I think of it a bit differently: if the tool is getting in the way, this will hamper the effectiveness and raise the barrier for skilled individuals to do their best. Yeah, the absolute top-tier max-talent people can do well regardless, but if the tools are better quality and more "out of the way", this allows a greater pool of people to do their absolute best, with less friction.
> if the tools are better quality and more "out of the way", this allows a greater pool of people to do their absolute best, with less friction.
I think YuukiRey's point is that this is not true. The bottleneck for people to do their absolute best is almost never tool-induced friction, until you've already built a strong pre-existing skillbase. Overwhelmingly it's motivation, interest, time, energy, etc.
In theory tools can help with this. In practice usually the pursuit of tooling ends up being a distraction. This is how you end up with the (overly derogatory) idea of GAS, "Gear Acquisition Syndrome." The equivalent of this for digital things is e.g. the writer who spends money and time trying to find the perfect text editor paired with the perfect keyboard paired with the perfect monitor etc, instead of just writing. There are of course exceptions where tooling is really the main unlocking feature, but those are far and few between.
In fact what I get from YuukiRey is the opposite of this:
> Yeah, the absolute top-tier max-talent people can do well regardless
Rather it's that the best tooling only really makes sense for top-tier people, because for almost everyone else the tooling is not the bottleneck.
Russian equivalent of this idiom sounds like "skillful surgeon helps a bad dancer". Even though it sounds confusing, what it really means is "a bad dancer blames his balls"
Right, I get that. That's their opinion, and I was expressing a differing opinion (that's why I said "I think of it a bit differently" lol)
I have recorded hundreds of songs using digital audio production software since ~1999. Switching to Logic Pro unlocked the opportunity for me to work WAY more effectively than a shareware tracker software I was using before (and Fruity Loops after that), in fact allowing production techniques that are literally impossible with a tracker. Not just large-scale features, but minutiae in how the interface works, "intuitiveness", ease of access like a single key-press to enter a certain editing mode, things like that.
When I am working with my mind and trying to be creative, every millisecond spent thinking about stupid UI quirks/peculiarities takes away from the part that actually matters: creating.
If the UI is obtuse, and I can't figure out how to employ a certain technique, the tool is hampering my progress. Conversely, a thoughtful feature in a tool can boost productivity and boost the success rate of reaching a "flow state"[0]. One example of this: there's a common technique to record multiple takes of the same segment of instrumental performance or vocals, and then layer those multiple recordings together to give more dynamism and depth to the sound. Infected Mushroom uses this technique a lot[1]. In Logic Pro 10 or so, they added built-in support for doing this, making it super easy to quickly/successively record multiple takes[2]. I don't know what other DAWs did this at the time, but if you're just learning, this is a really nice production process surfaced in a very low-friction way. Otherwise you are making a new track, recording, trying to line it up properly, making a new track, recording again, lining it up again, etc. It's also not even obvious that this is something you could do, but because Logic made it an actual built-in feature, its very existence also acts as a form of "tutorial" if someone is just exploring the UI or reading the documentation.
So, yeah, as a pretty amateur studio producer at the time, the "best tooling" allowed my skills to improve by a gigantic margin, compared to the slow progress I was making with inferior tools before that. I can't agree for a second that tooling doesn't matter or only matters for people at the top of their game.
