Quotes About Music

A MIDI file contains coded instructions to play a particular series of notes on an electronic music synthesizer. A MIDI file is more like a piano roll in a player piano than any type of sound recording.

I think it was inevitable that I get into synthesizer music. I always wanted to deal with sound more than anything else. I couldn't get the sounds I wanted out of the piano.

To me, I don't see any difference between a synthesizer and an acoustic instrument. It's what's done on it that counts.

More recently, I used guitar synthesizer extensively on the two albums I did with Robert Fripp.

I think I was first to do live performances on a modern electronic sound synthesizer.

A guitar being played by an actual person is never going to be as precise and perfect as a programmed synthesizer. But we maintain there is value in the potential for human error.

People shouldn't knock the synthesizer. It's an aid, and it depends on how you use it, just like any other instrument.

I played a guitar with a file, and a synthesizer.

I've worked with the same Prophet 5 Synthesizer by Sequential Circuit synthesiser for 40 years.

It's been very hard for the guitar as a serious synthesizer to compete with keyboards.

If the guitar synthesizer is really going to stand as a synthesizer on its own, it needs to develop a more characteristic sound; I don' think it's gotten there yet.

For me it always comes down to what is a good song and I'm very old fashioned in the way that I like to make songs that have something classic about them whether you can play them with an orchestra or an electro synthesizer or an acoustic guitar.

To me, the original VCS3 synthesizer is like a Stradivarius.

The spirit of Burzum never changed, but my ability to make music changed dramatically when I was imprisoned. It is more or less impossible to record music in prison, and the only music I could record was electronic music, when I was allowed to have a synthesizer for a few months in 1994 or 1995 and in 1998.

But synthesizer music has been accepted as emotional for long enough that it isn't a huge reach, conceptually, to think of a fake voice as 'emotional', especially since there's a human composing it.

Music has been taken over in this country by personalities and dominated by rock 'n' roll. There's been a synthesizer invasion and it's not going to go away.

I like real instruments, and try to stay from anything that sounds too synthetic.

To most people, jazz-fusion means this dreadful synthetic jazz-rock thing, this jazz-Muzak, which I detest. They also think of jazz as a specific form of music, while to me it's just the opposite.

Napster hijacked our music without asking. They never sought our permission. Our catalog of music simply became available as free downloads on the Napster system.

I remember when I was 5 living on Pulaski Street in Brooklyn, the hallway of our building had a brass banister and a great sound, a great echo system. I used to sing in the hallway.

Cranking the Auto-Tune is so easy to do that there's almost no systemic resistance to trying it. So when someone's stuck for an idea, that's what they do. I mean, to the extent that it's been embraced by an entire idiom of club music and culture.

The invisible pieces of code that form the gears and cogs of the modern machine age, algorithms have given the world everything from social media feeds to search engines and satellite navigation to music recommendation systems.

Great music is in a sense serene it is certain of the values it asserts.

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.