Quotes About Chords

The strangest part of Indian music is its lack of chords: There's no such thing as major or minor, and it's unusual to hear more than two different pitches at the same time.

I can put some chords together and maybe write a song, but I'm learning every day. And that's the fun part.

I try to find nice chord changes, that's how I love to start, and then I start trying to knock it into a song, knock it into shape.

I knew if I wanted to improvise over chord changes, I'd have to figure out all the scales that went with all those chords.

I live in Nashville, and I don't know how many people there would call me country. I really started in punk and anti-folk, but one of the reasons I originally gravitated towards country music is because most of those songs only use three chords. That was the easiest place for me to start, but I'm always trying to expand what I do.

With a track like 'White Christmas,' everybody has done that song in every format you can imagine, so I just looked at the chords at that particular song and what chords would make it work. That's kind of quite a sad song, and I had this idea of someone singing it in the subway, someone who is homeless, old and sad.

Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note.

Sunrise, it was revealed, could learn any song after hearing it once. In fact, she could just sort of imagine how a song would go. It was shocking each time she was right; it was shocking in the way that certain musicians just plunk out the melodies, chords, and all, and can't even read music, never "learned," just know.

Beyond the edge of the world there's a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.

When I was first learning songs, I'd have a favorite song, and I'd take the chords and twist them around. I'd learn the chords and then play them backward. That was my first experimenting with writing a song.

Yeah, I can read music and I know the names of chords.

If there's something I really like or a chord progression, I write a note in my Blackberry, and maybe a year later, I'll revisit it and ask, 'What did I like about that?' I really don't try to think too much about it. I like to be fresh.

I love classical music; I love the way it's worked... all those chord sequences so I often use that sort of effect in my solos.

My family was always playing music; I always enjoyed it. My cousin, who is a little older than me, he started playing music, so I wanted to, also. I asked my dad for a guitar, and he got me a banjo, so that was my introduction to playing. I played it like a guitar. I had a few lessons, learned out a few chords, and figured it out right away.

There's a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.

I spent many years trying to write a lot like Ben Folds or John Lennon or Rivers Cuomo. I think that's healthy when you're learning to write and seeing how chords fit together and how songs take shape.

Slowly, over time, I learned enough that I started considering myself a musician, where I actually knew how to play instruments. But still, when I talk to my real musician friends, they're calling chords out, and I have no idea what they're talking about.

Even the littlest minds, sunk in petty pride of self, are susceptible to chords struck on the cosmic scale.

There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.

Perowne sometimes wonders if, in his youth, he could ever have guessed that he would one day father a blues musician... But is there a lifetime's satisfaction in twelve bars of three obvious chords? Perhaps it's one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world... as Daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel... There's nothing in his own life that contains this inventiveness, this style of being free.

I love R&B and hard-hitting, slappy, intense music with deep chords and moody chords. But I also have a thing for bubbly lullaby music. Kind of like ice-cream truck rap.

I trust if your life is right, the right things will happen at the right time. If the chords are in harmony inside, I think other things will happen in the same way. That sounded highfalutin' to me once, but I believe it now.

A lot of country music is sad. I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times. It applies to music. Three chords and the truth - that's what a country song is. There is a lot of heartache in the world.

I write most of my songs to beats. I play around on guitar, but not enough to where I can compose my own stuff or play solos. I can accompany myself 'cause most songs are, like, four chords.