Instrumental Composition Quotes

My favorite music is when the sound is supplementing the message. I don't think it's dramatic; it's cinematic.

'Are 'Friends' Electric?' was two songs: the verse part and the talking part. Two different songs I couldn't finish. One day I was playing the main verse part of 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' and after a few minutes I got frustrated, as normal, then started to play the other song, and realized they went together.

An instrumental album is something I've been wanting to do for a long time.

We're fans of stuff like Maiden, but I think we generally get it from weirder places. For me, the Eagles' 'Hotel California' represents one of the most brilliant harmony approaches to music. Boston did it very well, too.

Everyone can write their melodies and chords and pianos and guitars, but what hasn't been discovered yet are tones and textures, and that's very exciting. Probably the No. 1 most important thing in my music is not to sound like anyone else.

I write a lot of more instrumental music than I do vocal music. It's because I come out of a background of playing piano and then playing sax for a number of years. I kind of got into rock backwards. A lot of guys go into rock and then get sick of it and then go into something else. I came the other way, so I've always just had a lot more stuff lying around.

John Barry was the first film composer I was aware of. As a teenager I owned several of his Bond soundtracks.

I started making music for myself when I was sixteen.

My favorite soundtrack is 'Avatar.' It's the best thing in the world. I love it.

No cowboy songs, no hoedowns. It's a more serious piece. Yet every bar of 'Appalachian Spring' is clear, clean, tonal, intelligible - great music that anyone can grasp at first hearing.

A guitar for me is pretty much strictly in the context of writing songs for my band, coming up with ideas with my band, and then being able to perform those songs as best as I can on stage - that's what the guitar for me has always been.

If I can sit down at my keyboard and have a melody that says something that I can't with words, that's a really beautiful thing.

The first beat that I ever made that I thought was actually worth a damn was called 'Toilet Paper Nostrils,' and I made it when I had a cold. I had the worst cold ever. And I had toilet-paper nostrils making music, but it was really reflective of how I felt. It was a really sad trumpet sound.

When I'm writing instrumental music, I try to find musical and non-musical inspirations.

The song was wordless; The singing will never be done.

I've always gone into the studio with a very clear understanding of a song, of the words or, if it's an instrumental piece, of the melodies, and that never changes.

I got started as a producer first, but really, I feel my beats had more life than anyone could rap on them.

I'll make music as long as I can sing and stand up and hold a guitar and I feel like doing this.

There is no piece of guitar music that has the formal beauty of a piano sonata by Mozart, or the richly worked out ideas and passion of a late Beethoven string quartet, or for that matter the beautiful mellifluous poetry of a Chopin Ballade.

I dread naming pieces of music because being instrumental, most of the time the songs that I write are instrumental, I want the listener to make up their own story as to what it is and get the emotion pure without using logic.

A lot of the time, I will write a guitar riff first. I don't write drum riffs first.

I love to play music.

Once I discovered music and that you don't need to just use words but can add a growl to the melody, that releases so much more. I never want to make music for any other reason.

Sonic Youth was not a singer-songwriter band. It was an electric collective. And, whatever else people's perceptions of Sonic Youth were, it was always about putting together a time-based composition - and that is exactly what songwriting is, in its classic form.

You get to tell your story through your music if you choose to.