Valee Quotes

I second guess everything I do musically, and I often could spend hours on, say, one snare sound.

One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music.

We are rich in the quantity of songs rather than in the quality. The singer has to go through hundreds of compositions before he finds one that really says something.

A lot of the stuff I've accumulated over the last few years of touring I thought was really interesting. Like sounds, sound bites, and beats even, but they weren't good dance beats they weren't ones anyone would want to rap over or anything.

The whole thing with recording is you have to know when to turn off the tape machine and just stop recording because you want to keep fixing, fixing, fixing, you know?

I think I've always approached making albums pretty much the same way. I'm just looking for a mixture of songs and topics that aren't the same thing over and over.

We needed to make a sound that's not gonna fit in with everything else - we wanted to make something that was completely unique and individual to us. We spent a lot of time trying to make a sound that was a One Direction sound. At first it was quite hard to do that, but I'm really happy with the sound.

Drugs have nothing to do with the creation of music. In fact, they are dumb and self indulgent. Kind of like sucking your thumb!

A vocal producer is very important, and it's a very important component of an overall successful and good-sounding record.

We certainly strive for trying to make a quality record throughout, and I think that's true of all of our records.

My producer, HH, makes sounds, so I'm writing to his beats.

Yes, alas, I've been on some recording sessions where the music wasn't good. Not so many, really, considering how many I've done. It's a very awkward situation because to do a recording well you focus on the positive of what will make the piece better.

I like to find music that shares a rhythm with the sentences I'm working on. And though I'll probably regret saying this, I think some songs actually don't sound too bad when they're played through lousy speakers.

The way I perceive an album to sound and the way I put out mixtapes are two different energies. There's a different focus; there's a different sound.

It was very important to establish a sound, so that people heard a record on the radio and knew immediately that it was you.

Sometimes I listen to music and I wonder how did they get certain sounds.

A lot of our tracks have sounded a lot better than I thought they would because of recording, mixing, and because I probably didn't hear it that way. I'm not a songwriter.

When I'm sitting in the studio, a mix isn't done till I feel it in my gut.

It's always been difficult to make a good record.

Music is only good sometimes.

A lot of people record on a laptop and use plug-ins, which might be OK for the kind of music that they're doing. But for the kind of music that I'm doing, that just doesn't work. I can't cut corners; everything has to be organic.

There was a recording studio in my school, and I knew this kid who had a key, so I'd write lyrics in school while I was in class, and then, in a 10-minute break, I recorded the song 'Hurt' in one go at the school studio.

If the script doesn't excite me, there's no point working on the music.

When I'm in a session with an artist, my job is to help execute their vision - so it's whatever story they're telling, and the news doesn't specifically affect that.

A lot of people hear things on the radio and try to make their own version of that.