Ro James Quotes

I do go back and listen to my songs. I'm biting my fingernails the whole way through, but I do listen. I have a lot of songs I've wanted to re-record just because of how advanced technology is and the different instrument sounds that I'm more experienced with.

T Bone is genius. The way they've recorded my voice and the instrumentation to these songs is really quite extraordinary.

I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.

The Police could get away with doing an entire record with really no audible reverb, which I have always admired and thought would be a lot of fun to try to re-create.

When you've got insane drums and a lot of guitar, it's really hard to mix the vocals, to mix it all well.

I love building a song up from nothing and jumping from one instrument to another.

We gave up on the idea of trying to make the record a good representation of the live performance.

The late '70's and early '80s is the zenith of a certain craftsmanship in sound recording.

I'm interested in creating a little sound world for songs, really crafting it, building it, and making it like a little doll's house with little things inside it, staircases and rooms and everything kind of relates to everything else. I've never seen it as drums, bass, guitar and vocals in very separate spaces.

I'm not really a knob-twiddler. I always work with an engineer; I'm not super hands-on when it comes to mixing boards and computers. I'm much more about what I'm hearing and what it needs to be like. I deal with songs and ideas and instruments.

My very first records, I was very interested in how you get the particular quality you want out of it, and I began to learn about the engineering and aspects of production and things very early on. I got hands-on with the process and taught myself how to engineer, as opposed to just being a producer who asked the engineer to make it sound nice.

It's not about how loud you turn the amp up. That's not what makes it sound big. What makes it sound big is fooling around with different delays and reverb settings.

But I would lie on the floor and analyze everything. I'd listen to all the strings and the background vocals on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and try to pick out the different instruments.

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

I don't try to make 15 musicians sound like two each.

In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool.

We actually added an extra electric guitar to beef up 'Need You Now', but we haven't changed any of this 'Own The Night' record at all for the international releases.

I like to explore a lot of textural, arrangement aspects in the studio.

My approach to recording and all that is pretty organic. It just has to do with all the songs I wrote; go in and record them.

Sometimes when it comes to music, effects or sound engineering, it is difficult to achieve what you want within a fixed time frame.

We always try to make every song we do sound like a track. It's vocal, but we want it to be really full so no one really can even know if it's a cappella. It's not like it's missing anything, per se.

My first CD started as a studio project and I record everything with one other guy, so I didn't have a band. That's kind of how I like to do it, though. I like to create it with one other person, this guy, Tommy English, who produces everything. And then I go out on the road with a band who interprets it live.

I always went in with a very specific idea of the sound I wanted, and once I'd recorded I'd try and make it sell as much as I could, but I only went in thinking of a sound I wanted. So, it's no surprise to me that he got the hit and I didn't. But what I realized was that he did dress it up nicely, and my god, he does sing on key well.

Adding instruments to parts of a song and having them somehow find a pocket. That to me was a huge lesson. Like, there's more than 808s in the universe.

I didn't really think about the sound of my songs before I started recording things in the studio.