Quotes About Creativity

I can sample Blink-182 but put an African vocal sample in there.

Toplines usually suck. I'll send a song to a band or artist whose entire body of work I love and I'll ask them to do a vocal for one of my songs and I'll get it back and I'll hate it so much. It might have to do with my possessiveness over my music.

Background scores allow me an absolute flight of the imagination, and I travel in my mind's eye. I do not like the scores to have vocal notes, because they act as a limitation to these flights of fancy.

I am something of a ham. Yeah, I'd always been a writer. But in high school, I acted in plays. So it wasn't as if you had to drag the words out of my vocal chords.

Artists often become vocal advocates of freedom of expression because we depend on it so heavily in our work. But it is an inalienable right that belongs to everyone on an equal basis.

I learned a lot from working with and watching Knxwledge, seeing how he produces non-stop. He doesn't dwell too long on stuff. He's very simple, using only about two or three elements. I like that in production. Sometimes it doesn't take more than three drums, a melody, the vocal, looping a sample or whatever, just as minimal as possible.

It's always a pleasure when you can compose guitar parts from a strong vocal and not just put the melody on top of guitar riffs.

The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music.

If you are recording, you are recording. I don't believe there is such a thing as a demo or a temporary vocal.

I feel there are tone singers, and there are more vocal gymnastics singers. And I think that's amazing when people can do that, but I think there's room for the tone singers. And there aren't a lot of them.

I started dance class when I was a little kid, and then, when I turned 11, I started taking vocal lessons, guitar lessons, and piano lessons.

I'm a musician. I play instruments. I dabble in the hip-hop field. That doesn't take vocal ability necessarily.

I don't dictate the solos and I don't dictate the vocal harmonies.

I was in art school, and we had all these random classes. We'd listen to a lot of Bollywood. I'd listen to Spanish music - and I don't even speak Spanish, but Hector Lavoe is amazing - we listened to French music like Edith Piaf. She's tight. I like cool vocal inflections; I like cool sounds. I pretty much listen to anything I think is good.

When I was young, I put on performances for my family and my parents where I would dance like a woman, singing a really exaggerated woman's vocal in front of my whole family.

I wouldn't say I worked with these people because I was looking for a particular vocal sound. I worked with them because I loved what they had done before-and because they really wanted to work with me.

The same song can have drastically different feels and personalities just by changing some minor things. A different drumbeat or some vocal overdub could completely transform the song.

I keep these songs in my head until I get behind the microphone. I never spend more than 30 or 40 minutes singing the vocal or it will sound mechanical. There are always mistakes, but it's about feeling more than being perfect.

But when you get to a song, not only do you have to do a vocal melody, you have to write words and not be redundant and make some semblance of a story.

But my role is to just apply the skills I've learned over the years: you listen to the guitar, you listen to the vocal melodies, you listen to the rhythm, and you come up with something that helps you take the song somewhere.

My vocal ability is very limited, but I'm fortunate in that I can write the songs around my vocal limitations.

I definitely don't subscribe to the theory that more instruments, or more vocal tracks, harmony, or double tracking the voice, is a good thing. People do their early albums very stripped down, then each album becomes bloated.

I like writing on piano and a computer, and a lot of 'Plans' came out of samples and vocal lines.

'In My Hands,' the title track, is my very first vocal attempt, and I'm not a singer as such. But I've always wanted to express myself vocally on my albums, and I don't really have much of a capability for singing. The strength is in, I think, the lyrics and just speaking. It just comes from inside.