Terry Riley Quotes

Everything we did, we did live - and then Bobby took it home and chopped it up and edited it. Which is pretty much what they did with every jazz record you've ever heard.

Everybody I've ever seen live sings out of tune, even the greatest singers in the world. And of course if you make a single nowadays, they'll autotune it anyway.

To me, there is nothing better than me going into the studio with a live band and hearing those violins and that echo and that sound. I mean I loved it.

It's great if you can afford to carry a string section on the road with you, but most people are used to the idea of just a keyboard player creating those string sounds.

More recently, I used guitar synthesizer extensively on the two albums I did with Robert Fripp.

I've watched so-called 'New Order' playing in Auckland, and Tom Chapman is miming along to my bass on tape... He's got his fingers on the low, and you can hear my high bass in the background. So he's miming.

I use Auto-Tune but it's not to mask anything. If you come to see me live, I can sing on the spot. Auto-tune is just for the recording. It keeps everything really precise.

Our recordings, you feel that it's been, not labored, but you feel that it's been constructed in a way where sometimes it's hard for us to create the feeling that this was done in a room.

When I go to a live show, I want to be moved. That's why you do it. And it's not very often that a band will move you live.

I still love playing live, and I love doing records, but writing songs is my main thing.

If what you're talking about is seeing someone perform, then I'll have to say that in the rhythm-and-blues side of things, seein' Otis Redding live was it, you know?

I like that kind of classic-type sound. A lot of my favorite albums were tracked live, with a four-piece band. I love the way those albums sound, but I want to make records that sound like that in the way I like to make stuff.

My dad used to do a lot of music when he was young, so he had an 8-track MiniDisc recorder, and when he realized that I was getting on with it, he brought it upstairs to my room and showed me how to record and how, once you finished eight tracks, you can cut it down to two and have another six tracks to play with.

We've had the good fortune of performing to live music a few times in our career and it always creates a different dynamic.

We were playing shows still when we wrote 'Phoebe' and 'Rock All Night.' We got to test those songs in a live setting, so it was nice recording them and knowing which ones really resonated with the crowd.

I remember when I was a kid and I used to go and see Queen play live. It was like there was Queen the album band, and then Queen the four dudes on stage playing the songs on stage, and it never lacked anything to me when it was just the four dudes playing the big songs.

Every time we go into the studio and use a different engineer or producer I try to look, listen and learn their approach. That has helped with the gear I look for to use live and in the studio.

I remember discovering that I loved recording - that breakthrough when I was in high school getting to record for the first time.

Technology means the kind of music you can make on your own if you've got an imagination is amazing. It's crazy that I can sit with a Mac and a keyboard and a mic and create a symphony.

I've had the honor of sitting in with the Allmans at their Beacon shows a couple of times, and it just doesn't get better than that.

Everything is so computerized these days and it's all edited and everything. Everything sounds so perfect, and we just want to be a band that sounds like a band.

That's what records do: represent a compressed, heightened version of the sound. Because of the compression of the tubes and microphones and the wax, it's magic!

We were touring the States tied to a load of drum machines and sequencers and synthesizers, playing to hundreds of thousands of people and yet feeling strangely removed from the music.

I think probably the first time I recorded anything was mid-2010.

One of the most fun parts about my job is that when the music gets recorded live at the end of the project and real musicians play it, I still get goosebumps every single time.