The first drum kit I ever had, which I bought at around age 7, was a Camco. It was a white pearl kit. It sounded great, but I wanted something that looked cooler. So maybe when I was 12 or so, I was persuaded by a guy at the local music store that this cool-looking blue kit — a garbage low end kit made in Taiwan called Royce — for around $400 was superior.

So I saved the money I made from my newspaper route, allowance, and odd jobs, I started paying for the Royce kit on installments. When I came close to what I needed for the new kit, I sold my Camco kit for $120 to afford the new kit. It sounded like a cheap kit. I ended up realizing that I made a mistake but couldn’t afford a better kit until a few years later, at 15, when I started working at my first regular job.

In recent years, I’ve bought a couple of sample libraries (from Toontrack) that have Camco drums. It makes me sentimental just to see that they’re Camcos, and they sound great.

My first “stage amp” (my Dad and I built a small Heathkit for my $29 Tiesco first guitar 🙂 was a 1965 Fender Twin Reverb and I still have it. BUT I blew the speakers (somehow) and instead of having the Jensens re-built (like my Dad advised), I bought el-cheapo nameless replacements (hey, they’re rated at 200W- what else matters?) and tossed the Jensens. We also did a lot of modifications to the Twin, but that stuff can all be un-done.

Just like the guy in the article, I had a Roland Juno 60 that I got new in 1984 (was actually my first polysynth that I ever owned!). Sometime in the late 1990s, while it was still in great working condition, I let it go for a steal! I was diving headlong into digital stuff , and figured it was headed toward the ash heap. Bad call there. Everything old is new again!