Jam Master Jay Quotes

Technology has allowed people to make records really cheap. You can make a record on a laptop.

For me it all started with two turntables and a mixer.

Time has changed and artists release more songs in a short span of time and that's where the auto-tune steps-in. One doesn't have to record a song multiple times to make it better.

I had also done a little disc jockeying.

DJing is an art that I have the utmost respect for, and I've been practising it since I was 17 years old. Doing Tom Cruise wedding-type things becomes the focal point of every interview, and you realize that you have to cut it out if you don't want to be answering questions about that.

I am such a gearhead. In my recording studio, I personally engineer and edit everything on computers.

The genius of vinyl is that it allows - commands! - us to put our fingerprints all over that history: to blend and chop and reconfigure it, mock and muse upon it, backspin and skip through it.

I basically taught myself how to DJ, but I've been inspired by DJs throughout my whole career. I have some good friends that would hook us up with music. You learn some little things here and there from each DJ and you just take it and put your own style into to it.

The beautiful thing about hip-hop is it's like an audio collage. You can take any form of music and do it in a hip-hop way and it'll be a hip-hop song. That's the only music you can do that with.

Pro Tools was invented to quicken the recording process.

You can get so many sounds out of one record. Every record can be used in some way.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

I named myself Flash many years ago, as I loved the cartoon. Then my own fans said that I should call myself 'Grandmaster,' because of the way I operate turntables. I put the two together and that was it.

If the music in a groove fits with what you're playing, then play it; if not, then you can play it backwards. If that doesn't work, you try it at a different speed. If it really doesn't work you just break it. The whole ritual to put a record on a turntable just to listen to it, I don't do that too often.

I'm a huge fan of home recording. I think it levels the playing field. You don't need $100,000 to record a studio CD.

Modern recording has made it so that people can spend forever taking shortcuts and making everything uniform, but that strips music of what makes it exciting.

I knew that as a DJ from 1970 on up that I would eventually come with this sound. I brought out all these other break beats that you hear so much on a lot of these records.

I prefer to unwind by DJing. I learned that from Mike D from the Beastie Boys. After a show, he would DJ. Once I saw that, I wanted to do that. And now DJing is like my lifeline. I love the power it represents.

I downloaded ProTools - legally, of course... and I wanted to impress girls by making remixes of songs.

Now, you can just get a laptop, get some software, put a microphone on it and make a record. You have to know how to do it. It does help if you've had 35 or 40 years of experience in the studio. But, it still levels the playing field so artists can record their own stuff.

I developed the Clock Theory to help me time records; you know, spin the record back two revolutions or whatever and then play the break, spin the other one back two, play, like that.

As an individual I was known as the DJ or the mixer.

Yes, we record practically everything on Pro Tools.

Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.

The good thing about Pro Tools is you can actually hear what you're working on, so it doesn't just become this intellectual idea. But Pro Tools can be dangerous, too. It can make things sterile.