Steve Albini

Musician

1962-07-22

Books by Steve Albini

100 posters, 134 squirrels
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Quotes by Steve Albini

As a recording engineer - someone who is deeply embroiled in the process of making records every day - you see trends and fads run through the social organization of the population of musicians in the same way that they would run through a high school.
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New York has magnificent eating available, both in restaurants and in the materials available to home cooks in the many specialty markets.
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By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum.
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Cranking the Auto-Tune is so easy to do that there's almost no systemic resistance to trying it. So when someone's stuck for an idea, that's what they do. I mean, to the extent that it's been embraced by an entire idiom of club music and culture.
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My dad, Frank Addison Albini, was a terrific shot with a rifle and had generally excellent hunting skills. While my dad loved hunting and fishing, he didn't romanticize them. He was filling the freezer, not intellectualizing some caveman impulse or proving his worth as a real man.
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We have no general conceptual thrust for the band, other than trying to make music that keeps our interest. When things are novel, they are probably things we have discovered by accident or investigation rather than by design.
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I feel like bands should be growing, living, functioning entities and to crystallize a band into a single album, and for that to be a touchstone - I understand it from a fan's perspective but I also feel like it's a little bit misleading in terms of the way bands actually function.
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There is a lot of use of ProTools in professional studios, but this is mostly for the special effects it allows, not for sound quality. These special effects soon fall out of fashion, and I don't think this trend will define studios permanently.
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If I'm working as an engineer for another band, the responsibility for brilliance pretty much rests on their shoulders. I think I'm pretty good, but I'm not good enough to turn a trout into a sausage, or the other way around.
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Shellac was asked to do a recreation of our first album, but we've always been a band that improvised our sets. That's critical to the way that we function on stage. Whatever the mood takes us on stage can vary from night to night with what you feel like playing.
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Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.
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Harmonics are vibrations a fraction of the length of the vibrating string, which add higher-pitched and more complex content to the notes. With a dull instrument, the harmonics die out, but with a sustaining instrument, the harmonics continue to sound along with the fundamental note.
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Suicide was such a formative band for me, so influential in the development of my taste. They're one of those bands that operated in absolute isolation for so long that they developed a completely unique world view.
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I'm busy doing my job, and being a loudmouth doesn't appeal to me as much as when I was younger and had the youthful delusion that I was smarter than everybody else.
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