Leonard Slatkin Quotes

Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.

Making music is fantastic.

I've always been interested in what happens in the studio.

Ultimately, what we do as musicians, I think of us as a type of emotional engineer. We essential take these sound waves, this sound, and we organize it into emotion, and that's how we connect with our audiences.

You treat the air as a canvas and the paint is the chords that come through your fingers, out of the keyboard.

I spend just as much time on how people hear my music as I do the actual music, no matter how long it takes. I'm such a visual artist as well that it always goes hand-in-hand.

I like to explore sounds.

I design music; I don't produce it.

I view making records as a journey.

I don't think people realize that I produce like 90 percent of all my music, except for the songs that I co-produce with people.

I'm very involved in the production of my songs. I know what I like and what I don't like.

Pretty much all the programming on our CDs is done by me personally, so I've kind of been able to have complete control of what sounds I'm looking for to complete a song.

When I make records I have full control of everything and I know how it sounds before it comes out, with films it's outta my hands.

The way Beyonce works, the song is a jigsaw piece and then she will piece various elements.

I record everything myself, I engineer everything myself.

I write songs; I record them. When I get enough, and it seems like a coherent piece, I call it an album.

On 'Platinum Flame,' I engineered the beats myself, so I produced and engineered them. So this is getting even truer to myself, how I truly feel.

I was 16 when I recorded 'Flashlight.' I produced it, made the beat, wrote it, recorded it.

We grew up understanding how the analog sound is a driving force for music.

The creative process of composing music has always fascinated me.

Every time somebody asks me, 'Oh, when you mix your own music, what are you going to make?' And I don't know.

I don't want to be on the mic, man. I want to stay producing.

This is just what I do, play music and create sounds and all that good stuff.

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.

I don't have session players come in and guitars, I'm doing the drums, I'm doing the scratching, I'm doing every sound you hear and that's always been my way. And not only that, I'm very meticulous about it just sounding right.