Rza Quotes

A lot of the stuff I've accumulated over the last few years of touring I thought was really interesting. Like sounds, sound bites, and beats even, but they weren't good dance beats they weren't ones anyone would want to rap over or anything.

I have always been far more interested in sound than technique, and how sounds work together, how they can be layered. I think electronic music, in its infancy anyway, allowed us to create music in a way that hadn't really been possible before. It created a new kind of musician.

Sometimes I listen to music and I wonder how did they get certain sounds.

I play a little bit of everything. I beat on the walls. I whistle. I scream. I go outside and scream because it sounds cool when it's recorded. I play drums on a chair. I snap, clap... just anything to build the track and make it feel like I want it to.

A lot of people hear things on the radio and try to make their own version of that.

I like making sounds and putting it together, I'm not just a singer or a producer.

I got FL studios; I looked up how to make beats and how to record myself, and then I just started making music from there.

Really, I just sit down, mess around, and play with sounds.

I don't sample. I'm not like one of these guys who concoct some beat on my sampler and just turns it in.

All day long you write little ideas on the piano and the guitar, but sometimes all you have to do is come in, set up the mic, press record and start the process.

When I was a kid, I played drums, and when I first got a 4-track, I would put down drumbeats and then do the rest of the tracks on top.

I'm intrigued on how music is made, that's how I started getting into it. Of course I've been in the booth before, just joking around to see how it is, and I'll make a couple of beats here or there and help my artists out. But other that, I'll stick to listening.

I love putting the music together. It's like art.

In high school I was making beats for my friends and for myself and rapping over them.

I've built an 8-track studio in my house that's virtually identical to what they used at Abbey Road, and I also own the 16-track set-up that Led Zeppelin used to record 'Houses of the Holy.' I'm interested in producing, but I'm mostly recording my own stuff.

Well, I've been recording myself on a computer since I was about 13 or 14. So it's completely entwined with my creative process. Essentially, it allows you to make music that's better and smarter than you are, by using your ears to lead the way.

I like tinkering with the tribe beat boxes and love using Reason as a beefed up beat box.

One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music.

The first two projects I did out of my dorm room were mock film soundtracks.

Everything I make as a producer, I visualize it as a DJ first. And all those beats, I test them as a DJ.

I've wanted to do it for years, but every attempt at it has turned into another tune. We have actually taken a different approach, we're doing a lot of sampling - we're even sampling bits of Flash!

By the mid-'60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

Today, computers help us making the music. It's really a tool.

Darrell is really good in the studio. I mean, he has a real working knowledge of how the process works, and what sounds good coming back over tape, and how the stuff works together.

I find it hard to get excited by just a sound. I have to have a song there, then I'll find what used I can make of that sound within the song.