Allan Holdsworth Quotes

As you can appreciate over my lifetime I've developed a large vocabulary of sounds each requiring certain physical techniques often combined with a specific effect box.

Yeah, I've always sung, and I always try to find a way for music to be in my life.

On 'Honeybabysweetiedoll' I used a Whammy, a Boss OC-3 octave box, a Sustainer and a Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler. That's only on the intro, where all those weird noises are happening.

I knew absolutely nothing about recording. I had this four-track recorder, and I'd plug my electric guitar right into it, which sounded real bad. I moved any fader that made a drastic change in sound. I thought that was cool - that it was communicating something. I didn't have the skills to do anything subtle. It was just like screaming.

Music turned to digital, and suddenly you had the possibility to make things louder than loudest, which boggles the mind but it's true, and what you have are all kinds of different ways of distorting your music.

'Sinister' is the first score I've done in which there's no orchestra in it whatsoever. There are traditional instruments I sampled, then manipulated, so you don't even recognize the source anymore.

If you're working on a computer and you're editing bass, it looks like a warm curvy, sort of feminine object.

But I find that the keyboard is the complete instrument you know?

'No Bones' has some reverb that I kick around.

Any effects created before 1975 were done with either tape or echo chambers or some kind of acoustic treatment. No magic black boxes!

Yes, sampling has changed not just my way of playing and composing.

If you're a guitarist, you should not be intimidated by using your instrument as a synthesizer, but you shouldn't feel that you have to own one, either.

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.

That it's a lot harder to make a keyboard sound not-cheesy than a guitar.

It's cool to play the guitar, but to me it's even cooler to scratch a guitar backward and forward, to manipulate it with a turntable. Guitars can't do that themselves.

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 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.

In OK Computer, the guitar was already moving towards a tone generator as well as a riff generator.

Every time I went into the studio some engineer tried to impress me with how they're going to capture my sound with all kinds of tricks. But they limited the sound and never allowed me to play how I felt.

I still think that I'm playing instruments, not just pushing buttons and there it goes. It's interactive and alive with the sound and the manipulation and it plays like instruments.

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

I love Yamaha Clavinovas. I have them at home, in the studio and on tour with me. I find them ideal for all sorts of things: silent practice with headphones at home; writing; arranging and... just playing the blues!

My home studio is my private instrument for me only. It's not intended to record anyone but me.

Some people say to me, 'You don't sound very Irish.' It's because I have this tendency to iron out my accent: not because I'm ashamed of it but because it makes my life easier if I don't keep having to repeat myself.

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