MIDI Quotes

I was using computers for music in the '70s, '80s and '90s, and people didn't get it. They thought you should only use computers for your taxes and making pie charts.

Computers were never designed in the first place to become musical instruments. Within a computer, everything is sterile - there's no sound, there's no air. It's totally code. Like with computer-generated effects in movies, you can create wonders. But it's really hard to create emotion.

I happen to think that computers are the most important thing to happen to musicians since the invention of cat-gut which was a long time ago.

There's a confusion sometimes with the laptop being the current tools and where electronic music initially comes from.

I'm pretty much fully digital. I've basically spent a few painstaking days putting sounds into my laptop, just banking them, because I love playing, and I love visually seeing it on my screen and being able to change the sounds more, with different plug-ins. I've created my own synth sounds.

At the beginning of this album I discovered the computer and had great fun playing with the thing. And I realized that, not being a good keyboard player, I could write things in very small sections, give them a certain feel and mess about with bends on the keyboard.

Atari always was a technology-driven company, and we were very keen on keeping the technological edge on everything. There's a whole bunch of things that we innovated. We made the first computer that did stamps or sprites, we did screen-mapping for the very first time, and a lot of stuff like that. We had some of the most sophisticated sound-creating systems, and were instrumental in MIDI.

Midi is my hobby.

I don't do that much sampling. I create all my own sounds.

I bought this Oxygen midi synth from a flea market in Boston for $10. And then I found a cord in my house that fit it, and so I just started using that to do synth stuff in GarageBand.

There is nothing wrong in electronic music or synthesised music.

Writing in the electronic world, you imagine a sound, and then you have to go and find it. It's not like imagining a flute and then making that sound materialize. That's easy!

People are approaching electronic levels in music; although not all of it happens to tickle my fancy.

Most of today's music is done electronically.

In 1983, before computers came along, it wasn't easy to do electronic basslines and rhythms.

I generally use a lot of analog instruments, a few synths from the '80s like the Roland Juno-106, and an old Fender bullet guitar.

Music is composed on computers and other electronic equipment; producers don't want to spend money on orchestra.

The thing that's good about music-making software like the DAW-kinda systems is that they're all generally the same; the kind of interface is normally laid out in a similar way. Depending on the program, the sounds might be quite different, but they tend to all have a drum machine or synthesizer or a sampler.

It is at least 10 times more difficult to get a good synthesiser sound than on an acoustic instrument.

I was given this music programme called Cubase, one of the first multi-layering programmes, when I was seven, and I graduated to Logica at 11, and that became my primary instrument.

If you hear a New Order track that's mostly electronic, it's generally come about through one person sitting at a computer and programming it.

Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology.

That it's a lot harder to make a keyboard sound not-cheesy than a guitar.

Sometimes you cannot produce a specific sound you want with, say, a guitar or piano, and you simply need to use electronic elements.