Rick Nielsen Quotes

My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.

Experimenting with different sounds is great, but when it comes down to it, you're still playing a guitar.

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.

I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

I'm a natural piano player. So all the practicing I do at this point is in my head. If I don't play for a year, my chops aren't going to get any worse. I've spent my time playing scales, and I don't necessarily want to play any faster than I play. So everything I do at this point is more philosophical.

If I try to write a song, I will completely fail to write a song. But if I'm just holding my guitar and I just start humming, then I'll have a song in an hour.

It's very demanding to make up your own music.

I'm not an intellectual composer.

I usually think in terms of music.

I am so highly skilled that when I pick up a phrase and then pick up my guitar, a form comes out almost immediately - a song - and once I start, I have to finish it.

I can't play an instrument to save my life. But when I'm creating, and when I'm making music, I feel like I'm the head of the orchestra, and I'm just waving my wand, and something is created.

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.

The creative process of composing music has always fascinated me.

I didn't have to apply my mind to the aspects of scales and playing, and instead, I focused on creativity. I wrote music, but I didn't 'practice' it. So yeah, you can always get better and improve your technique, but hopefully, that comes through being a musician and composing and being a creative individual.

When I feel like improvising, I always improvise on the guitar, never on the lute. It's as natural to me as breathing.

I wish I could play music. I think I get as closeas possible with the editing of the films. Over the years musichas been an even more important influence than-or as important as-film.There's no doubt about it. Painting, movement, dance, sculpture-it'sall in cinema.

I started playing guitar before I can really remember, and I started writing really early, too.

It's quite hard to have your mom as a teacher - it's like, she's not necessarily a 'real teacher' for me. But she'd always teach me to really hear the music, and develop my ear, and to try and hear the harmonics of the piano.

To have everything written for you... It's not really creating. That's why I think symphony drummers are so limited. They 're limited to exactly what was played a hundred years before them by a thousand other drummers.

I'm an interpreter of music.

I'm not a person who writes really abstract things with oblique references. I look at abstraction like I look at condiments. Give me some Tabasco sauce, some ketchup, some mayonnaise. I love all of that. Put it on a trumpet. I've just got to have the ketchup and Tabasco sauce. That's my attitude about musical philosophy.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

I feel pretty comfortable in a lot of different musical styles. I like rhythm, and I like melody and so forth.

Music. It's all creativity right here, right now.