A Tribute to Steve Albini

The music world has lost a champion of the underground music scene, and a foundational influence on this particular website: recording engineer Steve Albini.

Recording work

Most well-known for his recording work on Nirvana’s In Utero, my favorite part about Steve was that he never once forgot where he came from, and could inhabit some pretty rarified musical air without also feeling the need to live in that space.

Throughout his career he worked with big names, small names, and everyone in between. Even with his own serious level of cachet, a large portion of his recording work remained with small local bands inside his local community, for the entire duration of his career.

Artist advocacy

In an industry dominated by middlemen taking cuts, Steve was a pioneer in financial advocacy for artists. He put his money where his mouth was, intentionally turning down serious backend royalty points on some very famous albums, in order to help make sure the value remained primarily in the hands of the artists he worked with.

Though his success allowed him to build a multi-million dollar recording facility in Chicago (Electrical Audio), he constantly advocated for applying a wide range of recording gear at different price points. It was never about having the most expensive tools available, but about developing the knowledge, skills, and experience to apply the right tools for a given musical situation.

Steve worked hard to pass on this knowledge and experience as an educator, constantly teaching recording workshops to young musicians, while always advocating for a practical, hands-on approach to learning recording skills.

In December 1993, he penned an essay called “The Problem With Music”, that broke down issues of overselling and financial exploitation of artists by the major labels of the time. Looking at where we are with Spotify and the overselling of the streaming music economy to artists nearly 30 years later, it’s an amazingly prescient take on issues in the music industry that have yet to be fully solved (but are certainly going in the right direction with our current unionization efforts).

Recent efforts

In recent years, The Electrical Audio YouTube channel became a place for everyone to learn the foundational basics of traditional analog music recording techniques, always presented in Steve’s ridiculously fun and irreverent manner.

In tribute to Steve Albini, I’ve chosen some of my personal favorite videos from that channel to highlight:

Rest in power ✊