Quotes by Steve Albini

About Steve Albini:

Steven Frank "Steve" Albini is an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, record producer, audio engineer and music journalist. He was a member of Big Black, Rapeman and Flour, and is a member of Shellac. He is the founder, owner and principal engineer of Electrical Audio, a recording studio complex located in Chicago. In March 2004, Albini said that the number of albums he had worked on was "probably as many as 1500."
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I have no problem with bands using participant financing schemes like Kickstarter and such. I've said many times that I think they're part of the new way bands and their audience interact and they can be a fantastic resource, enabling bands to do thi...

Steve Albini

Cooking is about presenting flavors and other aspects of food in a way that makes best use of them and makes an engaging, satisfying meal. Taste necessarily comes into it along with technique. Some ingredients require cooking, cleaning or otherwise d...

Steve Albini

Know what you're trying to do before you do it. Turning knobs at random isn't enlightening any more than throwing paint at a wall blindfolded will let you paint a nice picture.

Steve Albini

It betrays hubris on the part of the artist to think his medium is limiting him, and I think we all recognize this.

Steve Albini

Buy groceries and feed yourself, even on the road.

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 schoo...

Steve Albini

You see something happen to a population whereby everyone adopts something that's just preposterous in a way that makes it normal instantly. If any one person prior to the rash of puka shells, for example, was seen wearing puka shells, he would look ...

Steve Albini

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.

Steve Albini

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 soun...

Steve Albini

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.

Steve Albini

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 ...

Steve Albini

I moved to Chicago in 1980 to go to college.

Steve Albini

In heaven, after antipasti, the first course will be pasta.

Steve Albini

My father was an expert hunter, so we ate a lot of wild game when I was growing up in Montana. That helped broaden my palate generally, but I know it informed my distaste for factory farms and unspectacular commercial meat.

Steve Albini

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.

Steve Albini

The band cannot sign to another label or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens.

Steve Albini

Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed.

Steve Albini

In 1980, I moved to Chicago, and I recorded demo tapes for my friends' bands, and in 1981, the first Big Black record - the first thing I did that was an actual record.

Steve Albini

I don't think anyone has exhausted the range of sound possible in a conventional rock band, but people do become slaves to their own easiest techniques.

Steve Albini

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 ...

Steve Albini

Author Bio

  • NameSteve Albini
  • DescriptionUnited States record engineer and rock musician
  • BornJuly 22, 1962
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionRecord Producer; Singer; Engineer; Audio Engineer; Singer-songwriter