Quotes About Music

With every record, with each band, I just try to make a song good. I'm not so much focusing on my technique. There are a million better drummers than me. I try to adapt to the songwriter; I try to adapt to the situation and retain my sort of melodic power. My goal is for the band to be good.

I don't push my voice; I try to keep a good technique, a natural way of singing, to sing from the breath, which is the main thing.

One thing I always really enjoyed about Quincy Jones' production technique was that there were so many layers to every song. Like, one week you'd hear a new trumpet-line, then the next week you'd hear - be hearing a new guitar-line.

I didn't realise that I was so accomplished on the guitar until someone said to me, 'How do you do that?' That someone was John Lennon. He asked me to teach him my technique.

To get a feel for the right-hand picking technique, you have to let the pick 'fall' from string to string as if you were strumming a chord. It's important that you don't separate the pick strokes.

I personally am into the minstrel technique - if I hear someone playing a lute or playing a crumhorn, it just moves me. I don't know why.

I don't care about technique. I have kind of been pigeonholed as a technical drummer since I was in Dream Theater for all those years, but it's actually very far from the truth.

I could talk about technique, theory and gear for days!

I play by ear - I'm self-taught. And so everything I do is through that technique.

Technique is superficial. The method used in applying technique is what gives music its character.

When I began playing the lute, in 1950 there were not too many lutenists around. I had to work hard, writing out music in museums and libraries. It was before the days of photocopying. And I had just picked up the lute, adapted my guitar technique to it and went from there.

I've started to look at guitar playing from more than just a standpoint of using certain modes and techniques.

The state-of-the-art techniques really allowed us to make maps of how Sting's brain organizes music. That's important because at the heart of great musicianship is the ability to manipulate in one's mind rich representation of the desired soundscape.

My music sounds different because the techniques are archaic, seeing as most people only record digitally.

I don't think we'll ever use the same sound techniques.

I don't think anyone has exhausted the range of sound possible in a conventional rock band, but people do become slaves to their own easiest techniques.

The best way to learn sweep picking is to first isolate the right- and left-hand techniques, master them separately and then coordinate them.

I just felt something was missing from my vision of what Tycho should eventually be. It took several years of learning new recording and production techniques to get to a point where I felt I could make a record like 'Awake.'

I tend to use different microphones, different mic techniques, and different recording mediums - like analogue tape - that evoke multiple eras of recorded music at the same time.

I grew up around salsa, merengue, bachata, bass music, freestyle, hip-hop, techno, house, rave.

I just love a slow groove. I feel so comfortable in it. But I listen to a lot of fast music, a lot of techno and house.

I'm more akin to things like Sigur Ros, Mogwai, possibly. But when I'm making solo electronic music, techno stuff is just the most exciting form of rhythm.

When you're growing up you also like to go out and party a lot, and the music that we would hear going out would be techno and electronica. And earlier stuff like the Prodigy. It kind of stood out from everything else. Y'know, 'Firestarter,' where did that come out of? It sounded alien and otherworldly.

I'm gonna be honest: I was never really a fan of techno music, dance music.