Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Most people don't even know what a trombone is. It's not that popular as a front instrument... I picked it up and fell in love with it as a kid. It's a difficult instrument, but I like doing things that seem impossible.
But somehow, I felt no inclination to be interested in it in any amateur way, let alone professional, until suddenly I became interested. And the first thing I did was to compose: not play an instrument, but to compose.
My identity has everything to do with me and my instrument. It doesn't have to do with what production style I use, or how many people played on it, whether it's sparse or grandiose or whatever. And I'm social, frankly.
More than any other instrument, the relationship between an acoustic guitar and a microphone is super-important. The kind of mics that you use and your placement of the mics to the guitar can radically alter your sound.
Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening.
I want to make the music that's not there anymore. I'm so passionate about the singing voice... What I'm trying to do actually with my album is show that it's my voice that's leading. It's my voice that's the instrument.
My big brother Ryan was funny and unfailingly kind. He was one of the most talented musicians you might encounte, and had a prodigious ability to pick up any instrument and play it by ear within the span of a single day.
When you listen to a symphony orchestra, and the basses don't - there's no bass part, there's not that much depth. That's why I'm attracted to the instrument, the bass. It brings depth. It's like playing in a rainforest.
You can have the greatest player in terms of mastering an instrument and you could be yawning your head off when you hear them. So, it's not what you do, but the way you're doing it and in the end that's all that we have.
Outside of the Constitution we have no legal authority more than private citizens, and within it we have only so much as that instrument gives us. This broad principle limits all our functions and applies to all subjects.
You go with what you 'get,' and I get playing the guitar. It's a challenge because it's not an easy instrument to play. There are so many interesting sounds you can make out of it and so many different elements. I dig it.
I feel if I'm playing an athlete, I know I have to prepare. I need to get that body language right, I need to walk like an athlete, look like an athlete. If I'm playing a musician, I need to know how to play an instrument.
So what I do, more than play any instrument - I mean, I love to play - but more than that, I write songs. Songs that are about living, about what it's like to be going through all the things that people go through in life.
The more I got into playing guitar, the more I enjoyed music, and the broader my listening became. The instrument itself became important to me, and I started messing around with classical guitar and took classical lessons.
The classical guitar has a dynamic to it unlike a regular acoustic guitar or an electric guitar. You know, there's times when you should play and there's times when you gotta hold back. It's an extremely dynamic instrument.
It was pretty radical to go from the Eagles to being the only melodic instrument. You have to play a certain way. It's like the Who. It was a great kick in the pants for me to get my chops up and to improvise a little more.
Spending eight to ten hours every single day practicing the instrument, starting from an early age, makes an instrumentalist spend his/her lifetime to hone the skill, and perhaps just as much time is spent to find a job too.
Using modern guitar techniques and modern methods on an early instrument is not a very clever thing to do, because it is the authentic spirit of the instrument that should dictate the quality and characteristic of the sound.
The electric guitar's a pretty cheesy thing when you think about it, still working on those bits of wire and magnets for its sound. It's all of the things that are wrong with it that have made it the unique instrument it is.
When you think about choir music, that's a cappella. You have church choir that you would sing without any instrument. I think the popular form that we have now is barbershop in the 20th century, and the collegiate movement.
The United Nations, and the way we approach collective security, must be adapted to changing circumstances. The United Nations is our prime instrument for effective multilateral solutions and a rule-based international order.
The Pleasure Seekers eventually turned into Cradle, when we started writing our own material. My younger sister Nancy was brought in as singer and I kind of stepped aside as main lead singer and concentrated on my instrument.
The clock, for all its precision in measurement, is a blunt instrument for the psyche and for society. Schedules can replace sensitivity to the mood of a moment, clock time can ride roughshod over the emotions of individuals.
The cello is a hero because of its register - its tenor voice. It is a masculine instrument, whereas the violin is feminine because of its soprano pitch. When the cello enters in the Dvorak Concerto, it is like a great orator.
I preferred not to be laden down with a big instrument. If you're behind a guitar, you get used to being behind a guitar, and you don't really perform because you can't. I wanted to be able to just hold on to the mike and sing.
Ideally, I'd really like to put my own stamp on things, but it takes years, you know, and you're constantly learning and studying and falling in and out with your instrument, learning different approaches and different attacks.
If there were an exact and universal scale of punishments and crimes, we would have a fairly reliable and shared instrument to measure the degree of tyranny and liberty, of the basic humanity or malice of the different nations.
No one familiar with the common law of England can read the Constitution of the United States without observing the great desire of the Convention which framed that instrument to make it conform as far as possible with that law.
I originally wanted to be an opera singer. I studied classical voice at the University of Washington but soon realised I didn't have the instrument or the discipline. The road for opera singers is more difficult than for actors.
I'm also very impressed with the best people in experimental electronic world, like Peta and Eckart Aillers and Finez and Jim O'Rourke and Oren Umbarci and Francesco Lopez. Most of them use the computer as their main instrument.
On stage, it's very naked. There's a reason you shake your knees. You're very vulnerable, cos it's just you, your body is the instrument. But I always had confidence in my voice, if I had the right song, the right words to sing.
I always tend to think that composing is not playing an instrument, composing is having something in your head that's steaming and it has to go out. It has to become sounds and be written. It's an emotion that you can't repress.
My talent is definitely a gift. I don't understand where it comes from. I don't play an instrument, and I never went to school for music production, but I know exactly how a song should sound and how to give an artist direction.
I think if you speak to any creative person, there's something so powerful - so intoxicating, if you will - about discovering another voice, another instrument, another way of looking at things, another way of perceiving things.
Polling is merely an instrument for gauging public opinion. When a president or any other leader pays attention to poll results, he is, in effect, paying attention to the views of the people. Any other interpretation is nonsense.
I don't think that John Kerry is the Messiah or the Democratic Party is the answer, but I don't like the evangelical community blessing the Republican Party as some kind of God-ordained instrument for solving the world's problems.
Words are a pretty blunt instrument. There's always going to be slippage between the words and the infinite complexities of a thought. As a writer, I find that frustrating, but as a social animal, I wouldn't have it any other way.
What I like about 'Game of Thrones' is that there's such a wide range. We have everything from very small, just solo instrument pieces, just the solo violin or solo cello, and then we go all the way to these bigger action moments.
What drew me to the violin was mastering the instrument technically, which I'm continuing to do. You want to push boundaries, to not always be in your comfort zone. If you don't, you get stale. So you have to find areas of growth.
I'd actually say that every musician is a human being, and that not everybody likes being social. But with music, there are all these ingredients to the business that have nothing to do with writing songs or playing an instrument.
It was also important for me to have a burning desire to achieve something worthwhile on that instrument, and I devoted many many many hours with little or no compensation to perfecting whatever I could, because I loved it so much.
Music was a big outlet for me. Being able to play an instrument and sing was definitely a good way for me to escape things I was dealing with: family issues, growing up, being a kid and not knowing what I wanted to do with my life.
I really enjoy listening to players on the cusp of swing into bebop like Charlie Shavers, Clifford Brown and Clark Terry. They balance immense facility on their instrument with rhythm, melody, and more complex harmonies of the time.
Music itself is a great source of relaxation. Parts of it anyway. Working in the studio, that's not relaxing, but playing an instrument that I don't know how to play is unbelievably relaxing, because I don't have any pressure on me.
When I heard 'Dookie' by Green Day for the first time, it unlocked something in me, like, it's totally okay that I'm a little bit weird because these guys are a little bit weird. It made me want to pick up an instrument and do that.
As human beings we're visual creatures, and it's so easy to play the guitar by looking at it. It's a real challenge to go from that visual way of perceiving the guitar to getting back to that pure sound connecting to the instrument.
I tried singing. I tried playing a musical instrument. I really wanted to be a musician, but I never could quite pull that off. I liked entertaining, but I was always drawn to some kind of technical work - some kind of honest labor.
With Whitney she has such a unique sound and powerful instrument that she made those songs her own. She might as well have written them because she brought such a power and passion to them that were very unique. She has a great gift.
Music is an important thing of energy. And there are a lot of wonderful aspects that come with it and vibrations, the physical vibrations, the movement of notes through an instrument and creating a wave that resonates into our spirit.
I just always wanted to play guitar. I though that was, like, really dope. And then in high school, I learned how to play trumpet and, like, French horn because if the instrument's right in front of me, I'm going to just teach myself.