Maury Yeston Quotes

You can't do opera when already from the 10th row you can only see little dolls on the stage. In such an enormous space you can't put much faith in the personal presence of the individual singer, which is reflected in facial expressions, among other things.

My live sound does not work in the studio, which is a completely different animal. Every little thing is detrimental to the sound. And if someone moves a mic, you've lost it. It's pretty much a case of 'lock the door and set up a police line.'

At every sound check, I try to practice on the stage that we're gonna play on that night, 'cause every stage is different. Whether it's concrete or whether it's plywood or whether it's Plexiglas, it all requires different things. You can't dance on concrete as well as you can dance on Plexiglas.

Behind the proscenium arch, you can't always hear what people in the audience are saying.

I arrive at the theatre four hours before the beginning of the performance. I must get accustomed to the hall even if I know it well.

A creative and artistic home is what I've been looking for in the theatre.

And so I've always been fascinated by the technical end of theater, and a lot of my closest friends are not actors, but in the other end of the business.

Theaters are great. They're designed to sound good, not for basketball.

We spent a lot of time on that record with the sound and recorded it on the Paramount sound stage which is this huge room where the sound is reflected but the reflection is so late and comes from so far away that it doesn't blur the music but gives you a room nonetheless.

Performing arts buildings are complex. The acoustics, the sight lines and all that have to just be perfect. So you begin with just making these things sublime as musical instruments. And if you fail there, you have failed it all.

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

In contrast, the control you have in a theatre is very attractive to me.

The sound was my greatest concern. There were certain difficulties getting used to the way every musician can hear his or herself, the way each of them relates to the musician in the next seat.

The first eight songs we were using someone else's monitors and it is hard to follow the changes when you are jamming if you can't hear those who you are jamming with.

Of course, we also have to play in concert halls. This is our dream when you are a musician - to play in a good, comfortable hall with a wonderful acoustic.

As a DJ I am never 100 percent in charge of the sound. The sound levels are controlled by someone at the sound board of the venue.

The studio that we mix in is still in Chicago.

Every day we make more progress toward understanding the concert hall.

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.

Every time I talk about this, I say: when the singer is singing, he must be respected, you must be able to hear what he's saying. You can't put a trombone and a drum up there, and a microphone on the drum, microphones on everybody. You can't hear what he's saying.

Everywhere in the world, music enhances a hall, with one exception: Carnegie Hall enhances the music.

Well, they put me in a booth and then did some nice things to the speaker to make it come out sounding ok.

I want to take some jams and really concentrate on hooking up with Page because, since he's the only one not next to me, and his sound is mainly coming from my monitor rather than through the air, it's a little harder for me to hook up with him.

I did sound for a number of years, so I know the pain of the sound mixer on a set where everybody was talking.

In music, what is very important is temporality of space and length, based on the breathing space the director gives the music within the film, by separating the music from various elements of reality, like noises, dialogues... That's how you treat music properly, but it doesn't always happen this way. Music is often blamed, but it's not its fault.