Musical Individuality Quotes

I made the tenor sax - there's nobody plays like me and I don't play like anybody else.

Certainly being proficient in an instrument does have its problems. Because the better you get, the more you just start sounding like an ordinary guitarist. There are certainly guitarists that transcend that and do really find their sound and all that sort of stuff.

I wasn't trying to sound like anybody else. Basically, I was just experimenting all over the place.

I wanted to make good records. But my problem is I've got a low boredom threshold, so I wanted it to look and sound different with each album, which is really tantamount to suicide, cause people lose it, they lose it - they say: 'I like that, and that's not this.'

I just wanted to make melodies. I started trying to do my own thing and let the melodies make the genre themselves.

The REM and Nirvana successes don't mean much to me except as a potential distraction for bands who want to cash in on the trend. Don't try to sound like someone else. REM and Nirvana don't sound like anyone else.

First and foremost, play what you love to play. Don't try to jump on a bandwagon or a trend or a popular musical craze.

I mean, Tool has a style, but we try to make all our songs sound different from each other.

Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.

I've always considered myself something of a musical rebel.

I made an a capella cover of Kesha when everyone else was listening to Miles Davis and people didn't like it. They imitated me.

I'm from the school of putting a lot of hours of practice into playing. But at the same time you have to write original music - that's really important, because that's the things that's going to separate you from everybody else, that's going to give you your unique voice as a music that you create.

The only way I'm not going to follow other people in reggaeton is if I listen to other things. I get other melodies or sounds and put them in reggaeton and make it different.

I liked the 12-bar blues because everybody could play it, but they could also play it their own way, and they could express their own emotions using that as a structure.

Any saxophone player will have those influences come through in their music in a very different way. I can listen to the same 10 sax players as someone else for my entire life, and we'll both play completely differently. That's the beauty of being a musician.

I think a lot of singer-songwriters get compared to each other, but I'd like to think that what I'm doing is special and specific to me.

In the past, I tried to be more of a typical session guitarist. I wasn't so concerned with impressing anybody.

I hear so many of the young people today sing and I think they have a good voice, yet I wonder if they'll ever know that they sound alike.

Seattle isn't known for a particular production sound, so that leaves a lot of great producers in Seattle doing kind of their own thing. And I think, for me, I was probably enough removed from hip-hop that my style was even a little bit weirder than that.

I don't try to worry about sounding like anybody because I know I have my own tone, my own sound. It's just about being honest in a song and trying to relate myself or how to basically break it down as simple as possible for someone to try to understand it. Not being too deep, not being too shallow at the same time.

My identity has everything to do with me and my instrument. It doesn't have to do with what production style I use, or how many people played on it, whether it's sparse or grandiose or whatever. And I'm social, frankly.

All my music sounds the same to me.

We stand for musical individuality. That's all we stand for.

A band ought to have a sound all of its own. It ought to have a personality.

Music was everything. Now it is just not as important as it used to be. When I was growing up, where everyone was trying to outdo each other by being more outrageous and sounding more different, now there is a homogeneous sameness to it all.