Ryan Ross Quotes

In the studio you can auto tune vocals, and with drums, you can put them on a grid and make them perfect. I hate that sound. When someone hands me a record and the drums are perfectly gridded and the vocals are perfectly auto tuned, I throw it out the window. I have no interest in rock music being like that.

I'm not into albums that are meant to sound perfect.

I like things that don't sound particularly processed or mechanical or made by machines. I like music that contains human elements, with all their flaws. There's air in it, and you can hear a room of a bunch of guys playing. Those are the magic parts.

The greatest records in the world were made without going to Auto-tune or Pro Tools, or having some click track. If they could do it, why can't we? Something's been lost in music. It's all been over-produced, squashed down, totally compressed.

The best records are not perfect. They don't sound digital or like someone applied rules.

Our recordings, you feel that it's been, not labored, but you feel that it's been constructed in a way where sometimes it's hard for us to create the feeling that this was done in a room.

Just from the beginning, I really liked playing around with tape recorders. And then, when I got into punk rock, I only really liked - the rawer it was, the more I was into it.

Sometimes things get too layered and compressed or there's too many effects and they turn into mush on record. I strive to keep it raw and live-sounding, like you are in the room watching the band play.

I was born in the overdub years. I wish there wasn't such a thing as a multitrack tape player, because what you heard would be the record.

I'm an electronic manipulator. Most people think J.J. Cale, he's organic. There ain't nothing organic about me.

I never want to go back and remix old records, either. If a record sounds shitty, that's just the sound it has. I just take it as part of the music. Some of my favorite bands - their old records sound terrible. But that's just part of the sound. If they were perfect, I'd probably hate them. Same thing with movies.

Everything we did, we did live - and then Bobby took it home and chopped it up and edited it. Which is pretty much what they did with every jazz record you've ever heard.

A studio recording is perfection, but emotion and passion come only when you turn on the machine and go for the groove. If you do that with no mistakes, it sounds beautiful.

Everybody I've ever seen live sings out of tune, even the greatest singers in the world. And of course if you make a single nowadays, they'll autotune it anyway.

It's good to play 100 per cent live - no tricks, no samples, no messing about.

Then I loved the fact that we were actually recording live.

To me, there is nothing better than me going into the studio with a live band and hearing those violins and that echo and that sound. I mean I loved it.

I've always thought live albums were cop-outs.

It's great if you can afford to carry a string section on the road with you, but most people are used to the idea of just a keyboard player creating those string sounds.

The records that I like, they have life and warmth and soul in them. Like the slap back on Scotty Moore's guitar on 'Mystery Train.' You're not gonna get that in a computer. You're gonna want a live room, you're gonna wanna bounce the tape, you're gonna want real musicians, in a room, vibin' off of each other.

Rock music is not meant to be perfect.

The tracks on 'Sleep' were recorded live to 2-track. I did a fadeout or two of them, but that's really it.

After that initial success, every chance we got we'd hire that remote recording truck and just record stuff at the Whisky because it was so inexpensive.

I feel like the live record thing is something that I've been getting used to as the years go by and with this being my second one, I'm continuing to learn what works and what doesn't work. A live record is an example of that authenticity and that realness that you find in imperfection and you can hear that in this record.

I just like music that sounds like music. Not like machines and computers and things that you design to make things sound slick and perfect.