If something happened to your music equipment tomorrow, would you be prepared? What if you had a theft, or a house fire and you lost everything? If you had to give your insurance agent a list of what you had along with serial numbers, could you do it? Until today, I am not sure I could have. In fact as I think about it, I am positive that I could not.

Today, my Wife and I spent some time going through all of my music equipment and wrote down brand, model, and serial numbers of everything. I also took a single picture of each item to put with the list. Over the years I have collected quite a bit of equipment. Because I have added each piece and hooked it up as I got it, it became very clear that this is a project I should have started many years ago, and should have kept up on. Unfortunately, this task required taking everything apart and disconnecting cables to get to the serial numbers. This would have been a lot worse if we were not in the process of moving some of the gear to another room. I still needed to remove all items from racks since many serial numbers were on the side of the units or underneath where they could not be seen installed in the racks.

The purpose of this blog is to encourage everyone to take the time to go through their equipment and make a list on their computer that they can print out or burn to disk, and keep in a safe place. Depending on how much you have invested, you may even want to speak with your insurance agent about having a separate policy to cover you musical equipment. I realized today that If I needed to replace my musical gear after a house fire or flood, my current home owners policy would not even cover just the music equipment, let alone everything else in the house which would be the first priority.
Just something to think about. In the mean time, I think we are going to do the same thing for all the other items in our house. After a disaster, people are seldom in the mindset to remember exactly what they had.