Steve Albini, the idealistic punk rock musician and engineer died Wednesday at 61 years old after suffering a heart attack.

His legacy will live on through a wide range of records that helped push the boundaries of alternative music. Albini's work ethic, no-nonsense style, and commitment to supporting musicians by refusing to take royalties on the records he had a hand in is extremely rare and should be celebrated.

So here are a few artists he was involved with who have firsthand reasons to be sad for today but blessed that they got to cross paths.

But first, here's the time Anthony Bourdain took Steve out for lunch where the New Yorker asked the Chicagoan if his low-priced model of engineering was some sort of Communism.

First up is PJ Harvey who worked with Albini for her sophomore album, Rid of Me, which many consider her finest so far.

"He’s the only person I know that can record a drum kit and it sounds like you’re standing in front of a drum kit,” Harvey said on MTV back in the day.  

“It doesn’t sound like it’s gone through a recording process or it’s coming out of speakers. You can feel the sound he records, and that is why I wanted to work with him, ’cause all I ever wanted is for us to be recorded and to sound like we do when we’re playing together in a room, and that’s never happened before,” she said.

Next is Nirvana, the biggest band he ever worked with and the record with his name on it that moved the most units.

Upon hearing of their former engineer's death (Albini hated being called a producer), the surviving members of the band posted this tweet of the fax he sent them to convince them to allow him to record their follow up to Nevermind.

“I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. No points. Period. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It’s the band’s fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it’s a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band," Albini wrote in the four-page screed.

Generally, time and money are the two most-used reasons why people don't accept offers. So with the latter taken care of, Albini addressed the former.

“If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody’s fucking up,” he stated.

Nevermind, produced by Butch Vig was a speedy process and sucked up just 16 days of the band's life, which was utterly changed (along with music) after that record dropped. Albini was claiming he could get the job done in half that time.

In Utero took 12 days to record (slackers) and two days for Steve to mix it. He charged them $100k for his services, a fraction of what any other person spinning the dials would have asked for from the world's biggest band at the time.

“After Nevermind, we could do whatever we wanted,” bassist Krist Novoselic told Rolling Stone. “Kurt wanted to make a Pixies record.”

What they got was something harder and punker than any Pixies record. It was so out there Geffen Records, hoping for Teen Spirit Part Deux hated it and demanded other producers come in and remix it.

Finally Cobain relented and agreed to let R.E.M's producer Scott Litt only defang the tunes earmarked for radio singles: "Heart-Shaped Box," "Pennyroyal Tea," and "All Apologies."

“It was totally devastating to me from a business standpoint,” Albini said. “Because it was officially regarded as inappropriate for bands to record with me on a mainstream level.”

A band you'd think a noise aficionado like Albini would love was Sonic Youth.

SY Guitarist Lee Rinaldi received a custom built guitar from Albini in the late '80s he named The Sonic Sixteen.

“It’s 16 strings, 16 high-E strings," Rinaldo noted in an interview with Earthquaker Devices. "It’s got an inlaid penis in the headstock, and it says ‘Sonic Sixteen’ up there."

Albini later told the same outlet, “I sent that guitar to Sonic Youth as a thank you for having my band play shows with them. But before I sent it off, I got to play it and I really thought it was fun to play, so I had him make another one. It has 16 strings on it. Typically it’s used as a drone instrument and all of the strings are tuned the same.”

The problem is, maybe Steve loved them too much.

A few years after he made them that guitar, the New Yorkers became one of the first experimental jet trash post-punkers to sign a major record label deal with Geffen (and then later recommend that Nirvana sign there).

Albini was disgusted.

He told GQ, "I don't know the exact circumstances of Sonic Youth's decision, so I'm not comfortable saying they did it wrong. But a lot of the things they were involved with as part of the mainstream were distasteful to me. And a lot of the things that happened as a direct result of their association with the mainstream music industry gave credibility to some of the nonsense notions that hover around the star-making machinery. A lot of that stuff was offensive to me and I saw it as a sellout and a corruption of a perfectly valid, well-oiled music scene," he said.

"I still consider them friends and their music has its own integrity, but that kind of behavior-- I can't say that I think it's not embarrassing for them. I think they should be embarrassed about it," he stated, as only a friend could.

So in sonic death did SY's Thurston Moore spit on his grave? Just the opposite. The guitarist wrote a long memorial for the engineer on Twitter and began with their original difference of opinion.

"He would become utterly disenchanted at SY for signing on with Geffen in 1990 considering it an abandonment of principle," Moore tweeted.

"Of course, we’d argue this; the transparent accounting and health care offered by a corporate label versus the artistic freedom of an independent label where day-to-day operations could, many times, be a mystery.

"His analogies of a recording engineer not being any more important than a plumber came across as certainly endearing. But Steve was not a plumber. He was an artist, a musician, a recording engineer, a high functioning decoder allowing for a plethora of poker winnings and pool table mastery," Moore continued.

"Steve, like the many other inspired people he admired, was drawn to, and would find himself working with – be it Whitehouse or Nirvana – was an authentic visionary, a person alive with the delight of creative impulse. And no matter how many times he’d sign off his written and oral missives with a middle finger raised high in the air he seemed to absolutely love the world and its people," he wrote.

Kim Deal first worked with Albini when Pixies hired him for their 1988 4AD debut, Surfer Rosa.

When Deal and her sister, Kelley, formed The Breeders, they hired Albini to produce their debut, Pod.

I was a student journalist at UCSB's college newspaper, the Daily Nexus when I had this exchange with Kim about Albini. Our convo was for the entertainment section, Intermission.

Intermission: You guys are the only band on the Rubiyat compilation [of Elektra artists covering other Elektra artists] not to have listed a pro­ducer. I know Steve engineered it, but was there really a producer?

Kim: No, just us. And that’s pretty much how we did (1988’s) Surfer Rosa too, and some of our B-sides. Steve Albini would prefer to not be listed as a producer, he thinks producers are dweebs. He thinks it’s criminal that they get royalties after their work is already done.

But then when you talk to a producer they’ll say, “Well, my work is on the album, as long as the album sells I should get pieces of that work.”

Steve doesn’t take points at all, he’s re­ally cheap to use. He charges a flat fee for the time involved, and expenses and stuff.

Do you guys work together well? Do you think he understands what you’re trying to do in your music?

Beats me. I don’t know. I can’t ima­gine him working well with anybody. But he’s good at what he does.

In a way, yeah (we do work well). Cuz we’ll say “What do you think of this, Steve?” and he’ll say, “I don’t like the song, so I couldn’t care less what you put on it."

But if it’s a song that he does like he’ll say, “oh it’s non-pussy, that’s good.”

But if we asked, “do you think we’re singing in tune?” He’d say “I don’t care, I don’t like vocals anyway.”

The Breeders album sounded a lot more basic down-to-the-bones than Pixies stuff.

Yeah, it did.

Was that what you were shootin’ for?

Kim: No. I thought Albini would have more of a tolerance for messing around. Like on Surfer Rosa there’s this song called "Tony’s Theme” and there’s a little section about seven seconds long— it’s gonna be a lead solo.

So we have Joe (Santiago, lead guitar) play all these noises. He actually takes pliers and cuts the strings, and it’s way too loud.

Then we cut them up and we have all these snippets of tape and we label them “Uuuum’s” or “Zooooms” or “high pitched feedback notes”.

Then we wrote down on a piece of paper “the lead solo will consist of: two Slurs, one Bing, three feed­back notes ... ”

Then we did that and taped them all together and we turned it all upside-down and we put that through.

And I thought we’d do more of that stuff with Pod, but when we got in there he was really cranky and a really moody bastard. And we told him that.

So we weren’t allowed to do anything over again once without really pissing him off. So it is bare bones.

A huge chunk of The Breeders' songs were engineered by Steve.

They will be on tour this summer both as headliners and opening for Olivia Rodrigo.

Tickets available on the Breeders' website.