Creativity Quote by Andy Summers

Summers is slipping a sly obituary notice into what sounds like gear talk. The electric guitar spent decades selling itself as the future: with pedals, tape tricks, and later MIDI pickups, it could impersonate anything. Calling it a "serious synthesizer" is a deliberately loaded phrase, because the guitar is culturally coded as authentic, sweaty, human - not a lab instrument. Summers is admitting that, when you actually judge the guitar by synth standards (range, polyphony, timbral control, programmability), it loses on sheer ergonomics. A keyboard is built for the job. A guitar has to cosplay as one.

The subtext is about power and prestige in pop production. By the late 70s into the 80s, the keyboard wasn’t just another instrument; it was the control surface of modern music. It spoke the language of studios: sequencing, precise envelopes, instant recall. The guitar, even in the hands of a player like Summers, is inherently stubborn: one note at a time, pitch tied to fingers and friction, expression that can’t be easily standardized. That "very hard" isn’t complaining so much as conceding an industry shift where convenience and repeatability start to win.

Contextually, it lands with extra bite coming from The Police’s resident colorist, a guitarist who embraced chorus, delays, and textural playing precisely to compete in a synth-forward era. It’s not anti-guitar; it’s a pragmatic admission that the future rewards instruments that behave like interfaces.