The first time I saw 'Minecraft,' people wanted to have 8-bit style video game music. But I wanted to go around that and make something organic and partly electronic, partly acoustic, and see if that would be interesting.
Doing the acoustic at Carnegie is basically advised because electric music tends to get, let's just say, acoustically unsound.
I'm big fan of soulful music - classic rock with a folk-ish twist.
In the studio, I don't use an amp, I just go direct into the desk. It's virtually acoustic, what I'm doing.
I write alternative, folkie pop. It's very acoustic.
With my projects, I really like the extreme high-tech stuff, but I also like the other end, the acoustic things. So it seems like those meet on an iPad, where you make shapes but the sounds coming out of it are really acoustic.
Playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table.
When they invented the mandolin, it was as if they were trying to come up with the least efficient means of extracting noise from a piece of wood.
I play the piano. I bought an upright piano that is actually electric, so I can practice my scales with headphones on and not make my neighbours' lives hell!
I'm enjoying writing songs that are more stripped back.
I would say when you're dealing with live musicians and musicality, the warmth of a live instrument brings a certain feel to a song that is really hard, sometimes, to get from synthesized instruments.
There's some pictures of me playing hollow bodies, but I never last long. I always come back to the acoustic.
My goal from the very beginning was just to write good songs that don't require any production to be felt or understood. I wanted to be able to sit in a room with a guitar and play the song from beginning to end and have it be as impactful as if you heard the studio version with all the bells and whistles.
I always come back to the gentler stuff like Simon & Garfunkel and the Fleet Foxes' first album - that's quite an odd one.
I wanted to hear the songs in the way that I had written them, which was very basic. All I wanted was drums and another guitar, and I was just going to sing.
I love the tone of old, non-amplified, real acoustic fiddles, and Wood Violins are the closest thing I have found to that sound. They play beautifully!
Electric guitars are an abomination, whoever heard of an electric violin? An electric cello? Or for that matter an electric singer?
Every one of the songs was based around picking an acoustic guitar. That was part of the concept from the beginning, that the tempos were going to go from slow to almost mid-tempo.
I've tried to become a singer with the guitar and not let any technological licks run my life. Just write the licks and play them as best as I can as a part rather than ad libbing.
I love the subtlety and tonal range of the acoustic guitar.
It's interesting to see how acoustic guitars are emerging as a primary instrument once again ... reminds me very much of what Jim Messina and I were doing back then. You can't get too far away from an acoustic guitar
In a way, as much as we love to be a big, loud rock band, the acoustic album was a lot easier to make than the rock records. I think because it was brand new territory for the band.
To me, there is nothing better than me going into the studio with a live band and hearing those violins and that echo and that sound. I mean I loved it.
When you play the 12-string guitar, you spend half your life tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune.
To me, my guitar has always been my orchestra.
