Creativity Quote by Andy Summers

Summers is puncturing a fantasy the music industry keeps selling: that technology can give you the same thing, only cleaner, cheaper, and more controllable. His line lands because it flips the sales pitch inside out. The guitar synthesizer is marketed as an upgrade path for guitarists - a way to expand your palette without abandoning your instrument. Summers’ point is that the very act of translating guitar into synth language strips out the messy, human mechanics that make a guitar feel like a guitar.

The subtext is tactile. A guitar’s identity lives in micro-events: the pick’s scrape, the string’s slight choke, the accidental harmonic, the way a note blooms or collapses depending on pressure and angle. A guitar synth, especially in the era Summers came up through, has to “decide” what you played before it can become sound. That translation creates latency, quantization, smoothing - not just technical artifacts, but aesthetic ones. You get something impressive, even useful, but it’s an instrument wearing a guitar’s clothes.

Context matters: Summers emerged from a band (The Police) that made restraint and texture into pop weaponry. His playing is all about articulation and negative space, the kind of nuance that doesn’t survive being converted into MIDI-like instructions. So the remark isn’t anti-tech; it’s pro-truth-in-advertising. Use the synth for what it is - a portal to other timbres - not as a counterfeit guitar. The irony is that the “most obvious” limitation is the one people most want to ignore.