Ringo Starr Quotes

I got my first set of drums when I was around 3. I went from band to marching band to Latin jazz band - it's like riding a bike.

Most people learn to improvise on their own, listening to records, endless hours of noodling on their instrument in the bedroom with all their spare time. That's traditionally how people learn.

The best way for me to teach myself an instrument is to just jam on it, and sound awful sometimes, and sound great other times.

I wish I'd gone to music school or just started playing in bands sooner.

I just play, and I'm always trying to write songs.

I'm a self-confessed geek, and my whole concept of music at first was entirely electronic. In many ways, it turned out to be an advantage. I was so green, so utterly naive about the nature of classical music, that I did things that made me look totally, deliberately unorthodox.

In the '70s, my playing was completely untutored, but it sounded good to me, and I tried to find ways to make those very simple things work in more ambitious contexts.

My early films look terrible! I didn't know what I was doing. I learned when I was doing it. I never went to film school.

There was a period in my life where most of my musical career was spent in a band that was very aggressive, and there was sort of a wall of volume all the time.

The goal of serious musicians is to play outside of yourself. That's most likely with people who suggest things that are outside your musical experience.

The fun for me musically is that you never quite know what works and why. So why pretend you do? Why not just put things together and discover, in the creative process, if and why they work? That approach has served me well.

I always felt a love for music, but I never got my nerve up enough to try a musical instrument in school.

When we played with the Rollins Band, we'd keep songs going until we felt like ending it.

I never went to business school. I was just bumbling through a lot of my life. I was like the guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there's no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

It's the things that you notice when you're not actually with your instrument that, in fact, become so interesting, and that you - you want to explore, through this tiny tiny surface of a drum.

In the studio, I'm always throwing people on different instruments.

I used to hang out a lot in jazz clubs, and the groups took to a kid like me who wasn't afraid to get up and sing with a jazz band. Then I started to hang out in rock clubs and learned to carry off different styles.

I've never had formal drama-school training; I've just picked things up as I've gone along.

If you are playing repertoire material, you're stuck. There's not huge amounts you can do.

I have always loved music. My mom used to sing with my sister and I when I was younger, and I was in choirs and loved to perform, but when I was in college, I went on a study abroad to Trinidad, and while I was there, I sang backup at my first concert.

I like to start with an idea, but then again, I might be sitting at the keyboard, and just playing a bunch of chords that sound cool together, and something just inspires an idea from that.

Some members of the Vienna Philharmonic convinced me to try Bruckner, which I have never done before. And that was interesting to me to have this experience with this orchestra, which knows the repertoire very well, and to be confronted with this knowledge, and to learn from them.

I love going into the studio with just an idea of the direction. Like, I want this tempo... I love to start from scratch, and the tracks sort of take on a life of their own.

If I pick up a guitar, I don't practise scales. I never have. I come up with something I haven't done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. It's not like the music I'm doing is just a single thread.