Creativity Quote by Kevin Eubanks

Eubanks isn’t dunking on guitar picks so much as exposing a quiet assumption baked into how we learn instruments: we inherit tools as if they’re laws. His analogy is disarmingly everyday - not some precious mystique about “tone” - and that’s the point. Comparing a pick to hunt-and-peck typing reframes technique as interface. If the interface limits your ideas, the “correct” method becomes a bottleneck.

Coming from a musician whose career spans straight-ahead jazz, TV bandleading, and high-level session work, the line also reads like a pragmatic rebel’s manifesto. Jazz guitar culture can be oddly conservative about feel and tradition, and the pick is part of that visual orthodoxy: it signals lineage, speed, brightness, a certain kind of authority. Eubanks steps outside that signal to chase a different kind of fluency - fuller polyphony, more immediate control over dynamics, the ability to articulate multiple voices at once. Fingerstyle isn’t just a sound choice; it’s a compositional choice in real time.

The subtext is about efficiency, but not the joyless kind. It’s about unlocking bandwidth. Typing “properly” isn’t about etiquette; it’s about thinking faster because your hands stop negotiating with the machine. Eubanks is describing the moment when technique disappears and intention takes over, when the tool stops dictating the sentence you’re allowed to write.