Creativity Quote by Richard Thompson

Thompson’s line lands like a shrug and a dare: if you have to turn an acoustic guitar into a small PA system, you’re already halfway to something else. Coming from a player famous for touch, dynamics, and the kind of right-hand nuance that makes a room lean in, “cheating” isn’t moral panic. It’s a musician’s diagnosis of what gets lost when volume becomes the main ingredient.

The intent is purist, but not precious. He’s drawing a boundary around a particular contract between performer, instrument, and audience: acoustic sound is supposed to carry its own evidence. You hear fingers on strings, the air moving inside the body, the small imperfections that make a performance feel present rather than processed. Heavy amplification breaks that intimacy and replaces it with a manufactured version of “acoustic” that can start behaving like electric guitar anyway: compressed, hyped, and scrubbed of the very transient detail people claim to want from wood and steel.

The subtext is also practical and a little weary. Once you amplify “more than a little,” you inherit a cascade of trade-offs: feedback, piezo quack, mic bleed, monitor wars, front-of-house decisions that reshape your tone more than your hands do. “Everything becomes a compromise” is the tell: it’s less a romantic defense of authenticity than a reminder that technology always asks for payment, usually in subtlety.

Context matters: Thompson came up playing folk clubs and then loud stages. He knows the seduction of volume and the cost. The quote is a quiet manifesto for restraint - not nostalgia, but control.