I started studying counterpoint and theory with a physicist whose hobby was music.
From a technical viewpoint, I have certain things I'd like to present in my solos. To do this, I have to get the right material. It has to swing, and it has to be varied.
One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.
In the right key one can say anything. In the wrong key, nothing: the only delicate part is the establishment of the key.
I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.
My music is tonally based. There is plenty of dissonance, but it's used as a contrast. There is polytonality at times and a lot of rhythmic interplay.
Even if you're improvising, the fact that beforehand you know certain things will work helps you make those improvisations successful. It really helps to have a certain amount of knowledge about musical structure.
Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors or the architect his three dimensions.
To me, atonality is against nature. There is a center to everything that exists. The planets have the sun, the earth, the moon.
The music is in minors.
Beethoven wrote in three flats a lot. That's because he moved twice.
There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces.
I often use triadic arpeggio forms within my riffs and solos as a tool to create rich-sounding, poly-chordal sounds.
I think there's something that feels so good about a 1-4-5 chord progression. It's a very standard chord progression, and it just feels good to the ears.
I want music to move me, and I don't think it can do that without at least a link to tonality. It's the tug between atonal and tonal which makes music poignant.
I always think about music horizontally and vertically at the same time.
A scale is just the notes that are in a chord played one at a time instead of together. That's what has allowed me to go through the possible notes that work with a chord and make choices about which ones I like best. I go through by ear; you can do it by theory too, but the best way is to learn by ear.
Sheets of sound. Well, that was when I got tired of certain modulations. Like when you want to get back to C, and you've got to go to D and then G and then C. I was fooling around with the piano, and I figured out some other way to do it.
I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.
Find one note on the instrument that pleases you, and then find another note that also pleases you.
If the chords change a lot over the course of a song, it's better to stay within the same melodic structure.
