Lee Ranaldo Quotes

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.

After a couple of failed attempts, I came up with a weird tuning where I was dropping the G string down a step so that it became a seventh, and it got me to a place where I could play all these figures fairly easily. It was not an easy thing to work out.

I was never a fan of open tunings, because some people will do that and fumble around. But that's not my jam.

We want to connect all these musical worlds together. We just improvise; we know straight away if its going to work or not. They're not covers - I hate the word cover. We do a transcription: mix it up, put our own spin on it. I think people will be surprised how powerful our show is.

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

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.

I don't even think whether I play the blues or not, I just play whatever feels right at the moment. I also will use any gadget or device that I find that helps me achieve the sort of sound on the guitar that I want to get.

When you tune your guitar in a different way, it lends itself to a new way of looking at your songwriting.

If I pick up a guitar, I don't practise scales. I never have. I come up with something I haven't done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. It's not like the music I'm doing is just a single thread.

Music is liquid. It's meant to be messed with and played with and stretched and pulled and pushed, I think.

Every album is unto itself, so whatever sounds we need to come up with, like way back when, we needed horns. So we invented the Lone Wolf Horns, and we learned how to play horns.

Thundercat, specifically, is insane. I'm always surprised at the things he comes up with when we're jamming out together. I gotta try to keep up with him and his ideas, be able to respond without speaking, and come through with some more music. He challenges me to keep it musical and not so computer.

We're not playing your typical guitar tuning, so there is no normal chords for us to get our footing with. We're pretty much making it up as we go as far as the sounds we're creating. Oftentimes, the song will be inspired by just a certain kind of block of sound that somebody creates.

One thing I liked about 'Silver Bell' is that I barely knew how to play in the tuning I was writing in, and I just went for it anyway.

I think it's really important to show new styles of song and music. I think that's what people want to see and hear from me.

I think with everything I do, I'm trying to just come up with new ways of creating music and mixing styles together. That's just what's fun for me to do, to try to make myself inspired.

I like to experiment when it comes to music.

I play guitar and I'm always trying to find out the latest kinds of riffs.

I'm influenced by a lot of different genres of music. So I'm constantly trying to rework production and make things interesting in the live show and on records.

I grew up learning carnatic music but I also enjoyed english music so I always thought I could marry the two words and we tried the idea once and it was a hit.

I just wanna make more music, legit music as opposed to keeping the same constant thing. I wanna show growth in the music, pretty much.

It's like jazz: You learn the rules to break them - as long as you can break them in a meaningful way.

I think I compose as a listener: improvising and listening back excites me because I get to ideas that never would have occurred. Then I bring in the computers and samplers... and I begin to loop and process and change them.

Always try and play with as many people as possible, even if it's not your style of music, because you will learn a lot.

The goal of serious musicians is to play outside of yourself. That's most likely with people who suggest things that are outside your musical experience.