Billy West Quotes

A lot of people have said 'people should see you work in the studio,' because a lot of people don't realize I'm an actual engineer. I don't walk in and have some guy grab the board. I have my own studio and soldered every wire in the studio.

I've got the recording process down, and I can knock it out very quickly.

I'd like to do radio just like pictures - leave the imperfect stuff on the cutting-room floor.

I like radio because you can do an hour-long interview and then three days later have a finished piece.

I feel that working with the camera and editing it is actually my strong suit.

I started doing radio pieces with no clear, preconceived idea, except that I have a tendency to be theatrical.

I was broadcast-struck from an early age; I had saved up for a tape recorder and started making programmes.

I love voiceover work.

I be on some, perfecting my craft, just making sure the music is all the way there.

Ground zero for me is audio.

Every time we go into the studio and use a different engineer or producer I try to look, listen and learn their approach. That has helped with the gear I look for to use live and in the studio.

I think it goes back to me being a recording mixer and engineer. Because of all the technology now you can make music yourself and a lot of people are doing that now. I started out doing that a long time ago and I found when I did that I came up with a unique sound.

I've been working in radio on and off for most of my career. There's a restfulness about it. It's more focused on the voice, so you don't have to worry about extraneous things like sound effects, as there's someone there to look after that.

I went to school for audio engineering, and I was around a lot of sound engineers over the summers in New York, so I'm pretty comfortable in engineering my own stuff.

I'm really into the way sound works in film, and I did a little bit of sound design for theater in college.

The rush of creating sounds and mixing sounds is always an interesting challenge, especially for someone like me, who doesn't know about sound.

My first cut is always pretty similar to the final cut.

And then computers got to a point where you could just record directly into them. So when that happened, funny enough, I thought, Right, I'm going to learn how to do this because then I can understand that part.

I tend to play better in the studio, no pressures, just sheer volume and alcohol.

That's why you go to a nice studio. You can get a magic take. You don't really have to do anything to it.

If it takes you three years to set up a studio, and you've made one track with that setup, then the logical thing to do is not change anything and just do another one using the same set of sounds.

I like working together with different producers. Of course the process is different, producing a new track is like creating something all new, while reworking an already existing track is more like giving your own twist to the record.

The lowest stress environment is the radio show. I am not on camera and I can let the music do the talking. The rest is more highly pressurized or in the case of writing, time intensive task. I say yes to all of it and like all of it but the radio show, by nature of what it is, is the least hassle.

The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising ("but of course that's why he was doing that, and that means that...") and it's magic and wonderful and strange.

Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.