Yngwie Malmsteen Quotes

It's easier to collaborate with instrumentalists than singers; they know exactly the sound that I need.

I always wrote everything - I wrote all the lyrics, I wrote all the melodies, everything; it's just somebody else sung it. And to me, the singer is nothing else than a different... like a bass player or a keyboard player - they're not more important than any other musician.

A song is composed of music and lyrics: 50 percent is the producer, 50 percent is the artist. So, I'm responsible for 50 percent. All I know is that I have to do my job, and I have to do it well. And he has to do the same.

I got a couple on per album but my problem was that I wanted to sing the songs and not let Roger sing them.

Artie is a singer, and I'm a writer and player and a singer. We didn't work together on a creative level and prepare the songs. I did that.

Whoever hired me might've just heard 'Refugee.' Well, I'm not the secret to 'Refugee.' The secret to 'Refugee' is the song. But if somebody really good calls me up to play on something because they like the way I played on 'Refugee,' then I wind up playing on another really good song.

Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.

There was no such thing as production at Starday. We'd go in with the band, we'd go over the song, I'd look over and tell the steel player to take a break or kick it off, and I'd get the fiddle to play a turnaround in the middle.

I'll come in with a string of riffs and direct the musical ideas. But you still need a band and their input to make the ideas come alive. You can't underestimate band chemistry.

I really had a great time working with 'Modest Mouse,' just because of the people. I loved writing songs with Isaac Brock, and Jeremiah Green is probably my favorite musician that I've worked with.

For me making music is part social, part interaction, part collaboration.

If you're going to write a song, try to get together with a collaborator because it's better to write with collaborators.

I love being part of a creative process, so having a band to work with is perfect for me.

With Dream Theater, every creative aspect of the group went through me. I oversaw it all from top to bottom.

When I did my solo album, I put on a song that I'd planned for Toto that never made an album constructed from a great drum track with Jeff and a bass track with Mike and the guys loved it.

A lot of times, people assume that I write all the songs: that I arrange them and I stick Kevin up there as kind of a puppet or something. It's absolutely not that way. In fact, he writes probably 60 percent of the songs, and I write probably 40 percent.

In our band, every member has input, but me and Steve do the majority of the writing. We start the songs, the rest of the band help us finish it.

What people fail to realize is that any album we did, really, 90 percent of it reflected the songs people brought in. If someone had brought in two great rock songs for 'Cornerstone'... they would have been on that record.

Here's the way Static-X has always worked: I write all the songs by myself - totally and completely by myself - I give demos to the other guys, and then they add their parts to it, and then we argue about stuff and compromise and it turns out being Static-X.

A lot of times, I played bass on songs. Gene plays guitar on some songs.

I've been writing and composing songs since I was 5 years old.

Sometimes I like to make music together with a singer or with singers.

I picked all the tunes before I went to Memphis, and the band was all set. Willie Mitchell is an arranger like I am, and he let me do what I had to do.

I write the music, produce it and the band plays within the parameters that I set.

If I'm working as an engineer for another band, the responsibility for brilliance pretty much rests on their shoulders. I think I'm pretty good, but I'm not good enough to turn a trout into a sausage, or the other way around.