Quotes About Instruments

I first began with the recorder in our community music school. After that, I played horn and participated in the school orchestra.

I used to feel that musical knowledge and emotional truth-telling were antagonistic. But I was too curious about chords and instruments and recording to stay locked in that mentality.

I joined my father for recordings when I was 11 or so. By then, I could play a dozen instruments. My first professional recording was around that time. I played the vibraphone for Shankar-Ganesh in a Tamil film.

Like with me, like around '97, for Christmas my parents bought me an MPC 2000 sampler and a little eight-track cassette recorder. And I started sampling records and, you know, producing hip-hop beats. And it got to the point where I realized - I innately realized that the music I liked the most was made by people that played instruments.

The heavy guitars are the ones that sound good. They are not that comfortable, but they do sound great.

In 'Boondien' I worked with a band where everyone had their own instrument to play.

I played the cello from when I was ten, and then I bought a guitar from the father of some friends of mine and played that for a while. And then when I was fourteen or so, I bought a guitar - a real nice one - in Durham, North Carolina, that I worked with up until I was about twenty-five.

My dad is an art director for BBC TV shows, and my mum does screen printing workshops. Both of my parents played instruments, too, and my mum used to have crazy house parties when me and my brother were young - dub and garage would be banging through my house.

Mum is a photographer, and Dad does world music and plays almost every instrument except for drums.

I started playing drums at three, then piano at five, then clarinet. But it wasn't till I picked up a saxophone aged 13 that I really got serious about music.

I think what makes the Byrds stand up all these years is the basis in folk music. Folk music, being a timeless art form, is the foundation of the Byrds. We were all from a folk background. We considered ourselves folk singers even when we strapped on electric instruments and dabbled in different things.

While you're learning guitar, figure out the drums, too. Not only does it help you have great timing, but it helps you understand how a band works.

Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.

It's much like playing jazz, flying. It's multitasking in real time. You have a number of instruments that alone won't tell you exactly what the airplane is doing but together give you a picture of everything that's going on.

All the instruments of percussion known to European science are essentially nonmusical and can only be tolerated in open air music or in large orchestras where a little noise more or less makes no difference.

I've always liked using flutes and clarinets. Any time I can use those, I'm really happy.

Instruments fascinate me because they're completely awkward. When I picked up a guitar for the first time I was like, "What is this?" because it's so foreign and unknown.

And then the last album, "Get It", was done over a shorter period of time and I started using other musicians, as opposed to playing all the instruments myself like I did on the other two.

By the time I got to building synthesizers, I had perhaps 20 years experience building electronic musical instruments.

In a lot of African instruments, you find a rattle, and sound engineers have a hard time making sense of it.

I've been into music for a long time. I started playing drums when I was 8 and piano when I was 10, then bass and guitar when I was 18.

In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. . . . The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, nonutilitarian thing.

In actual pieces of music, the pitches of a chord may be duplicated and heard in many different octaves depending on the number and type of instruments playing.

Like the emery and sand with which we scour off rude surfaces, evil and trouble in this world are but instruments. And they are in the hands of God.