Alexandre Desplat Quotes

When you make music, you're forming these invisible vibrations in the air into different shapes and consistencies and speeds in order to create music, and understanding how the math of that works just gives you more colors to paint with, and allows you to get to what you want quicker.

My vocation is more in composition really than anything else - building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.

I think I'm much more of a guitar-songwriter than a singer. I start with chords and then test out melodies rather than improvising over it.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.

Experimenting with different sounds is great, but when it comes down to it, you're still playing a guitar.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

I've never really been schooled in music theory. I'm a guitar player, and I attack the guitar in a certain way that it not fully unique to me, but it's more unique that some other people.

Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.

It's very demanding to make up your own music.

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.

The relation between practical and spiritual spheres in music is obvious, if only because it demands ears, finger, consciousness and intellect.

However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

To me and my band, guitar riffs are what it's all about. We know that every time we jam on a great riff, we've got a fighting chance of writing a great song!

Usually I write on guitar.

The creative process of composing music has always fascinated me.

When I sit down to write a song, it's a kind of improvisation, but I formalize it a bit to get it into the studio, and when I step up to a microphone, I have a vague idea of what I'm about to do.

All these tales of people sitting down and composing symphonies just as though they were writing a letter are very much exaggerated; at least, it isn't that way in my work.

'Write' is almost the wrong verb for what I do. I think 'compose' is more accurate because you're trying to make the sounds in your mind and in your voice. So I compose while I'm driving or in the shower.

When I was first learning songs, I'd have a favorite song, and I'd take the chords and twist them around. I'd learn the chords and then play them backward. That was my first experimenting with writing a song.

I write in all keys. I've always written in all keys. I've probably written a lot of songs in A.

With music, it feels natural that, in my head, I can pull things apart and then put them back together very quickly.

I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

My songs are more arrangements than they are songs.

I enjoy singing the songs a certain way, but I don't even know how the writing even began. To me, it's work that is kind of invisible; it's a weird kind of work to have because you're not working, but it's not not work. Formulating your thoughts and making a melody that's catchy enough for people to listen to what you're saying is really hard!