Richie Sambora Quotes

When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.

You start to think in terms of making an album that might be greater than the sum of its parts. It's sort of like having a lot of footage and then editing it into something that will make sense to a viewer, you know. Sometimes it might involve even working on an older song that might complete that picture.

I sit and write songs alone and then get together with people to help me flesh it out into a recording.

A great song has to stand on its own, just singing and playing, and the rest is frosting. But you have to pay attention to the frosting.

For me, it's always just about playing the song and recording it and giving it what it needs as a song.

Making an album is always a puzzle: you start by seeing a lot of different pieces, and they all need to come together into one picture.

In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool. On paper, though, it's all stripped back. The musical idea is the one that wins.

I love being in the studio, and I am a huge fan of live music. Without writing good stuff in the studio, you have nothing to play live.

I've got my own studio, and I've got four- to five-hundred unreleased tracks. I've got stuff that's electronic, orchestral, jazz, I've got rock, I've got metal, you know, I don't have polka.

I always want to make an album that lets people immerse in it, kind of like you get caught up in a good movie.

I pay such close attention of the record making process that most people would assume are very little and wouldn't be that big of a deal; the packaging, the title, and the harmonies, I think, are arguably as important as the lead vocals.

We listened to a lot of Rolling Stones and Beatles records when we were recording. They were really good at not playing loud, but generating really big sounds out of everything.

I want to make an album with just great beats and big vocals and just amazing lyrics.

I have been playing acoustic music for a very long time, and it's something that I am very comfortable doing, so if I made a record, it would probably be a mixture of that and some other things that I'm interested in.

We'll set up a demo session and try to knock out eight or ten songs and make them sound as close as we can to a record with the money and time we have.

I write the songs, go in and record them, then I listen to everything and decide how it all fits together.

When I listen to a record, or when I'm making a record, I listen to everything. I listen to the drums, the bass, the voice, the arrangement. I listen to the whole piece as an ensemble.

I create the music, and if this artist could complement this record, I reach out.

The records I make, I'm there from the writing of the first note through the click tracks to the miking of the drums to the editing of everything to the production to the vocals to the artwork.

Putting together a hit record is like putting together a puzzle.

I am always thinking about records I want to make.

I always created things, layered things on top of each other. That hasn't changed at all. With this first album, it was basically a celebration of that process of inventing and building sounds.

The producer should decide what kind of music is being made, what it's going to sound like - all of it: the why, when, and how.

When we record a song, like 'Bedside Manner,' it's important that the next time I write a somber, mid-tempo song that we don't treat it the same way.

As a songwriter, I've always loved to tell stories. But in my band, it was always about what would make sense for a band to put out.