Ornette Coleman Quotes

I wrote music as soon as I knew notation.

I taught myself how to play the guitar. I never studied music.

When I write the music for any of my songs, I write as a composer-lyricist in my head.

I had a drummer in my band who started teaching me tricks to come up with interesting rhythms. Because I don't come from a musical background, I've never studied music, and I don't know music theory at all, so a lot of stuff I discover on my own are things students would learn in the first grade of music.

In order to write music, you need lots of Tabasco sauce.

My main object is to write, to keep learning. I always try to perfect my composition. But I do like writing film and opera music. I believe that it fulfills the needs of particular situations.

At 13 I taught myself piano from an old song book, and Joni Mitchell's 'Both Sides Now' was the first song I learned.

I started writing music as a composer in school, in the classical tradition.

When I was 4 years old my mother put me into an early music education school. That's where they taught you perfect pitch and harmony and how to write music and all that. At that time, one of the homeworks was to listen to all the sounds and the noise of a day and transfer that into musical notes.

I've always regretted the fact that I've never formally studied and learned the mechanics of writing music.

I'm not unfamiliar with music, and I really do write music. I've gotten a talent for it. I don't have the technical skills, but I do plan to learn.

Around eighth grade I decided I wanted to be a composer and that's what I went to college for. Just a few years back, I switched out of composition and into creative writing so I could work with words.

My brother Carl taught me how to play bass. I'm a self-taught keyboard player, though - I figured out our harmonies at the piano.

When I was a kid I never learned to play. I actually got in bands through watching people play and copying them.

I was in the band as a boy and was taught music and learned to compose.

I learned music from a book on piano theory. I was only interested in knowing about chords. From that, and from the 'Harvard Dictionary of Music,' I learned everything I wanted to know.

I learned tabla for three years when in school, then started picking up the basics of the acoustic guitar when in college.

Music was my first love, and at Marlborough we put bands together and sang the pop songs of the day. Although I couldn't read or write music - I still can't - I taught myself to play the guitar and piano by listening to songs and working out the chords.

I had a fascination with the roots of African American music. That would have been my first education in music. I had a real passion for it. I wanted to play it, sing it. I could sing at a young age, but I started to teach myself bass guitar and started writing when I was 15.

I know how to read music, watching my mom and listening to Mom play music.

I wish I could write music notation. Even if I couldn't play it, I wish I could just write it.

I learnt everything to do with music in my own time.

I started officially learning music when I was 14. I learnt Hindustani classical.

I would sit at the organ and just start making up things by myself - I was maybe 7 years old, which was too young to even know how to notate music. So I never wrote anything down, but when I'd make things up, I'd memorize them.

I started playing when I was about 13, mainly because Dad had guitars lying around the house. My dad taught me my first three chords, and I taught myself from there.