Robert Palmer Quotes

I tend to play a lot of blues things at home, because most blues things are basically within a 12-bar pattern.

There's a difference between the blues of the New Orleans guys and anyone else and the difference is in a chord, but I can't figure the name of it. It's a different chord, and they all make it.

Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

I understand that transposing a song a half step can effect the believability of a lyric.

There are only twelve tones and they need to be treated carefully.

They don't bother too much with the balance and things on blues records.

Sometimes it's cool to play major third and minor third diads back-to-back, or a minor third followed by a root/fifth diad - whatever combo sounds good.

To be honest, I don't have a particular recipe, but I normally start with the chord progression and then I build it from there. I listen to a lot of jazz, so the chords are really important to me.

If the chords change a lot over the course of a song, it's better to stay within the same melodic structure.

There's only seven chords, so you got to use the same ones over and over. It's all in what you do with them.

A scale is just the notes that are in a chord played one at a time instead of together. That's what has allowed me to go through the possible notes that work with a chord and make choices about which ones I like best. I go through by ear; you can do it by theory too, but the best way is to learn by ear.

There's a musicologist named Peter van der Merwe whose theory is that the blues generates tune families, and that their similarity to each other is in fact part of the pleasure you take in them - rather than the differentiation in which Jerome Kern and George Gershwin indulged to great effect.

Anytime I can use open strings in a chord, or add a ninth, I will.

See, we started out with a foundation of blues. But then we added people like Miles Davis and John Coltrane to the mix and gave rock n' roll a much more complex structure. It made it possible to play more than three chords.

My favourite chord? Bb6th with added 9th.

Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors or the architect his three dimensions.

I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.

I was the third one in my family born, and there are three notes in a chord, so that's how they came up with my name.

If I'm soloing, I usually try to start with a theme, which will often stem from the blues.

I started studying counterpoint and theory with a physicist whose hobby was music.

I think I'm much more of a guitar-songwriter than a singer. I start with chords and then test out melodies rather than improvising over it.

I always say that to compose is to think. Playing is good, it's useful, but it's how your intellect puts the ideas together that will bring hands to write or to play. So, it's really a combination of many things; hearing sounds, hearing layers of counterpoints, of chords.

A violin is tuned to a fifth. But a guitar is tuned to a fourth with a one-third middle. It is very perplexing to composers.

I had always been a jazz fan - Django Reinhardt, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, the early George Benson. And I come from the Hank Marvin melodic upbringing. So blues, I loved, but I also liked jazz. Therefore, my style was more lyrical.

Philosophically, I think riffs that start with E repeating itself are almost guaranteed to be great.