Quotes About Recording

THE POWER OF DREAMS—AND WHY YOU SHOULD RECORD THEM

My process is really about little bits of inspiration. I just record them really quick on the guitar or something. I have a huge folder full of them. But if I start a song, I finish it.

I got offered to do a book yeah, and they said to me, 'Gem, you're so busy, how about we get someone to walk around with you with a dictaphone,' and that's how we did it.

Every time we get days off, we try to go home and record five or six songs.

When I put out a record I don't really like to do covers as much, but I don't mind playing them. I do them mostly for my friends. When a friend's like, 'Man I really like that song,' I go 'hahaha' and I go home and I record it.

In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool. On paper, though, it's all stripped back. The musical idea is the one that wins.

We played all of the songs on the first Johnny Winter AND every day before we recorded them, so that when we got in the studio, it was totally easy, as we knew exactly what we wanted to do.

I thought that some of my best records was when there wasn't a lot of work being done on it, like 'Winter in America' and 'Secrets' and when there weren't a whole lot of people in the studios.

After years of begging, I got my parents to get me a little Craig tape recorder, a reel to reel. Then I started recording voices, or recording Jonathan Winters off television and stuff like that.

The very first thing I ever did, I was doing some work for the French Cultural Center. They wanted a little recording set up. And I got wire. A wire recorder. The wire came off spools, and to cut and edit, you tied it together in little square knots. Can you imagine?

When I was in grade school, I had a little duet act with a guy who was a beautiful singer, and somebody recorded it on a wire machine. They played it back for us, and I went, 'I hear Donald, but what is that other ugly voice?' It turned out to be me, of course.

If you're famous and supposedly wise, it's always a good idea to have a tape recorder in the room. Never can tell when you might spew out a line or two worth printing somewhere.

One of my most persistent, long-term fantasy wishes is not that I could fly or become invisible, but that I could make sound recording be invented decades or even centuries earlier than it was, so I could hear what people in the 1830s or 1750s actually sounded like.

One way of paying tribute to my parents was 'bearing witness' as the Quakers do - writing down everything that was happening instead of turning my back on it and pretending that it was all great.

I'm always writing something. I've got so much stuff, I don't know what to do with it. Some of it will be Strokes, some of it will be I don't know what - stuff for pop singers. TV themes. I've got a jar stuffed with songs, all these ideas that are just me humming into a recording device.

People are afraid to be themselves because people are afraid to be recorded. Everything is being recorded, and everyone is so sensitive. You say something; a section of people will be offended. It's so annoying; you got to be completely censored.

Billie doesn't actually like recording sessions at all. We like making music together. She doesn't like going to some big studio and having them pretend to be a therapist for a couple hours. So by default, we always make the good stuff together.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

In fact, I'd just like to own something. Everyone thinks I'm glamorous, rich and famous but all I've got is some recording equipment and a battered old BMW.

What do I think of digital recording? Well, it's all right. But those old thorn needles, now, that was a sound.

The magic can happen in a studio. Special things can happen in a recording studio, even though it may seem like a clinical environment from the outside looking in.

He thought of his old tapes, the ones he'd had for years, the ones he'd used over and over again. Their silence was always different to the silence of a new tape: it was loaded, prickly with things recorded and erased; a silence that was like ghosts. That house was an old tape masquerading as a new one. It had recorded and erased, but it was pretending it had just come out of the cellophane. It had ghosts, but it wasn't owning up to them.

I don't feel pleased with myself while recording this cruelty, even though it was only a cruelty to a doll. It's a vengeful side of my nature that I am sorry to say I have failed to subdue entirely. But in an account such as this, it is better to be scrupulous about your faults, as about all your other actions. Otherwise no one will understand why you made the decisions that you made.

With technology now, you can go in and sing a song, and for $100,000, you will sound flawless.