Jose Feliciano Quotes

I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn't exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips.

With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.

Any talk of 'craft' makes me laugh. My music looks outward; it does not gaze upon itself in admiration. Artisanal is for cheesemakers. I don't know anything about music theory. Every time I approach my guitar, it's like the first time. There's no craft in that.

What I want to happen is to be really creative, and to play something new in the improvisations, every time.

I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record.

If you force yourself to write away from the piano, you come up with more inventive things. If you're too good a piano player, as some composers are, the music may become flavorless and glib. And if you're not a very good pianist, you're limited to the same patterns.

What intrigues me is that you get a good bunch of musicians together, and interesting things will happen.

I used to just sit in the living room and make up songs on the keyboard.

Someone like my father will improvise as much as 90% of the music in concert, but with me it's maybe 10 to 20%. It's sort of the test of how great someone is, the more they can improvise correctly and still be true to the raga they're playing, and still keep it new and fresh the whole time.

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

The composer makes plans, music laughs.

You can play a shoestring if you're sincere.

And if I would have taken lessons I probably wouldn't have done it, and what forced me to do all this weird stuff on the guitar was I couldn't afford effects pedals, I didn't have all this stuff when I was a kid so I just tried to squeeze all the weird noises I could out of the guitar, which brings me to building guitars.

For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.

I like people that can strap on a guitar and don't sweat the fact that you have to come up with a song in an hour. I want to work with someone who won't feel like they have to play along with Jason Molina. I want them to just have the confidence.

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.

What I look for in musicians is a sense of infinity.

To have everything written for you... It's not really creating. That's why I think symphony drummers are so limited. They 're limited to exactly what was played a hundred years before them by a thousand other drummers.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

I'd always been on the giving end of music and creating.

I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.

I never think about rhythm versus melody; I've always just played to what's in my head.

I've never taken a lesson in my life, and I can play every instrument there is. I play by ear, but I can fool anybody into thinking I went to some conservatory of music.

If I try to write a song, I will completely fail to write a song. But if I'm just holding my guitar and I just start humming, then I'll have a song in an hour.