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Bjork's album, 'Homogenic,' it's got beats, strings, traditional Icelandic stuff. That's my benchmark for what an album should sound like, right up there with Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme' and Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going On.'
A lot of the music that you listen to now is because of the things that the Meters did, the Neville Brothers did, and they're there, the guys who invented those beats that the guys sample today. Such an enormous opportunity.
I had eJay, and then I had Acid Pro. I had a crack of both of them, and I would just make little loops, and then I'd hum along to them. I used to spend a lot of time on a computer looking for music and making beats and stuff.
It's really important to me that my sound is a combination of beats and melody. I love hearing strong, confident beats in music because I love to dance. At the same time, melody is really important to me because I love singing.
Fortunately, our digital age has created some wonderful tools for finding employers and showing your strengths. But when it comes to discovering or keeping a job, nothing beats good old-fashioned face time and up-to-date skills.
I was against getting Beats cause I know they're kind of really popular and you know, hey're such a well known brand. But, I ended up buying them and they have changed my life, and the best thing about these is the battery life.
News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It's a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different. Anderson Cooper, different still.
I've never had vocal training. No one could ever say that they helped me carve what my voice has become. It's just been more of self-training: me just continuously going into the studio every night and trying out different beats.
Besides my son, music is the most important thing to me. I always have music on in my car and playing at house, and I'm in the studio or performing every night. I like Beats by Dre for headphones, and Bang & Olufsen soundsystems.
At the end of the day I'm not just sending beats in. I'm mixing the song. I'm recording the song. I'm engineering the song. I'm in the studio helping with the songwriting. I'm doing the whole beat - every single piece of it is me.
Leading up to the fight [Trevor Berbick] took every opportunity he could to badmouth Larry Holmes and I just blew up. After I beat him in the ring, he tried to get me going again, saying he deserved another fight, wasn't happening.
I've always wanted to collaborate with Shawn Mendes, he's an amazing artist, but the thing with Shawn is that I won't collaborate... me just sending some beats. It has to be in the studio where we'd both be there recording together.
Future's the guy, like, where, if I send him some beats while he on the road, and there's a pack of beats that he really like, if there's a new vibe or new wave, he's like, 'Man, keep feeding me more. Feed me more of this every day.'
When I was younger, I was a rave kid trapped inside a singer/songwriter's body. But I kind of figured my way out because I started making these really terrible beats on this Yamaha keyboard that my parents got me for my 10th birthday.
I've seen many great performers on stage, from Dean Martin to Celine Dion, but nothing beats the first time I saw Elvis. There was no pomp, no pyrotechnics, nothing to distract you from the raw talent of the man in the white jumpsuit.
None of my songs sound the same. None of them. I take R&B beats and put it as a rap song or hip-hop beats and put them as a R&B song. A lot of people are boring. I don't like boring music. Everybody sounds the same, like they copying.
I really prefer the actual experience of being onstage and living the character from beginning to end with the energy of the audience. There's nothing that beats that feeling, and yet I really have trouble with the eight shows a week.
I have a place in Chicago and I get there as much as I can... The city is so unbelievably beautiful. It's one of the greatest cities on the planet. My heart beats differently when I'm in Chicago. It slows down and I feel more at ease.
Experimenting is part of the process. I remember when I was younger, I spent a whole year just writing on straight trap beats because I just wanted to be able to do that at a high level. So it's about perfecting your craft in every way.
Initially we were spitting lyrics over garage beats, in that eight-bar gap where there wasn't a vocal. But we were rebellious towards garage because they were rebellious towards us; a lot of their gatekeepers said grime was too violent.
I've never worked hands-on with a producer. I've been on my own writing, just taking beats and doing what I have to do. I've been on my own. To have Timbaland invite me in and say that 'I want to work with you' is amazing. He's a legend.
If you put four different people on a podium conducting the same downbeat, you get four different sounds. It's a little mysterious and fascinating. There's so much you can do with motions and body movements besides giving accurate beats.
I started producing in California, and they called it mob music. When I moved to Atlanta, the sound was different. People in Atlanta didn't like to rap over West Coast beats. So I had to make adjustments to what was going on in the South.
I used to do the beat box. A friend of mine, he was the rapper and after, we'd be doing a block party or something or a house party, and he's gettin' all the attention and I'd end up with a handful of spit, you know, from doing the beats.
I was like 13, 14 years old. I had a Rock Band mic, and I used to record music and put it on YouTube and DatPiff. Then I started getting to producing my own music because I didn't want to keep rapping on beats I was getting on SoundClick.
If I was fighting myself, I always say that I would kill Mike Tyson but then again I don't know how hard a punch Mike Tyson can take and I don't know how hard Mike Tyson's punch is. I don't know. For me looking at me, I think I can beat me.
A lot of the stuff I've accumulated over the last few years of touring I thought was really interesting. Like sounds, sound bites, and beats even, but they weren't good dance beats they weren't ones anyone would want to rap over or anything.
I was joked by a lot of older musicians because I was playing saxophone over trap beats or future bounce beats, and it just wasn't what you do. They were just like play some John Coltrane and get in the corner. But that's just not how I work.
I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.
Producing isn't just making beats on a beat machine. It's bringing together these string players with this flute player and this singer, and telling them to all work in the key of C major... You bring these people together and let them all cook.
No acting, no production, could take the place of that moment when you come out in the dark on to the stage and the drummer plays four beats on the hi-hat and then lights and music. It just takes your breath away. No words can do what music can.
Investigative journalism and reporting has become much more dangerous. This is especially true for journalists and sources in National Security - but it has been getting pretty bad for beat reporters and small outlets doing local reporting, too.
I really wanna make hip-hop music, but I don't know how to use any of the tools. Electronic, computer skills, I don't have those for engineering or making beats. I don't know how to use a sampler well. I don't know how to use any of these things.
There's very little synthesized sound in the 'Arrival' score. There are a couple of synthesized beats in there, but 99 percent of the sounds in there are acoustic in origin and either played or sung by a musician or a singer and recorded in a room.
One day, my mum bought me this music production software for my computer, and I started making beats... I realised it was more like production than a video game, but it was a video game when I was playing it. That's how I got into music production.
Hip hop scholarship must strive to reflect the form it interrogates, offering the same features as the best hip hop: seductive rhythms, throbbing beats, intelligent lyrics, soulful samples, and a sense of joy that is never exhausted in one sitting.
All you have is yourself and what you have to present, and just focus on that. And if you can walk out of the audition and say to yourself, 'I hit all my beats,' 'I accomplished my emotional honesty,' or 'I remembered my words,' then that's winning.
Without Metallica, I wouldn't be doing what I am doing. I have every Metallica record, of course, and I would spend hours on drums in my parents' basement with the stereo behind me, cranking those records and learning Lars' drum beats, beat by beat.
I think there has been this really bad habit of environmentalists being insufferably smug, where they are sort of saying, 'This is the issue that beats all other issues,' or, 'Your issue doesn't matter because nothing matters if the earth is fried.'
As I got into my teens, I started reading better books, beginning with the Beats and then the hippie writers, people like Wallace Stegner up in Northern California, and all the political New Journalism stuff, the Boys on the Bus dudes and Ken Kesey.
When I started rhyming, my favorite rhythms were from John Coltrane and some of the things he did on sax. And certain rhythms that I hear on drums, I try to emulate with my words, dropping on the same patterns that them beats or them notes would hit.
I try to eat 'real' food as much as I can; often I'll shove a load of ingredients - spinach, an apple or whatever's knocking about - in my NutriBullet. Nothing beats a bit of buttery toast though! I think a little bit of what you fancy does you good.
I really like Caravan Palace's electro swing stuff. They incorporate the electronic, but when you see them live, they're all on stage playing live music. They're all playing their instruments. They drop these beats with the DJs that are so incredible.
Nothing is old, nothing is new, save the light of grace underneath which beats a human heart. The way of feeling, of understanding, of loving; the way of seeing the country, the faces that your father saw, that your mother knew. The rest is chimerical.
When you talk or write or film, you work with the music inside you, the music that formed you. Different generations have different musics in them, so whatever they do, it's going to come out differently, and it will speak in beats of their own generation.
Timbaland was crazy to work with. When he stepped in the studio, it was like working with Morpheus from 'The Matrix' - he stepped in with three beats and said, 'Pick one.' They all sounded crazy, but I could only pick one. I picked one and he hooked me up.
With me and Timbaland, we would always be at the studio, but working separately. He would be doing his thing with the beats and I would be doing my thing writing and then we would both come together and say 'OK, you add this to it and I'll add that to it.'
I love the golf courses because it brought the best out of me. It made me prepare, made me work at it, made me do the things I needed to do to be better, and that's what I loved about USGA events. If you couldn't handle it, then you got beat, and that's OK.
There's a lot of surplus rage from the '60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton's earmark for a Woodstock museum.
When I made 'Real,' I recorded it over the phone in prison. I did it in a week. I had no idea what it was going to sound like. I couldn't even listen to the masters before it came out, I couldn't listen to 90% of the beats. I recorded 21 songs in seven days.