will.i.am Quotes

The first devices to record and play back music were the phonograph and the gramophone. The gramophone's inventor: Alexander Graham Bell.

My thought was I should try to stick with names that people may recognize like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Hoagy Carmichael, so if somebody cared to research, they would find a wealth of material.

Gibson has been making the finest electric guitars the world has ever witnessed for over 70 years. They are as American as God, guns and rock and roll.

By the time I got to building synthesizers, I had perhaps 20 years' experience building electronic musical instruments.

The Midwest is a musical melting pot and the source and birthplace of several musical genres.

The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions.

I had been building electronic musical instruments since I was a kid.

Lots of people think it was Jimmy Page who had the first fuzzbox. It wasn't, No! it wasn't me either.

I don't like Thomas Edison. I'm a fan of Nicolai Tesla.

If we look at music history closely, it is not difficult to isolate certain elements of great potency which were to nourish the art of music for decades, if not centuries.

I was the first artist, I think, to ever do an all-keyboard album. There were things that resembled it, like Stevie Wonder. A lot of his stuff was on keyboards, but he used brass and he used other things as well. I was the first artist, also, to use drum machines. I was really the one who kind of started that whole thing.

I lived at the greatest time in the history of mankind to be a musician.

There was no music at all during my childhood. The first time we heard music was when my eldest brother bought a tape recorder. Even then, only he was allowed to touch it. But in our house, we listened to legends such as Muhammad Rafi, Mehdi Hasan, Noor Jehan, Attaullah Khan Esakhelvi.

I am pretty well versed in the knowledge of music.

I grew up listening to my grandfather's stories of our musical past. He would often talk about the orchestras that played at concerts and the musicians who played on Sunday evenings on street corners. By the time I grew up in the '80s, all of this was a thing of the past. I lived vicariously through his stories and often wondered what it would have felt like to have been part of his generation.

There would be no rock and roll or rhythm and blues without Leo Fenders' contribution ... the tone is everything

When the musical keyboard was created in the 1970's, you had electronic geeks that had no background in music created these devises and gave them to musicians that had no background in electronics. The result was some of the wierd sounds that came out in the '70s.

Michael Jackson changed the format and history of music. His videos were films. He was the first who floated on the stage and changed the concept of a musical performance. He created something that's still the basis of a lot of what's done today.

Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.

The rise of salsa was such an important time in musical history, not just in Latin music but music in general, because these guys created a new sound.

I grew up I guess you'd say in the cassette era.

From a very early age, I started to get really interested in how songs were put to tape. Not just listening to the songs, but the way the songs were recorded.

The greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison Edison's first major invention, in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented.

There's quite a few people getting into that - new acts coming along that are using a lot of stuff that happened in the 50s and 60s. They're completely ignoring the 70s which is kind of a turn on because to me nothing has really gone down in the 70s.

You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.