Trey Anastasio was on Cory Wong last week. If you’re a music nerd, or just want to hear two of the greatest guitar players of their generation talk shop, I highly recommend it. The conversation covers a lot, but one moment stuck with me. The boys go deep on their relationship between gear, tone, and the way we use technology to “improve” our voice … only to circle back to what we had all along. The thing we’re known for.

Technology keeps getting louder, sharper, more insistent. Every few months, a new tool promises a new edge, better tone, better polish, better reach, better output. But the strange thing about this moment is that the more perfect the tools become, the more we risk losing our sound. The internet turned everyone into a broadcaster, a performer, an always on communicator. We define ourselves through what we publish and how it’s received. Yet underneath all that machinery is the one variable no tool can replace: the voice itself. And the more uniformity the system produces, the more valuable the unique sound of a real human becomes.

Trey tells a story that maps this perfectly. He spent decades playing through a rig he built in 1986, shaping the sound fans know as him and his band, Phish. In 2016 he went on a wild tone optimization pilgrimage, testing every permutation he could find in search of something sharper. But all that experimenting only pushed him deeper into wanting to sound more like himself. After all the searching and tweaking, he circled right back to the rig he started with. The hero’s journey wasn’t about finding new tools, but about appreciating the originality that made him Trey. 

That’s the trap I worry many will fall into now, thinking the tool gives you an identity, when your identity is the only thing that gives the tool any power.

The real work is not beating the machine. It’s beating the part of you that thinks you need the machine to begin with. “You are Cory Wong, so you have to play a Fender”, Trey told Cory. “That’s your sound. You’re Cory Wong”. Trey tried to outrun that myth with 10,000 hours of tinkering, only to find that the tech wasn’t the constraint. Your style is the one thing technology cannot clone. Tools can enhance it, distort it, amplify it, but they can’t generate it. And if they try, the result only exposes the void: perfection without personality.

This is why Jack White still sounds like Jack White on gear that’s mostly plastic and ranges from pristine to broken. Why Ray Brown made the shittiest upright bass in the club sound like gold in one second. Why every attempt to “sound better” through technology eventually collapses back into the truth that the sound is not the instrument, it’s the person. Part of your voice is the sum of everything that built you: the mistakes, the obsessions, the taste you stole from your heroes, the moments you thought you weren’t good enough, the experiences you lived through that no one else did. That’s the tone no system can simulate.

And so the actionable insight is simple. Use the tools, but don’t chase them. Experiment, but don’t second guess your sound, your identity.  Technology will keep getting better, faster, more precise, but your job is not to match its perfection. Your job is to return to the thing that made you worth listening to in the first place. 

Your voice can’t be beaten because it’s yours.

Trey Anastasio was on Cory Wong last week. If you’re a music nerd, or just want to hear two of the greatest guitar players of their generation talk shop, I highly recommend it. The conversation covers a lot, but one moment stuck with me. The boys go deep on their relationship between gear, tone, and the way we use technology to “improve” our voice … only to circle back to what we had all along. The thing we’re known for.

Technology keeps getting louder, sharper, more insistent. Every few months, a new tool promises a new edge, better tone, better polish, better reach, better output. But the strange thing about this moment is that the more perfect the tools become, the more we risk losing our sound. The internet turned everyone into a broadcaster, a performer, an always on communicator. We define ourselves through what we publish and how it’s received. Yet underneath all that machinery is the one variable no tool can replace: the voice itself. And the more uniformity the system produces, the more valuable the unique sound of a real human becomes.

Trey tells a story that maps this perfectly. He spent decades playing through a rig he built in 1986, shaping the sound fans know as him and his band, Phish. In 2016 he went on a wild tone optimization pilgrimage, testing every permutation he could find in search of something sharper. But all that experimenting only pushed him deeper into wanting to sound more like himself. After all the searching and tweaking, he circled right back to the rig he started with. The hero’s journey wasn’t about finding new tools, but about appreciating the originality that made him Trey. 

That’s the trap I worry many will fall into now, thinking the tool gives you an identity, when your identity is the only thing that gives the tool any power.

The real work is not beating the machine. It’s beating the part of you that thinks you need the machine to begin with. “You are Cory Wong, so you have to play a Fender”, Trey told Cory. “That’s your sound. You’re Cory Wong”. Trey tried to outrun that myth with 10,000 hours of tinkering, only to find that the tech wasn’t the constraint. Your style is the one thing technology cannot clone. Tools can enhance it, distort it, amplify it, but they can’t generate it. And if they try, the result only exposes the void: perfection without personality.

This is why Jack White still sounds like Jack White on gear that’s mostly plastic and ranges from pristine to broken. Why Ray Brown made the shittiest upright bass in the club sound like gold in one second. Why every attempt to “sound better” through technology eventually collapses back into the truth that the sound is not the instrument, it’s the person. Part of your voice is the sum of everything that built you: the mistakes, the obsessions, the taste you stole from your heroes, the moments you thought you weren’t good enough, the experiences you lived through that no one else did. That’s the tone no system can simulate.

And so the actionable insight is simple. Use the tools, but don’t chase them. Experiment, but don’t second guess your sound, your identity.  Technology will keep getting better, faster, more precise, but your job is not to match its perfection. Your job is to return to the thing that made you worth listening to in the first place. 

Your voice can’t be beaten because it’s yours.