Steve Vai had a unique style of playing. Steve Vai didn't sound like anyone else: Steve Vai sounded like Steve Vai.
It's hard to say this about a guy like Eddie Van Halen, one of the greatest guitar players who ever lived, but he's really limited to a style and they're locked into it.
The way I play is very unique.
I'm left handed and I'm playing a right handed kit... That's why everyone thought, 'Wow, he's a genius,' but all I was doing was trying to play backwards... It's one of those mad accidents, you can't learn it.
Originally I had a block about appearing in a musical. I went to a voice teacher for a while, but that did no good. My range is about one and a half notes. I ended up talking the musical numbers, which was revolutionary at the time. The lyrics are extremely intricate. They move along like a precisely acted scene. If you miss a word - heaven help you - the orchestra rattles past like an express train, and you've got to run like the devil to catch up.
When I watch my early documentaries, they're very eclectic. They don't follow any particular [pattern]. I would have gotten thrown out of film school because I didn't. I was just putting them together somehow as the spirit moved me, following my nose, thinking I was brilliant.
I think Thurston's and my weird tunings lent Sonic Youth a very different sound from the get-go. In the band's 30 years - aside from covers - there are maybe two or three songs we wrote using traditional tuning.
At the time when I was conducting my research there was no known method for taking the guinea pig's temperature. I demonstrated a technique which is now widely used.
Stevie Ray Vaughan was very intense. Maybe that's what caught everybody's attention. As a player, he didn't do anything amazing.
Caravaggio was a tormented, defiant, bisexual, angry young man - a maestro who looked nothing like a maestro.
You must hold on to the sort of finger-painting aspect of music. That's something I learned, particularly from listening to Neil Young. Tom Waits is another one, because Tom's music is incredibly sophisticated and beautifully arranged, but he's using a toolbox that's unlike anybody else's.
Just making a movie the way 'All is Lost' had to be made was a great experience, because it was structured differently than any other film I will make for the rest of my life.
No one believed me when I said it was possible to put fabric in resin.
The goal I proposed myself in making cubism? To paint and nothing more... with a method linked only to my thought... Neither the good nor the true; neither the useful nor the useless.
When Tom Morello picks up the guitar, I'm sure what he sees is totally different from what I do, but I love the way he plays.
The best engineer a few decades ago was someone who could create the most beautiful beam or structure; today it's to do a structure you cannot see or understand how it's done. It disappears and you can talk only about color, symbols, and light. It's an aesthetic of miracle.
I read an article on me once that described my machine-method of silk-screen copying and painting: 'What a bold and audacious solution, what depths of the man are revealed in this solution!' What does that mean?
When we could split the screen, it was like 'Wow!'.
My way of directing is definitely unorthodox, definitely unconventional.
What I've done from the very beginning is play everything with extreme accuracy. I never said to myself, 'Okay, if I put my fingers this way, it's gonna result in this.' I've never taken a lesson. My way of playing the guitar was a fresh approach to the instrument.
The leg drop was a move that nobody really used, and nobody ever hit the ropes and jumped up really high, so I tried it out in Japan and the people loved it. That's how I came up with it.
I came up with my own 'Dream Shake' I guess - the white version.
I think people hire me for the slightly weird angle that I bring. Part of the trick is keeping it sort of simple; you have to give the impression of not that much music playing when there's really a lot.
Twyla Tharp set her sights on ballet, and ballet, hungry for major talent, succumbed.
Percussion is the most adaptable family of instruments. The biggest challenge is to project percussion in a lyrical way.
