Vinnie Paul Quotes

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

The message of music was also the first thing what I learned from my first teacher. She was an organist too and she was very devoted to what she played, so she had a respect for every piece and she felt that she is not allowed to add something of her own.

I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.

I think musically.

I don't ever consciously change gears when I play jazz or classical. It's all music.

Anybody can be a drummer.

I don't think I could ever be in a band if we just had to go out there and play the record note for note. I'd give up. I'd become a banker.

I got my first set of drums when I was around 3. I went from band to marching band to Latin jazz band - it's like riding a bike.

I don't try to make the guitar sound like the harpsichord or lute. That makes you end up being like a bad copy.

I've got a collection of songs that I've had, I keep adding to and they're all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I've done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect.

What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about.

We were playing popular music, but we were doing our own arrangements because we were too lazy to sit down and figure out the originals.

The most important thing is that you honor that musical integrity, whether you make music that sounds like ABBA or you make music that sounds like Void.

So now I don't have time to practice drums. It's been five years since I've touched the drums.

I thought of Gene Krupa's drumming, his staccato drumming. I went and put 'Misirlou' to that rhythm.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most. Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs.

No matter how long you play rock n roll songs might change just as the balls are there, the rock balls. And that's what's important to us.

I've always seen my drumming as lyrical anyway.

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.

From a very early period of my life I have derived the highest enjoyment from listening to music, especially to melody, which is to me the most pleasing form of composition.

I'm a freak, everything has to be totally flat when I play. Ed Will, my jazz teacher, set up everything completely flat, and then you'd tilt your snare drum away from you, so I do that too. So my snare tilts away from me.

My son, Wolfgang, plays drums, guitars and bass.

It does just boil down to music.

I've always kind of had an interest in the drums but nothing else. The drums are the only thing I feel I would be good at, because I'm a very physical person. I've always played sports and stuff. Drums would give me something to do.

But a large symphony orchestra basically is a repertory company and it has a very enormous repertoire and it is important for the performers to be able to know how to shift focus so that they instantly become part of the sound world that a particular repertoire demands.