Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Before you worry about what genre it is, about whether it's a loop or a drum, it's about what suits the song. It's using what's within your reach, but also reaching for everything you can. I don't know if I always get it right, because I don't know every sound yet.
My place in Scotland is in the middle of nowhere, so you've just got a keyboard, guitar, a little drum machine and you know if you can work stuff out like that, if you can hammer out songs that sound good just with those three things and a voice, you're on your way.
I've always been into computers. When I was getting out of high school and forming my identity musically, all of it was really coming into the fold, computers and drum machines. It felt like, you know, I'm in the right place at the right time. I liked the collision.
I used to drum on the table at school. I think a handful of my school reports say that they thought I might have some kind of ADD because I was making sounds. I was far from being an ADD child. I was actually quite quiet and well-behaved. But I used to drum on things.
When you play to an audience, you come away energized. It's the promo that really breaks an artist. Some lad sitting on a box trying to create a drum sound in a dry little studio. Everyone goes, 'Great - okay, now on with my day.' You go back to the bus, and you weep.
I remember my first trip to Toronto. There was this street musician playing an instrument I've never seen before - like, he had a hang drum on the left side and this random bagpipe, bodhran stick type of thing. It was the craziest thing ever! So I sampled it for a beat.
In the past, I used to rely on the randomness of working with samples, which was a good way because it threw you in a completely different direction. You just thought, 'What if I take this samba drum and combined it with an '80s synth line or something from this record?'
Every film for every actor is a make-or-break film. I believe every film has the power to break you or make you. So, an actor will treat every film like his last film. That's the way we need to work, and that's the way you can drum up that passion needed to do good work.
The rhythmic feel of 'Dark Days In Paradise' is completely different to anything I've ever done before. There's a lot of drum loops on there, but used in conjunction with real drums: a lot of influence from hip-hop and dance music, with the keyboard sound and sequencing.
I suppose I am a frustrated musician so I annoy my family by playing guitar in the house. I used to be into acoustic stuff but my son Joseph is learning drums, so now I have an electric guitar and we play Metallica. We have an amp and a PA in the garage with his drum kit.
I love the percussion. It's a right brain, left brain thing. There are different beats, but cooperating together. It's your whole body doing it, you're doing the snare drum and the high top with your hands and the bass drum with your foot. You're this whole motion machine.
As soon as you pick up a guitar, you're up against the legends of rock. The same goes with stadium drum kits and electric bass. Essentially, you're already in a soundscape that's very familiar and has a lot of established legendary material recorded using those instruments.
This was totally influenced by me and the direction that I am writing about and the stuff that I am writing about. There is just no way that you can be as intense as what I have been through in my life over a drum beat machine, sample, or loop; it's just not going to happen.
I was in a Montessori school. There was a drum circle with all the kids passing around a little bongo drum. I was the last person in the circle, and when it got to me I played 'Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits' - in front of all the parents. Blew the crowd away at five years old.
There are methods to creating a mayhem that sounds different from your usual mayhem. Because mayhem and a heavy drum backbeat end up sounding like Green Day or something. But if you put a different beat within it to create some air and lightness, the chaos comes through better.
Having toured a lot really influences some of the decisions you make in the studio - is this part anthemic enough for people to want to sing to it at a show? is this part dynamic enough? Is this drum beat 'arena' enough? You think about it a lot when you are creating, for sure.
The old footage of my dad, I always knew we were cut from the same cloth, because my dad was such a renegade and always marched to the beat of his own drum. To see where we were both dancing and being silly together, it's too beautiful for words. I was really happy to have that.
Bill Ward, when you hear his beats, he's not just playing a straight 4/4 beat; he's doing almost a hip-hop beat. There's a song called 'Sweet Leaf.' The drum beat that he's playing, he's trying to kind of swing and funkify it. Now, is he doing a great job of it? Maybe not. Maybe.
When someone is playing drums, they aren't actually moving around a space; they're just moving their arms and limbs. They're stuck behind the drum set. So to film someone playing the drums and make it feel as kinetic as a car chase or a shootout or a battle scene was the challenge.
I grew up around electronic instruments. To me, the turntable is an electronic device. At the same time, I had access to drum machines and keyboards through my uncle; then track recorders into computers. At an early age, I was messing with computers more than most hip-hop musicians.
Unfortunately, like, homework and school wasn't the thing that I was obsessing over. It was, you know, music and making music and how to like - and drum machines. And we met Rick Rubin, and Rick Rubin had a drum machine. So I would just cut school and go to his house - his dorm room.
My first real foreign holiday was my honeymoon 20 years ago, and we went to Bali. It was particularly special for that reason, I enjoyed it very much - I had packed music scores and a practice drum pad, suspecting that I would be completely bored, but actually they remained in my case.
Yeah, Travis Scott's dad taught me how to ride minibikes and how to repair the engines. His name's Jack Webster. Jack had a drum set and his brother had a bass. So I used to play with them, and that's what started me wanting to get into music and take it serious. And this is before rap.
My biggest 'Spinal Tap' moment was a stupid one as well. When we were rehearsing for the Zeppelin O2 gig, I was having an argument with my drum pedals. I actually took them outside, and drove over them several times with the car. Shouting at them and telling them they'll never work again.
I think a lot of people saw 'Fight Club' and thought, 'Right, here's our next Che Guevara, here's our next Fidel Castro, here's someone who's going to wave the flag.' And I was like, 'No, it's just a book. And if I beat that drum, if I play that song one more time, I won't have a career.'
In the late '80s and early '90s, there was a slightly retro drum sound that was popular in hip-hop music called the 808 bass drum sound. It was the bass drum sound on the 808 drum machine, and it's very deep and very resonant, and was used as the backbone as a lot of classic hip-hop tracks.
Drumming completely eclipsed my life from age 13, when I started drum lessons. Everything disappeared. I'd done well in school up until that time. I was fairly adjusted socially up until that time. And I became completely monomania, obsessed all through my teens. Nothing else existed anymore.
I can't tell you how many things I've worked on where I sat on it for a few years, and then somebody else did something very similar. Whether it's some weird vocal effect you hear on another record, or a drum beat, or even a song title, a subject matter, or a mixture of different kinds of music.
As a musician, I don't think I'm the greatest guitar player. I'm a bigger fan of the drums than I am the guitar; I just happen to play guitar. I play drums almost every day at my house. I wrote a lot of songs behind the drum kit, just having the music and vocals in my head and playing the rhythm.
This is show business, and there's room for the shows and the personalities. But I think there's also room for music, for people to play music, and there seems to be an audience developing that's willing to go listen to music again, rather than just be blown away by drum machines and choreography.
What I did is I bought a drum set and I listened to 80s music, and I played, and I was, like, DJ'ing, and I said, 'this is what I wanna make. This is how I'm gonna give back to the people. I'm gonna make this party music.' It pulled me out of the depression, and then I've never been depressed since.
Portishead's production is just insane beats you would expect to be on a KRS-One album. But then there's this little white girl with an angel voice singing over it. It was a cool juxtaposition. I like 'It's A Fire.' That's a chill song with kind of a military drum thing going on, like a drummer boy.
I went into Guitar Center, and David Koresh and Steven Schneider were looking at a drum set, and they asked me to play it. They handed me their card, which said, 'Messiah Productions.' All this religious scripture was written on the back. The last thing I wanted was to join any kind of Christian band.
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.
Movies don't sit in the theaters for an entire summer like they did in 1982. Now you've got a two- or three-week shelf life so you need to have that awareness right off the bat. And in order to make a lot of people know about your movie, you need to be out there banging the drum and showing your stuff.
When I was a kid, we went to St. Augustine, Fla., and I was lying on the couch one night with a Q-tip, cleaning my ear out after I'd taken a shower. I hit my arm on something, jabbed the Q-tip through my ear drum, busted my ear drum and couldn't get back in the water the rest of the time we were there.
I grew up watching Gregory Hines banging out rhythms like drum beats, and Jimmy Slyde dancing these melodies, you know, bop-bah-be-do-bap, not just tap-tap-tap. Everyone else was dancing in monotone, but I could hear the hoofers in stereo, and they influenced me to have this musical approach towards tap.
The thing that's good about music-making software like the DAW-kinda systems is that they're all generally the same; the kind of interface is normally laid out in a similar way. Depending on the program, the sounds might be quite different, but they tend to all have a drum machine or synthesizer or a sampler.
I'm always making tracks. I find that when you make tons of tracks, you stumble upon genius. You can't always turn the drum machine on and right away there's a hot track. Sometimes you luck out. But it can take a lot of time between thinking about the artist, listening to music for inspiration or going to clubs.
How did it happen that an enlightened country like Germany was pulled into Nazism? That question has occupied me since 'The Tin Drum,' my first book. The story also shows that we can never know how a person's life will unfold; there is no guarantee that a person will do what is right and avoid what is not right.
I had no idea 'The Dream Weaver' would be so successful. Everything just fell into place with that album. I pioneered a number of ideas with that album and subsequent tour. The all-keyboard approach with no guitars was a new one, and I was one of the first to use a drum machine in concert. It was an amazing time.
I love to talk about the drums and music. I started playing drums when I was probably six and played a lot until I was about ten or eleven years old. So, I guess five or six years where I played. I had a drum set at home, and I would just bang on it. I'd even go on the Internet and study basic beats and so forth.
There's something very particular about the kind of rage you feel when you're alone in a practice room by yourself, unable to master a simple thing like a rudiment. You keep trying to master this very basic thing, and when you don't get it, you just scream. I broke a lot of drum heads, and I broke a lot of sticks.
I remember when I was writing 'The Tin Drum,' I had the totally misguided idea of giving Oskar Matzerath a sister, and he just wouldn't have it. There was no space for a sister, yet I had the character of the sister in my head. In fact I used her in later novels, in 'Cat and Mouse' and 'Dog Years,' Tulla Pokriski.
People don't realize how much it means to your music to record on tape, whether it be for new music or old music. People don't realize how much or how imperative it is to use actual hardware when making drums because those are actual percussion samplers. They're hardware instruments that are made to have the drum hit.
I figure no matter what interview I do, the real good 'journalists' are going to find the completely irrelevant quotes that will drum up some controversy and stick it on their page to get some clicks and completely miss the real context of what the interview is about. That's what we do nowadays and call it 'journalism.'
I was the first artist, I think, to ever do an all-keyboard album. There were things that resembled it, like Stevie Wonder. A lot of his stuff was on keyboards, but he used brass and he used other things as well. I was the first artist, also, to use drum machines. I was really the one who kind of started that whole thing.
There's not a whole lot to do in Athens. When I was 13, I just started entertaining myself by writing songs. I'd sit in my room for 10 hours playing the same song, stacking vocals, trying out different drum beats, realizing no one would ever hear this but having so much fun. I guess I got my voice from just doing that so often.
There are numerous different kinds of drum sounds - some are more ambient and roomy and this, that, and the other, the John Bonham kind of thing. Then there's kinda what I did with Pantera, which was much more attacky, and then with what I did for 'Blood For Blood' on the Hellyeah record is kind of a combination of all of that.
One that really caught me was Joe Morello. He was the first drummer I ever saw that could do a roll with one hand. He would turn his hand over and use his fingertips to get the stick bouncing. He could sit there with his right hand doing stuff on the cymbals and tom-toms while he was doing a roll with his left on the snare drum.