"I love Logic Audio and have been using it for years. All my track outputs used to come up on my old board in the same order as in the old Mac G4 - 1 through 32, came up as 1 through 32, for instance"
About this Quote
There is a particular kind of heartbreak that only studio people recognize: not the big, dramatic crash of a session, but the quiet betrayal of a workflow that used to behave. Tony Visconti opens with a love letter to Logic Audio, then immediately pivots to a complaint so specific it reads like muscle memory turning into friction. The detail about outputs lining up 1 through 32 isn’t trivia; it’s a portrait of how producers think. Order is not aesthetics here, it’s speed, recall, and trust. When a system mirrors the console, the engineer stops thinking about the machine and starts thinking about the music.
Visconti’s subtext is generational, too. The “old Mac G4” isn’t just a computer; it’s shorthand for an era when studio setups were tangible, legible, and relatively stable. His nostalgia isn’t for beige plastic, it’s for predictability: you could walk into a room, patch things the same way, and get back to the creative problem at hand. The numbers matter because they encode a whole working method built over years of repetition.
Coming from someone who helped shape the sound of Bowie, T. Rex, and a half-century of pop modernism, the gripe lands as cultural commentary: technology markets itself as progress, but the cost is often paid in invisible labor. Every re-mapped output is time stolen from listening. Visconti’s praise is real, but it’s also leverage: a veteran reminding software makers that “innovation” means nothing if it breaks the studio’s most sacred resource: flow.
Visconti’s subtext is generational, too. The “old Mac G4” isn’t just a computer; it’s shorthand for an era when studio setups were tangible, legible, and relatively stable. His nostalgia isn’t for beige plastic, it’s for predictability: you could walk into a room, patch things the same way, and get back to the creative problem at hand. The numbers matter because they encode a whole working method built over years of repetition.
Coming from someone who helped shape the sound of Bowie, T. Rex, and a half-century of pop modernism, the gripe lands as cultural commentary: technology markets itself as progress, but the cost is often paid in invisible labor. Every re-mapped output is time stolen from listening. Visconti’s praise is real, but it’s also leverage: a veteran reminding software makers that “innovation” means nothing if it breaks the studio’s most sacred resource: flow.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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