Serj Tankian Quotes

The sound was my greatest concern. There were certain difficulties getting used to the way every musician can hear his or herself, the way each of them relates to the musician in the next seat.

Never let the horns and woodwinds out of your sight; if you can hear them at all, they are too loud.

In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool.

In fact, I had to make an enormous adjustment to this, not only in listening to it but in playing with it. It's a full sound. In some instances, you must have the volume to get the effect.

I started a recording studio. I started producing people and doing remixes.

I've been DJing a little bit, so you get used to the fact that music sounds brilliant when it's loud.

For instance, if you're playing a record with drums - horns would sound nice to enhance it so you get a record with horns and slip it in at certain times.

I'm not really a knob-twiddler. I always work with an engineer; I'm not super hands-on when it comes to mixing boards and computers. I'm much more about what I'm hearing and what it needs to be like. I deal with songs and ideas and instruments.

Doing the instrumental thing, you're really looking for the power of the melody to carry the record.

But I would lie on the floor and analyze everything. I'd listen to all the strings and the background vocals on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and try to pick out the different instruments.

I don't try to make 15 musicians sound like two each.

T Bone is genius. The way they've recorded my voice and the instrumentation to these songs is really quite extraordinary.

My idea is to play with the people who you know want to get it right. Then it's fun and easy to record, and you can get down to details, like taking out cymbals so the verse doesn't dwarf the chorus, something like that.

I try to listen to a lot of music when I'm in the mixing process of a record, when I'm in post-production and trying to get everything to sound a certain way.

When I listen to a record, or when I'm making a record, I listen to everything. I listen to the drums, the bass, the voice, the arrangement. I listen to the whole piece as an ensemble.

'Deacon Blues' was special for me. It's the only time I remember mixing a record all day and, when the mix was done, feeling like I wanted to hear it over and over again. It was the comprehensive sound of the thing: the song itself, its character, the way the instruments sounded, and the way Tom Scott's tight horn arrangement fit in.

I used Coldplay's mixer, Michael H. Brauer, on 'Roadsinger'; he's brilliant. He won a Grammy for their record.

I think, for me, a way to really come up with new ideas and come up with new ways of writing music is to create a unique sound palette or soundscape for all the films I'm working on.

Producing is getting the performances, tracking it, making sure all the parts are there. Mixing is when you take the finished work, and you make sure all the levels are right. It's putting all the parts together.

I usually like to hide my vocals behind the music. I don't like to hide them consciously, but I have a tendency to prefer the vocal at the same level as everything else and put lots of reverb on it.

I'm not the most technical producer, so the weird mixes and blown-out sound happen naturally.

I'm not a mixer. That's not what I do. I'm a songwriter, a singer, and a guitar player. You might have some ideas here and there, but you let the mixer mix the song because, overall, you've gotta trust their instincts.

If you listen to my early music, I didn't know how to mix. I barely knew how to record for real, and I didn't care.

We really like having songs where we think the arrangement is just as important as the melodies, even though they're typically not.

'Brace the Wave' is an acoustic-electric record recorded with electricity on analog-digital and digitally-analog equipment.