Quotes About Music

I went to the Guilford School of Music and Drama, which was affiliated with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was lucky enough to be taught by a beautiful, wonderful teacher called Patsy Rodenberg, who works a lot with the Royal Shakespeare Company as a voice coach and technician.

Schaeffer gave me permission to work in the studio with a technician, but I've never worked with him.

It depends who your technician is as to how much fun the recording is.

I like pop music. Earnestly. Most of the greatest technicians, mix engineers, and players are working in pop music.

When I listened to Elvin Jones, man, for the first time I heard a drummer that had all the technique plus emotion, passion, feel, and just - good God!

For me, the intellect is always the guide but not the goal of the performance. Three things have to be coordinated, and not one must stick out. Not too much intellect because it can become scholastic. Not too much heart because it can become schmaltz. Not too much technique because you become a mechanic.

If you write a hit song for Britney Spears, it's worth several million dollars. Just one song! And it might have taken you two hours to do it. It's like mining for gold. It takes a lot of skill and a lot of technique.

When I was studying... there weren't any black concert pianists. My choices were intuitive, and I had the technique to do it. People have heard my music and heard the classic in it, so I have become known as a black classical pianist.

You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?

I have no guitar technique.

It wasn't a class system where I was the better guy and he was the second-rate guy. That was his role and my role was to play the solos. But he took great pride in his technique as a rhythm guitarist.

I loved Art Tatum! And, through him, and other different jazz musicians, I actually found my technique.

Guitar players in the nineties seem to be reacting against the technique oriented eighties.

I'm glad there are a lot of guitar players pursuing technique as diligently as they possibly can, because it leaves this whole other area open to people like me.

I'm pretty basic as far as technique is concerned. I don't use many gadgets, and I like the sound my guitar makes, anyway.

If it's fast, no I don't have enough piano technique. In that case, it's probably been done on some kind of synthesizer or sequencer. Then the score can then be printed out and so forth.

I think the fundamental part of my technique is my vibrato.

And, you know, my dad would show me some things sometimes, but the best things that I got to do were to actually see really good players play up close. That gives you an idea of fingering and technique and what not.

Just because people play songs with great technique doesn't mean the records are better.

I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there's very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally.

Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply.

Contrary to the norm, as my technique improved my voice became higher.

As a songwriter, you tend to develop your own style, your own technique, based around what it is you're trying to write and perform, in terms of your own music. So a way of evolving a guitar style as a songwriter is much easier, I think, than developing a true style of your own just from listening to music or playing other people's music.

I never actually had a guitar lesson. I taught myself the guitar from piano exercise books, which led me to have a pretty good technique on the guitar and allowed me to find different ways to do things.