Spend five minutes around musicians - online, in a bar, or even just hanging out in someone’s home studio - and this argument will almost always come up: are virtual instruments making people lazy? Or are they the best thing to ever happen to music?
It’s funny because the fight isn’t new. People said the same thing about the electric guitar when it first showed up, calling it a gimmick that would ruin “real” music. Drum machines? Too robotic. Auto-tune? The death of authenticity. And yet, every single one of those “threats” eventually became part of the fabric of music. You can’t even imagine pop, rock, or hip-hop without them now.
So when people say plugins are destroying the craft, I don’t roll my eyes, but I do think: we’ve heard this story before.
Let’s be honest: VST plugins do make things easy. Too easy sometimes. You don’t have to practice scales for ten years to get a decent piano sound anymore. You can load up a plugin, drag in some pre-made MIDI chords, and suddenly you’ve got something that sounds polished.
That’s what makes purists nervous. They’re not wrong to worry about it either. If you’ve ever scrolled through TikTok or Spotify playlists, you’ve probably noticed how many songs start to feel like clones of each other - the same loop, the same beat, the same “radio-ready” polish. When everyone has access to the same presets, it’s inevitable that things start blending together.
Here’s the thing though: the very same tools that can make music sound generic in one person’s hands can be completely groundbreaking in someone else’s.
Plugins don’t just replicate old instruments. They let you create sounds that literally couldn’t exist before. They let you stretch, twist, and warp audio into something alien, something beautiful, something unexplainable.
Entire genres - dubstep, hyperpop, even some of the cinematic soundscapes in movies - exist because someone pushed a plugin way beyond what the manual said it could do.
So the real question isn’t “are plugins bad?” The real question is: what are you going to do with them?
This is where it gets tricky. If you spend years learning how to play a Chopin piece on piano, people immediately respect that. They should - it’s insanely difficult. But what about the producer who spends years figuring out how to design a sound no one has ever heard before inside a synth plugin? Is that any less impressive?
The truth is, musicianship has never been about the tool. Hendrix could have made a toy guitar sound revolutionary. A visionary producer can take a free plugin and create something that changes culture. The creativity isn’t in the gear - it’s in the person using it.
To see where the industry itself is leaning, I asked Noah Murray - someone who lives and breathes this stuff - how he sees the “lazy vs. creative” debate.
Murray runs TopVSTPlugins.com, a site that dives into the world of virtual instruments, effects, and music production tools. It’s become a go-to place for producers who want to understand not just which plugins exist, but how they’re shaping the way music sounds today.
He laughed a little when I asked, but his answer stuck with me.
“Every time new tech shows up, people panic,” he said. “Yes, plugins make it easier to start. But the best artists don’t stop at the preset. They dig deeper, they experiment, they push the limits. That’s where the real art is.”
And he’s right. Technology doesn’t kill creativity; it just shifts the canvas.
You might be thinking: Okay, but I don’t make music. Why does this matter to me?
Because the way music is made shapes the way it sounds - and that shapes what you listen to every day. The tracks blowing up on TikTok, the playlist you put on while driving down the Shore, even the songs blasting out of Ocean City boardwalk shops - almost all of it has plugins baked into the DNA.
If you feel like music is moving faster than ever, genres blending together, sounds coming out of nowhere, that’s not an accident. That’s software at work.
So… are plugins making musicians lazy? Sometimes, sure. But they’re also making others more daring than ever. And maybe that’s just the price of progress: more sameness, but also more sparks of brilliance.
Music has always been messy. The best parts of it usually come from the mess. And if history tells us anything, the skeptics will eventually change their tune.
So the next time you hear someone complaining that plugins are ruining music, ask them this: would you really want a world where innovation stopped at the piano, or the guitar, or the tape machine?
Neither would I.
