The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.
People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.
Widespread Panic discovered a couple of my songs and started doin' 'em on the gigs. They'd take a song and expand it and everybody plays a long time and people really like that. But I made my living as a songwriter so I try to get to singin' and get it over with.
We had a bunch of instruments around the house. Like, I played different instruments, trumpet, bass, drums, piano, all that, but whatever I could get my hands on.
I play keyboards and sing. I've written a couple of songs too.
Music is extremely intuitive, which acting too in a different way.
What I do is, I look at rock guitar players, and I say to myself, 'What is this guy doing? What does he have that can inspire me?' I try to see what other people are doing and take what they have and turn it and twist it into my own thing.
I learned tabla for three years when in school, then started picking up the basics of the acoustic guitar when in college.
I don't really write. I'm an on-the-spot type of person. This beat, let's listen to it; let's vibe. And then I'll do a melody, and then we'll go back and do it.
It's very hard to write a song alone. It's only by jamming that you can get a song together.
Swing is my main weapon.
The thing with Led Zeppelin songs is that they were never the same. They were very fluid and tight but loose.
Studying music involves a lot of mathematics and a lot of exercises of memory. Or you've got to be able to be like somebody, to play like somebody, to play Mozart's music the way he played it and how he intended it. You've got to make it perfect, and that's not what I want to do. Although it is beautiful.
I've been devoting quite a bit of my time to harmonic studies on my own, in libraries and places like that. I've found you've got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.
I took a few piano lessons as a kid, but it didn't last; I just learned piano from doing it over and over on my own, because I didn't have many friends, and there was always a keyboard in the house.
My grandfather and my father disagreed about music, not least of all because my dad wanted to improvise. It wasn't just that he wanted to play different music; it was just that he came off the dots.
It's great fun to play with a really good band.
I enjoy songwriting. It's slow-motion improvising.
It's real primal; I just like playing music.
I played the Spanish guitar for eight years, like flamenco.
I'm kind of a one-note at a time, one finger keyboard player.
We're all about trying to play better every night, not just singing hit songs ... we ad lib, and every night there's jamming .. it's almost like the Grateful Dead meets Buck Owens some nights, because we'll go off on little adventures and sometimes we do crash the bus!.
I'm a guy who doesn't know the name of the chord, but I know that it sounds good.
I'm a crap guitarist and I find it really hard writing on my own.
My mom and sisters liked to sing and we would jam at home very often. I would also jam a lot in college, where I formed a fusion band and played the keyboards.
