There are lots of really good guitarists, but they play with the same pedals that everybody else does. Everybody buys the same pedals, so the sounds tend to be the same. I am looking for different ways of doing that without having to spend days and weeks and months fooling around with pedals, which I don't enjoy.
I'm trying to enlarge what I do with my voice, not through technique but just through the sounds. I think we all make noises, and particularly when we get involved or emotional about something, the colors and the tones of those noises change.
People need to go back and figure out why it is that Slipknot plays the way it is. That way, maybe, you know, maybe every band doesn't start sounding the same anymore.
When I started to play with my fingernails, it was not just for volume. The most important thing was giving the guitar different colors in its voices.
You always have to reset your volume for the venue you are in. Sometimes the tubes can have you scratching your head because they react differently at different volumes.
If you take a violin, you can make it sound 50 different ways. Not just pizzicato and played by the bow, but ponticello, and harmonics, and tremolos. If you take an oboe and play it, there's about one way you can make it sound: like an oboe.
My set can get really screamo and aggressive, or it can be ambient and Enya-esque.
You can't imitate; all our faces are constructed differently... and the vocal cords; otherwise, we'd all sound alike. I don't think anybody should ever teach by imitating.
I have one custom guitar which I play almost exclusively. I have others - sometimes you want a little texture, kind of a different sound or something.
They flat their fifths, we drink ours.
Metal, I love metal sounds. If I have a stick with me, I just drag it across a fence. And all fences make different sounds, just like people when they laugh.
It was loud in spots and less loud in other spots, and it had that quality which I have noticed in all violin solos of seeming to last much longer than it actually did.
I don't really think of Dire Straits as a sound, you know. It. just depends on the song, and the stuff we're doing is so varied.
The guitar to me, from the classical/gut-string guitar right through to Hendrix, et cetera, has all the range [of sound]. Within those six strings it is incredible what one can get sound-wise. It's just down to imagination, really.
Obviously the biggest change is that it's me by myself. When you don't have another band interpreting your songs or playing them the way that they have, it's bound to sound different.
Rilo Kiley was a rock band, so I wanted my solo records to feel different.
The Replacements don't sound like The Replacements half the time!
The wind is a very difficult sound to get. It's always changing.
The sensitive ear of the musician detects a certain musical note in every city which is different from that of another city. He hears in each little brook a new melody, and to him the sound of wind in the treetops of different forests give a varying sound.
If you stick with one sound and one way of working, how will you ever progress?
Blues purists may hate what I do sometimes because it's a little dirtier.
Never try to make the same record twice, even when people are screaming for the same sound.
I'm versatile with my sound. I can switch it up a lot.
Some tracks are with quartet and some tracks are with synthesizer.
What can often happen when doing accents is that you go too far to one extreme, so it becomes a caricature. It's important to bring an accent back to a natural organic place so you're still speaking like you would speak, just the sound is different. But your rhythms are not.
