maybe learning a new software program) just makes me tired.

Magazines I trust:

Tape Op
Mix
Premier Guitar
UK guitar mags in general

does anyone else remember the ancient years when harmony central was actually slightly useful instead of being a cesspool of lunatics and bots doing product placement?

(note: i will also make a very biased suggestion of talking to somebody at a local store you trust and have enough rapport with to make them not want to asscram you with whatever discontinued garbage they can think of.)

i hate the feeling wanting to buy something that will cost a fair amount of money but not knowing how to ensure i'm making a wise, educated decision about exactly what to buy :/

I guess one advantage of having a low budget and a rudimentary set-up is that I never really wonder about quality; I'm more concerned with whether the item's specifications are going to work easily with my set-up. Then I'll google around, and ... well, if anyone anywhere has positive things to say about the kind of cheapo bottom-end stuff I buy, then it's probably good; and if the thing doesn't work or breaks easily, there'll probably be plenty of people complaining.

The one purchase I've made lately that was an exception was an Artcore guitar, which I got because (a) it was the only way I was going to be able to afford a semi-hollow, and (b) J. Justen and various guitar-forum people thought it was a pretty solid guitar, and "solid" is all you really ask for from budget stuff.

i have still never had a warranty claim on an artcore, which is pretty incredible considering the price.

does anyone else remember the ancient years when harmony central was actually slightly useful instead of being a cesspool of lunatics and bots doing product placement?

Yes. So what I do, if consulting a review and there are a lot of them, is jump right to the last page -- or earliest of them.

Just today, I ran across this ... which I think you'll admit is OTT in the way that's ruined much of it's content. I find the ever longer and more elaborate animated adverts increasingly odious, too.

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Of some bog standard but boutique fuzztone:

I am running this in conjunction with other pedals ( in line from the guitar : Morley Bad Horsie Wah to Circuitrix.com Distortion One to ancient B.K.Butler Real Tube Overdrive to SFZ to Prescription Electronics RX Overdrive used strictly as a clean boost. There is also a Lexicon MPX-1 in the parallel F/X loop in the head). I have several guitars,a wonderful 20 year old handmade Les Paul repo loaded with BKP Black Dog pups, a Gibson Les Paul Flametop loaded with BKP Stormy Monday pups,a 40th Anniversary Les Paul with stock P90's,an American Standard Strat loaded with Seymour Duncan Alnico II's. These run into a 14 month old Bettencourt (Circuitrix.com)50 watt head modeled on Marshall. It is all point to point,handwired,with MercMag matched trans. and NOS Tubes using KT-88's in the power stage. It has two discreet preamps going to one power amp stage.Pre 1 is a repo of a 1968 Model 1959 Plexi Super Lead,Pre 2 is a repo of the 1975 Model 2203 JCM 800. The head is essentially an exact repo of Jimi's 1968 Super Lead with a JCM 800 preamp thrown in for fun. Needless to say it is beyond Christer. This feeds a 1972 Hiwatt 4x12 bottom loaded with old Naylor Classic 50's (a repo of the earliest pre-Rola Celestions-now unavailable) or a 1x12 handmade cab based size wise on the Cornford Harlequin loaded with a vintage Fane. The head has true "power scaling" in it so I can do anything from a very small club with the 1x12 or blast in a big place through the 4x12. The SFZ fits right into this rig with zero issues. It is amazingly quiet for a Fuzz pedal. Theo went above and beyond in taking the original FuzzFace circuit and building it by hand out of the finest materials available. I wanted that one pedal that would give me the Jimi tone when I am playing my Strat. The NKT275 (with the Hendrix Mod offered by Theo)side of the SFZ gives it to me. At a high enough fuzz setting (like 8 on the dial) it will give me that "Band Of Gypsies" singing lead tone and dialing down the volume knob of the guitar get me to strains of the rythym tone of such things as "Little Miss Strange" or "Axis:Bold As Love". With my Black Dog Paul it will give me the early Billy Gibbons (intro to "Brown Sugar") tone in spades. The BC108 side gives to my ears more of the Jeff Beck in his "Blow By Blow" days tone...like "Ended As Lovers". It is a bit brighter and a bit cleaner dirt than the NKT275 side. I do not stack the two sides together..it substantially lowers the output level and also gives a mosquito like mess of fuzz sound that I have no use for.Each of my pedals is in the rig for a specific "flavor" of distortion ; Satch like heavy to Jimi rythym lite. I wanted to have a pedal that would give me the tones of damned near everything recorded from 1967 through the mid 1970's and the SFZ does this perfectly.

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Harmony Central was recently useful in determining the correct pawn shop price for an SG knockoff made by a no-name company called Arbor. There was a pink one for sale in Pasadena and the store was asking $265, about one hundred over what it was worth new. I looked it up on harmony-central, laughed and passed on by.

I am running this in conjunction with other pedals (snip)

Somewhere, Hendrix is laughing his ass off at guys like this.

This is the thread to post vain douchebag Harmony Central reviews

It's tough for me. I'm in a fairly small town and the two music stores which just kinda carry your basics, so I just do what Nabisco does, or check youtube demos and pray there's a decent one for what I'm looking for, etc. If there's stuff I don't like about something in particular, I ask myself, "what does this cost and what I can I modify myself on the cheap". It can be a real gamble. I kinda lucked out with this Xaviere semi-hollow tele knockoff, after swapping a few parts off I've got possibly my favorite new guitar for under 300 bones. I mean the neck looks like a fucking #2 pencil, but it plays and sounds really great. So shit.

Basically I look for deals and TRY not to drink the kool-aid on high-end/boutique junk (I mean how many of those $200+ od pedals just sound close enough to a tube screamer or a step up from a bad monkey or something, it's ridiculous).

And yeah, Harmony Central is a nightmare. I only read them to look for any recurring mechanical bottoming out.

Guys I don't know what I just posted, but if any of that doesnt' make sense I'm pretty drunk right now.

When I was younger and more bored, I used to read a good amount of stuff about gear. Magazine reviews are generally goofy but if you understand the basics of construction and function of guitars, amps, and effects you can get pretty good at reading between the lines. Learning as much as you can about how the stuff actually works is the best method I've found for understanding what you want. That being said, my basic formula of modestly-priced guitars and slightly upscale effects has not let me down.

gearwire.com
^put together by friend of mine.

Yeah, "reading between the lines" is basically what you need to learn because basically all other players writing reviews who don't think exactly like you (meaning, all of them) are going to sound batshit crazy half the time.