"One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music"
About this Quote
The phrasing is doing quiet work. “These days” nods to a cultural moment when music production was rapidly democratizing: cheaper gear, home studios, and later the dawn of computer-based composition. “So easy to make sounds” is both celebration and critique. Moog isn’t gatekeeping technology; he’s diagnosing what happens when friction disappears. When anyone can assemble layers that “appear to be music,” the burden shifts from access to discernment. The trash metaphor isn’t about genre snobbery; it’s about editorial judgment - knowing what to discard, which is the unglamorous core of composition.
The subtext is almost moral: tools don’t absolve you of taste. “Good music” remains hard because difficulty isn’t just technical. It’s the hard part of deciding what matters, shaping time, earning emotional credibility, resisting the cheap dopamine of a cool patch or an impressive sequence. Moog, the patron saint of synthetic possibility, is insisting that the real instrument is still the human making choices - and that restraint, not abundance, is what keeps music from becoming noise with branding.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Wikiquote entry for Robert Moog — contains the quotation: "One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is...but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music." (no original primary source cited on the page) |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Moog, Robert. (2026, January 15). One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-always-has-to-remember-these-days-where-the-91870/
Chicago Style
Moog, Robert. "One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-always-has-to-remember-these-days-where-the-91870/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-always-has-to-remember-these-days-where-the-91870/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
