Creativity Quote by Steve Albini

Albini is doing what he’s always done: puncturing the comforting myth that the newest tool automatically equals better music. ProTools, in his framing, isn’t a neutral upgrade in fidelity; it’s an incentives machine. It makes certain moves easy - edits, comping, elastic time, pitch correction, copy-paste perfection - and when a move becomes easy, it becomes common. That “special effects” phrasing is pointed. He’s demoting a whole era of hyper-edited production from “craft” to “gimmick,” the sonic equivalent of an overused Instagram filter.

The subtext is less about software than about power. ProTools shifts authority toward the producer/engineer and away from the band’s performance as a fixed event. If you can “fix it in the mix,” you can also endlessly revise it, sanitize it, and optimize it for whatever radio or label norms are currently winning. Albini’s suspicion is moral as much as aesthetic: technical convenience can become a form of coercion, nudging artists toward homogeneity under the guise of professionalism.

Context matters: Albini came up in a lineage that prized documentarian recording - capture the band, the room, the moment - and he watched the ’90s and 2000s studio become a workstation-centric editing suite. When he predicts the trend won’t “define studios permanently,” he’s making a bet on taste cycles and musician backlash. Effects age quickly because fashion does. A great performance doesn’t. Albini is staking his reputation on that distinction, and daring the industry to admit which one it’s actually selling.