Lee Ritenour Quotes

If some of our works are symphonies, then wrapped walkways was chamber music.

My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.

After all my years of doing instrumental music I still like just a simple instrumental song with a nice catchy melody and an opportunity to play a solo over a harmonic structure.

At times I have a beat first and then I write. Sometimes I have a melody in my head and I pick up the guitar to develop the song. Other times I just write without any melodies, and I end up using those lyrics when I think I have the appropriate instrumental that would bring out and depict the emotions of what I have written.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.

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.

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.

Cage always wanted to know what my structure was, if I had one. I often did have some sense of the time structure. Then he'd make a different one for the music.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

The guitar shouldn't be a main instrument, it should be a texture. It shouldn't be important whether it's there or not. If it's important to you whether a guitar is there or not, you're weird.

A lot of the time, I will write a guitar riff first. I don't write drum riffs first.

I'm a guitar player. Actually, I think of myself as a songwriter/rhythm-guitar player.

When I was a student, if you accidentally wrote a triad in a piece of yours, it was just sort of like you were breaking the law! You just couldn't do it. And that just meant you were a bad composer.

There's only seven chords, so you got to use the same ones over and over. It's all in what you do with them.

I equate composing with orchestrating. I think my music in terms of an orchestra.

I want to know exactly how the first few measures are going to go, and the rough shape of a movement or the whole piece and its essential character.

Sometimes we'd just play acoustic guitar and try out the parts and make a library. We'd use a double cassette player and make little edits.

I would sit in my dorm room and write songs. I loved it. I was learning to sing and play guitar. I was becoming a musician. I was the beginner who somehow could write a song.

As soon as I choose the timbre of an instrument, that dominates how I compose.

I remember writing lyrics for 'Take Me to Church' for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It's not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don't actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.

If I ever do meet John Mayer and we end up in the studio, hopefully he'll bring the guitar, and I'll make a beat to it or something.

The pre-chorus always flows and the chorus is always a little bit harder for me because I put pressure on myself. I didn't know that there was a proper way to do these things, so I just write what sounds good to me in my ears and then I hope to God that someone else likes it too.

I actually played guitar before I played drums. And I always play guitar on the Slipknot albums as well, as well as being responsible for a lot of the songwriting.

The creative process of composing music has always fascinated me.