Joey Jordison Quotes

Playing live is such a total visceral experience, and really, as a musician, you're trained from the beginning to be a live performer.

It's a constant challenge to get your arrangement and musical expression across to a new audience, especially when you're playing live every night like we are.

The crowd is the crowd. You're gonna take them as an individual performer how you take them. The key is how do you learn from them. How do you use whatever is happening reaction-wise to get better.

I'm always making micro-adjustments onstage, listening to the audience, and what a crowd is like can be infectious.

In the U.K. and Ireland, crowd-work is a big thing. It shows you how funny someone would be if you met them off-stage. Americans don't care if you're funny off-stage. They want to see the writing; they want to see the work you did.

If there was a wrong note, it didn't matter as long as it was rocking.

The main rhythmic loop in 'Alaska' is me just patting on my jeans.

A responsive crowd is great - they help you see new things in your comedy.

As much as a lot of my music is very R&B, there's a bounce to it that obviously makes it easier to perform live. It's upbeat and uptempo.

My records are one thing. My live performances are something totally different because they're very improvised performances.

I play some places where the people are right at my feet, and you can see their expressions. It's kind of more like playing in your living room. It's almost easier to play in front of thousands of people in an arena scene, in some ways, but you don't get the personal contact.

The cool thing about WWE is it's like entertainment boot camp. You're performing in front of a live audience, a different audience every night. You're doing promos in the ring. You're doing talking segments in the back. You're wrestling. You're performing. It's everything all rolled into one.

When you use a metronome, you'll start to notice where the notes are falling, if they're on the beat, behind the beat, between the beat, and so on.

No matter what happens with EDM, I would like to go to New Orleans and just play with one of those small funk bands in an intimate venue. How cool would it be to work with a band with those huge horn lines and produce all of that great funk that makes you just want to party?

I've listened to musicians who say that using a metronone makes you robotic, that it decreases your 'feel.' That's ridiculous. Either you have feel or you don't. Feel is one of those intangibles that can't be taught. But if you do have feel, using a metronome will allow you to play cleaner - and that'll make your 'feel' have more, well, 'feeling.'

We were built to be rhythmic.

I tend to think about so many different things on a recording. I'll be trying to tune into what the drummer's doing, trying to keep everyone playing the groove and other things like making sure the piano's in a nice pocket.

Drumming is a real part of my live show, and I like to do it because so many people aren't expecting me to go and do it.

R&B and all that stuff was always very spare and spontaneous. Nobody made those records under solid gold situations. It was just in and out, and you didn't labor over the thing. I like music like that.

The biggest thing for me, I hate going to concerts where no-one's moving. Everyone should be dancing and having a good time.

I gravitate to rhythmic music, so I listen to jazz, world music, Indian music, Hawaiian music, all kinds.

Everybody's been blessed with something, and my gift is my timing. Let's face it, it's all about keeping time and having a groove.

I don't ever really plan my sets. I just get out there and feel the energy of the crowd.

If the rhythm or beat of the music changes with a live orchestra, you have to think on your feet. If you feel like you are not on your leg, you have to make a decision to make it look as though nothing is going wrong.

If you do enough rap shows, you get a pretty good sense of an audience. You start to develop this sense of what a feeling of a room or a group is.