Creativity Quote by Bill Bruford

Bruford is puncturing a fantasy that still haunts virtuoso culture: the idea that speed automatically equals human mastery. His tone is almost offhand, but the move is slyly corrective. When he says, "If it's fast, no I don't have enough piano technique", he refuses the rock-myth expectation that a serious musician should be able to execute anything, instantly, on any instrument. That admission is less self-deprecation than boundary-setting: musicianship is a set of choices, not a blank check.

The real bite is in the pivot to technology. He’s naming a quiet industry trick: dazzling passages that sound like "hands" are often workflow. Sequencers can generate impossibly clean velocity, and once the data exists, the score becomes a kind of after-the-fact legitimacy, printed out "and so forth" as if documentation could reverse-engineer authorship. That casual phrase carries the subtext: we all know the routine. The machine makes the performance; the paper makes it respectable.

In context, Bruford comes from prog, a scene obsessed with precision and complexity, and from a period when MIDI and studio production blurred who played what. He’s not condemning synths; he’s demystifying them. The intent is to relocate musical value away from gymnastic display and toward judgment: what to play, why to play it, and when to let a tool do the job. It’s a musician insisting on honesty about process in an era that sells miracles.