Quotes About Improvisation

The thing with Led Zeppelin songs is that they were never the same. They were very fluid and tight but loose.

In the Led Zeppelin shows of the Sixties and Seventies, it was the same numbers every night, but they were constantly in a state of flux. If I played something good, really substantial, I'd stick it in again.

If you listen to five nights of Led Zeppelin back to back they are all different.

The great thing about jamming is that you come in with zero preconceptions. Someone might want to play something that suggests something else to you, and the next thing you know you're on a 20-minute adventure.

In the 'Mass Effect' universe, there is zero ad libbing.

I know Charlie Kaufman really well, for instance. Charlie Kaufman starts a story, and he has no freaking idea where he's going. None. Zero. And he doesn't want to know, because there's a little bit of death in that.

I love working in TV. And I love the adrenaline of hosting things like 'Access Hollywood' with, like, zero preparation and just going straight on.

White Zombie was a bunch of kids with the worst equipment playing in a basement. But that is what is so great about it. There is no reason to think that you can't do it.

For me, great jazz records really feel like everyone in the room is playing together in a zone - and all the musicians are completely in sync with each other.

To me, the stage is like the free zone. That's what makes it exhilarating. For whatever reason, there's this weird little square where it's kind of a romper room for adults.

Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language, when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the spot-that's what I love most. That's where character lives.

I feel a recipe is only a theme, which an intelligent cook can play each time with a variation.

If there's no bread, cakes are very good.

Music is like a conversation. One person says one thing that speaks with a harmonica, with a bass, with a drum. They're all conversating, and we're just trying to find a way to make conversation rather than blah, blah, blah. But it's not really so hard a thing to do if you know the way to approach it.

A jazz tune, melody, or composition is usually based on either a traditional twelve-bar, eight-bar, or four-bar blues chorus or on the thirty-two-bar chorus of the American popular song.

Once we're inside a tune, we can do anything with it.

I don't know any jazz stuff. I don't know how to jam in that way. So jamming, for me, is writing a tune.

I'm not that fluid when it comes to scales and modes. I just pick up the guitar and play. It's all about exploration: just tune the guitar any way you want and start playing.

'Enlightened Rogues' we made like the earlier ones: whatever tune came up, whatever direction it went in, that's the way it went. That's what we'll always do. I think if we ever stop doin' that, we ought to quit.

We would work up a tune that would make me learn a drum pattern I hadn't played before. In the early stages, the pattern wouldn't just fall into place, and I would start thinking about it. And the more I thought about it, the worse it would get.

Taking a solo on a tune is always a little bit scary.

You can tune your guitar funky, and something's gonna come out. There's no secret to it - either you got it, or you don't.

I was playing with the audience between takes. And the SNL' crew was like, OK, we see you.' I'm like, Dude, they're right there.' If you were playing a rock show, you don't just go quiet and tune your guitar between songs. You have a little bit of chat, a little bit of banter.

I'll sit around and play my guitar; that's how I write tunes.