Johann Johannsson Quotes

My music has always been strong in melodic content.

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 really believe in melody.

We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics are and what you want to say and go from there.

I love classical music; I love the way it's worked... all those chord sequences so I often use that sort of effect in my solos.

It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness - sonic goodies.

I like to come up with the melodies, and I have a lot of ideas as far as structure goes.

Sometimes I write them down in musical notation as a trigger to remind me about certain directions to go. Or I can be specific about a sound I'm looking for.

I studied harmony and composition in a very spontaneous manner.

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!

Of course, you can't teach songwriting. You can only encourage people to do it and help them to sort out for themselves what they want to achieve, and get a list of exercises together that improves the craft and gives them more access to the craft of writing good songs.

I kind of write in a very classic way. I sit in the piano, working on some catchy, cool melodies and coming up with song concepts for those melodies. I kind of write in a very traditional way '- how people have written since the early '40s.

I compose melodies in my head and then interpret them musically with my guitar and keep them recorded. The guitar helps me to build unique chord structures on simple melodies.

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.

I think what I wanted to do was meet someone who knew more than me about songwriting structure and progressions and middle eights and things that more traditional writers write and I don't usually employ.

The songs started as a soundscapes, and then came the words and music; each song took at least a year to make.

I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last. Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.

I really feel like I've written my most effective music in the instrumental realms.

I write most of my songs to beats. I play around on guitar, but not enough to where I can compose my own stuff or play solos. I can accompany myself 'cause most songs are, like, four chords.

Sometimes I can sit at my computer and find a cool sound, or a new synth patch, and get super-inspired by that and make a track based on that sound. But the piano is where I find the inspiration and come up with the melody.

All my songs were made at the end of the neck, 'farmer's corner' chords.

I always say that to compose is to think. Playing is good, it's useful, but it's how your intellect puts the ideas together that will bring hands to write or to play. So, it's really a combination of many things; hearing sounds, hearing layers of counterpoints, of chords.

Basically, I'm a melodic writer.

There are rules that are so blatantly broken on 'Contra,' like structures of harmony and texture.