Expensive gear doesn't make you a better producer

"bad guy" won Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Album of the Year at the 2020 Grammys. It was written and produced by Finneas O'Connell in his childhood bedroom, on Logic Pro X, through a Universal Audio Apollo interface and a roughly $99 Audio-Technica AT2020 microphone. When the mix engineer Rob Kinelski got the finished stems, his reaction, on record with Universal Audio, was: "I'm almost embarrassed by how little you need to do to their mixes."

That's not a story about gear not mattering at all, worth saying up front. Kinelski's own mix ran through a serious professional chain, Neve preamps, a Distressor, tape emulation, the kind of studio most bedroom producers will never own. But the thing that made the record a record, the songwriting, the arrangement, the vocal performance and production choices that gave Kinelski so little left to fix, happened on ordinary consumer gear a working adult could buy this weekend.

It's not a one-off story

Steve Lacy's early breakout track "Dark Red" was made entirely on an iPhone, using GarageBand and a cheap IK Multimedia iRig interface for guitar. Asked about it, he put it plainly: "there needn't be any excuses to making tracks, not having the right equipment." Worth noting his later, bigger records weren't made this way, but the one that got him noticed was.

"Old Town Road" became the longest-running number one in Billboard Hot 100 history. The beat was bought for $30 on BeatStars from a then-19-year-old Dutch producer, YoungKio, working from his bedroom around a sampled Nine Inch Nails loop. Flume, before a Grammy and an international career, started making music on free promotional software that came on a CD in a box of breakfast cereal. Grimes built Art Angels around a laptop, Ableton Live and a single Apogee Duet interface, and has said outright that she moved away from professional studios partly because the pressure of a $200-an-hour clock was bad for her creativity. Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago, one of the most influential indie records of its decade, was written and recorded alone by Justin Vernon over a winter in an isolated Wisconsin cabin, with basic gear and no label, before it launched his career.

None of these are obscure SoundCloud curiosities. They're a Grammy sweep, the biggest chart single of all time by weeks at number one, and a launchpad for careers that went on to arenas and Grammy wins of their own.

What the people who've actually made it say

Rick Rubin has produced some of the most significant records of the last forty years across hip hop, rock and metal, and he's said openly, on 60 Minutes, "I have no technical ability, and I know nothing about music." Asked what he does bring, his answer was taste: "I know what I like and what I don't like... The confidence that I have in my taste, and my ability to express what I feel, has proven helpful for artists."

Steve Albini, who recorded Nirvana's In Utero and hundreds of other records, was asked in a MusicRadar interview about home recording taking work away from studios like his. He disagreed: "As technology has progressed and become more democratic... it's only natural... there are going to be ever-more bedroom geniuses creating stuff uniquely theirs." And on his own approach to gear: "I'm definitely not one of those engineers that has racks of outboard patched in on everything. I try to keep the signal-path simple." One of the most respected engineers in the business, on the record, arguing for restraint over accumulation.

The honest counterargument

None of this means gear is irrelevant, and a piece that claimed that would be as dishonest as one that claimed the opposite. There are real, documented cases where a specific piece of hardware mattered. Engineer Geoff Emerick began running nearly all of the Beatles' vocals, and later drums, piano and guitar, through a Fairchild 660/670 tube compressor starting with Revolver, and it's widely credited by audio historians as integral to the sound of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's. Chris Lord-Alge, an A-list mix engineer, still runs his mix bus through analogue outboard rather than plugins because, in his own words, "plug-ins don't give me the character thing that outboard has." Mastering engineer Bob Ludwig has said different tape-machine playback electronics can make a real difference, and that few pieces of gear sound exactly alike.

Attack Magazine's own essay on this exact question, The Gear Myth, lands on a fair conclusion: "it's disingenuous to claim that the tools don't matter." The same piece makes a point worth sitting with, though: the Roland TB-303, TR-808 and TR-909, now the literal defining sound of acid house and techno, were commercial flops and budget "toy" instruments when they launched, dismissed by the serious studios of the day. They became iconic through what people did with them over years, not through their price tag on release.

Even where gear differences are real, they're often smaller than the marketing around them suggests. Sound on Sound ran a public blind test of mic preamps, comparing budget and expensive units on the same recorded material. Cheaper preamps held up well against far pricier ones, a genuine, documented result rather than a forum opinion, and a useful reminder that "you can hear the difference" is a claim worth testing blind before you believe it, including from people trying to sell you the expensive option.

So what actually matters

• Finishing tracks matters more than owning more plugins. Every artist above shipped something with what they had, rather than waiting for a better setup.
• The gap between a free DAW and a paid one, or a £150 interface and an £850 one, is real but small next to the gap between a finished track and an unfinished one. See our free DAW and free VST plugin guides if budget is genuinely the thing stopping you from starting.
• Expensive gear tends to matter most at the very top of professional mixing and mastering, where the difference between very good and exceptional is being fought over in decimals. It matters far less at the stage most people are stuck at, which is finishing and releasing a first track at all.
• Constraints aren't only a beginner's compromise. Grimes chose a smaller setup on purpose, over paying for a bigger studio, because it changed how she worked for the better.