Mike Shinoda Quotes

I'll hear a beat and think, 'How can I make this a banger?' I'll write the lyrics on my phone or on a piece of paper, and either way, it's going to be a slapper.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

I like making sounds and putting it together, I'm not just a singer or a producer.

Really, I just sit down, mess around, and play with sounds.

You should find the dopest producer in your area, and that producer is always going to want songs written to his beat.

I'm always going to do that - record and make music.

I demo all of my songs on Garage Band, where I pretty much play everything - not very well, but I manage to hammer out a drum beat and a bass idea.

I started out really making music in my dorm room, and it wasn't really producing or anything like that; it was you making something.

My son is a hip-hop producer.

Music is a passion of mine, so I also want to continue along that path, creating with my friends.

Rapping was something I always wanted to do, so after school, my friends and I would catch the bus to my house and just sit there writing songs, every day.

With '5 Boroughs,' we were each working on beats, sitting in front of our laptops and samplers.

I have been making hip-hop since I was a kid growing up in New York in the '80s and '90s. It's always been a hobby of mine - I've been making beats and writing songs for as long or longer than I've been acting.

Lyrics over some nice beats - that's what the people want from us.

I started rapping towards the end of middle school. In high school, with a lot of my friends, we would make beats and just start rapping - beating on the wall, beating on the table and freestyling.

If you want to be a songwriter, you've got to obsess over it.

I try to make music, all kinds of music, whether it be singing or rapping.

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

A lot people don't know that Mannie Fresh is one of my favorite producers because I used to just be fascinated with how he would be producing stuff. He'd be silly, too, when he raps.

Twenty percent of my records, you'll find a loop, like two or three loops per album out of 13 or 15 songs. I'd rather keep it like that.

All the Public Enemy albums, I knew what records they were sampling but was like, 'How'd they construct it like this?!'

I've been a DJ since I was about 13, and I started out as a hip-hop DJ. So I was always playing records that would just get people going. I was just doing parties and high school dances and whatever, and then, progressively, I started making my own music, writing little songs here and there, but it was never anything crazy.

I was 16 when I recorded 'Flashlight.' I produced it, made the beat, wrote it, recorded it.

I started by producing, and the rapping came second to that, because I wanted to fill out the beat.

Every time somebody asks me, 'Oh, when you mix your own music, what are you going to make?' And I don't know.