Karlheinz Stockhausen Quotes

Sometimes you can just record anything and slow it down hugely and you'll find all these hidden notes and frequencies that match up really nicely.

I have been using delay and reverberation since the middle 1960s. I use them to make what is almost inaudible to the ear, audible. I do not use them to play loudly but to make the higher harmonics heard.

I was able to interpret the difference between the sharp, quick sound and the slow, deep sound of percussion and manipulate it, get a third sound out of things, if the beats were rapid enough.

What is auto-tune? I don't even know what auto-tune is.

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

My interest in his new toy, the Theremin, isn't very big. It simply does not fit into my way of playing music. I do not want to fiddle around with my hands in the air.

I am a sound freak. I could play around with sound forever.

One of the rules of the road is that if you want to create the sense of silence, it frequently has more pungency if you include the tiniest of sounds. By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it and what other things you don't hear, you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.

With Crazy Horse, it's all one big, growing, smoldering sound, and I'm part of it. It's like gliding, or some sort of natural surfing.

It's not about how loud you turn the amp up. That's not what makes it sound big. What makes it sound big is fooling around with different delays and reverb settings.

I got tired of different drum sounds so you buy different effects for more manipulation.

Dick Mills was in charge of sound effects and all the rest then, and he put the voice through a ring modulator or whatever gizmos he'd got at the time to make it sound a little more electronic.

I was greatly influenced by musique concrete when I was, like, 10. I was completely mesmerized by the idea that you could make music out of sounds. So that's been a constant influence on all my work.

I don't even think whether I play the blues or not, I just play whatever feels right at the moment. I also will use any gadget or device that I find that helps me achieve the sort of sound on the guitar that I want to get.

I started using contact microphones that you can place on common, ordinary objects, like a rake. I put a microphone on it and it picked up the tines vibrating and turned it into a horrible din. What attracted me to it was the horrible din - that's what I really liked.

The human voice sounds thicker with a chorus and reverb than a dry signal.

I still feel like I have a lot to learn in the realm of sound experimentation, and I think I would like things to get noisier and weirder and more distressed and more aggressive, but I don't know if that's something that would be suitable for public consumption.

People who care about records are always giving me a hard time. I mean, I would destroy records in performances, and break them, and whatever I could do to them to create a sound that was something else than just the sound that was in the groove.

Or the other process that is important is that I compress longer sections of composed music, either found or made by myself, to such an extent that the rhythm becomes a timbre, and formal subdivisions become rhythm.

I usually create sounds and have different generators running over it. You know you can open a word-file as a picture or the other way round. I do the same with sounds.

The good thing about Pro Tools is you can actually hear what you're working on, so it doesn't just become this intellectual idea. But Pro Tools can be dangerous, too. It can make things sterile.

I was left with an urge to make the guitar sound like things it shouldn't be able to sound like.

I don't think we'll ever use the same sound techniques.

I always say that when I was recording with Phil Spector, he would not let me really sing, you know? And even to make me sound younger, he would speed the track up. He still wanted that real nice, little, quiet, sweet little sound.

But Contra la Puerta was done mostly in the opposite way, starting with sounds and melodies.