Dimebag Darrell Quotes

The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.

I learned it was crucial to play right on the edge of the beat... It makes you drive the song more. You're ahead of the beat, but you're not.

I think the way I play the guitar is very percussive. I play a lot of rhythm chops as though I were playing congas or something.

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

If you hear Bing Crosby trying to swing, it doesn't work. He swings like a rusty gate.

I mean, in the course of an evening, people will take a solo here and there, but generally it's all about the rhythm of that music. Dealing with the rhythm with everything. That's essentially at least my concept of what that group is.

Jazz should be recognized as music of the people, based in a lot of accents and melodies. What is jazz but music that people danced to? Jazz has the dynamic thing. I don't think you have to be playing only Charlie Parker licks on your horn or whatever the new version of that is.

Many classical musicians lack pulse and rhythmical strength and precision, so for us it was very important to acquire and learn those.

When the snares don't hit together, it's just the most awful thing to hear.

I'm more relaxed when I can hear the beat clearly all the time I'm singing.

Jazz music, as is also the case with the old down-home spirituals, gospel and jubilee songs, jumps, shouts and moans, is essentially an American vernacular or idiomatic modification of musical conventions imported from Europe, beginning back during the time of the early settlers of the original colonies.

I snapped my fingers all through it. Sometimes I set my own tempo during rehearsal by doing that.

The best way to express rhythm is music.

Ragtime was a fanfare for the 20th century.

I rely heavily on rhythm when I write. You should tap your foot when you read it, all the way through.

But since the middle of the century in particular, the music has become very irregular in rhythm.

I started playing piano with a little band in high school. I was terrible. I thought I had absolutely no talent. I couldn't keep time. I only got into McGill, which was a lousy music school, because they were taking American music students.

I think I can keep a rhythm to a beat, but there are quite a few people who would argue with me.

I can't hear rhythm.

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.

The fact that rap has a strict meter and stays to a click means that you have to make your thoughts concise.

It's as if my left heel is my bass drum and my right heel is the floor tom-tom. I can get snare out of my right toe by not putting it down on the floor hard, and, if I want cymbals, I land flat on both feet, full strength on the floor.

People comment on the way that I phrase. And in my 20s, I realized, my phrasing is jazz phrasing. I don't comply strictly with musical theater phrasing. Musical theater tends to be very one and three, and jazz is definitely two and four.

I usually write to the beat. Really, the beat can make the song itself.

One very important side of my playing lies in rhythm; I have a very percussive style. It's one I've developed with Dream Theater over the years, and requires the guitar to be very locked into the rhythm of the drums... way more than what would normally entail.