I guess that I’m primarily thought of as a rocker, largely because of ‘Frankenstein’ being such a heavy song – you know, it was really hard rock, almost a precursor of heavy metal and just the image of the synthesizer. I happened to be the first guy to get the idea of putting a strap on the keyboard.
If I can sit down at my keyboard and have a melody that says something that I can’t with words, that’s a really beautiful thing.
One of my earliest memories is of bashing the keyboard with my hands, my chubby little baby hands, and I remember the sound hitting my face. It became my toy.
Yes, my mother was a singer, and my father played piano and keyboards. They were in a band together, though they also had regular jobs because they had kids and stuff like that.
It was always the singer that was the front man, but Mike stood there and played piano and keyboards. He had a great voice and he was the Sixties’ Rod Stewart, and he contributed a tremendous amount to the Dave Clark Five.
Music is my passion. I’ve always been musically driven and musically inclined. I play the keyboard a little bit. I love listening to music and discovering music. That’s my love, but I’m not a rapper at all.
Where I thrive is with my hands on the keyboard or my pen on the paper. One of the things I get to do is I get to rewrite. I rewrite, and I work hard on my scripts. You can rewrite until you’re ‘perfect,’ and that’s something that’s safe for me.
I do music because I can just pick up my guitar and sing, and completely satisfy, instant gratification. I don’t need a script, I don’t people, I don’t need anything, cameras, I just have myself and my guitar, or keyboard.
Time made me change. I gradually woke up to the realization that this is who I am, an author, a public figure, and I couldn’t just hide in my study, tapping away at the keyboard and pretend that I didn’t have a role to play beyond stringing words together.
One summer, when I was elementary-school age, my neighbors and I built guitars and keyboards out of scrap wood, painted them in bright colors, and formed the cover band Lil’ ‘D’ Duran Duran. We didn’t make our own noise or even pretend to play our fake instruments.
The keyboard is my journal.
If there is no music, I will perish. While I have not learnt music, I can play the tune that comes into my head on the keyboard.
I’ve got four or five records in my head at a time that I try to work on and I would like to do a guitar trio record next – since The Police I’ve mostly made records with keyboards.
Music has always been in my family, but it was mainly keyboards. I learned to play classical piano, but when I first heard the amazing bass guitar of James Jamerson, who played on all the big Motown hits of the ’60s and ’70s, I knew bass guitar was my instrument.
The rhythmic feel of ‘Dark Days In Paradise’ is completely different to anything I’ve ever done before. There’s a lot of drum loops on there, but used in conjunction with real drums: a lot of influence from hip-hop and dance music, with the keyboard sound and sequencing.
Android phones are sold by dozens of hardware makers, the biggest being Samsung, Motorola, and HTC. There are lots of different form factors. Slider phones. Phones with keyboards. Big screens, small screens, midsize screens.
You look at keyboard warriors who just want to get on and talk bad about the people in the sport, and the problem is that everyone who’s talking bad, they wouldn’t even be able to fill a stadium with three thousand people.
We are all capable of so much more than the narrow confines of our regular behavior and our personality. So it’s interesting to play different notes on your keyboard.
Pighammer’ is what I envisioned the first Static-X record to be; trancier, a bigger electronic vibe with more keyboards.
Ad Rock from the Beastie Boys gave me a present: it’s a boombox with a keyboard and a beatbox in it. You can’t make that up.
I think that cakes should have touches of candy bar in order for it really to hit all those childhood notes on the keyboard.
I was never chasing to make a career out of it, but every day after school, I’d go to my keyboard and play for four hours and make up songs. It was a constant part of my life.
On any given day, I’m likely to be working at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences – or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles.
Even though there are some great keyboard players on the album, there are a number of songs with no keyboard on them and the backing is all guitar oriented. This is first time I’ve ever done this actually.
I play the keyboard, but I am fond of all wind instruments, the oboe in particular.
We spend a lot of time with MIDI keyboards and various processors, and we just figure it out. And all those things you hear in our songs work as submelodies and countermelodies, and everything has to fit.
To see a hacker actually hacking is not the most interesting thing visually, and it’s pretty boring as an actor: a hacker taps on her keyboard. There’s really not much more than that.
I have been playing a lot of keyboards, especially in the last five or six years. I suppose it gives you more scope than the guitar, although it does tend to make you write a different way.
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.
I got a toy keyboard when I was around like five or six.
My initial training was on the keyboard – mainly the great American songbook. In junior high, during the day, I was a classical clarinetist, but after school, I played New Orleans jazz and big-band music.
With the help of modern technology, I can compose intricate keyboard parts and then I have to go back and learn them in order to perform them properly.
I used to just sit in the living room and make up songs on the keyboard.
When I was about 14, I got a tacky keyboard for 250 pounds and put on a drum machine and found I could write a song.
There are keyboard terrorists everywhere who hide behind a veil of anonymity to pursue their vicious slanders.
When I’m online, I’m alone in a room, tapping on a keyboard, staring at a cathode-ray tube.
My place in Scotland is in the middle of nowhere, so you’ve just got a keyboard, guitar, a little drum machine and you know if you can work stuff out like that, if you can hammer out songs that sound good just with those three things and a voice, you’re on your way.
What I do remember is visualization of the sound of music, seeing bodies in movement in relation to how music sounded, because my mother practiced at the keyboard a lot and I also went to her lessons. As a two year old, three year old I remember seeing things in movement.
Because of the nature of my brand, it’s so important our readers know it really is me behind my keyboard.
We’re definitely going to get some flak each and every day, whether it’s social-media keyboard warriors, or people in person.
Twitter brings out the best in the keyboard bullies.
I went down to my keyboard and was playing random chords, and the one line I kept repeating was, ‘I’m a lost boy from Neverland.’ I decided to post it to Vine, and it got the biggest reaction I’d ever gotten. People wanted to hear more, and I had to explain it wasn’t a song.
I write songs. I perform. I play the guitar. I play the keyboard.
In my home office, I have two large, 30-inch computer monitors – a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard, so I can type or copy and paste between them. I’ll typically do Web stuff on the Mac and e-mail and chat stuff on the PC.
My brother Carl taught me how to play bass. I’m a self-taught keyboard player, though – I figured out our harmonies at the piano.
I plan to retire at 50. When I’m done, I ain’t touching no more keyboards.
The problem is that once I start on a song and get a rough idea of where I might go with an arrangement, I try dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different things on a song. The bass, the backing guitars, the lead guitars, the keyboards. It’s a long process. It’s like 100 steps forward and 99 steps back.
From time to time, I’ve experimented with sculpture or metal design. It’s a good break from just sitting behind the keyboard.
A lot of artists are scared when they see trumpet players show up – they like, ‘Nah, that ain’t what I want.’ I try to tell them, ‘Dude, I’ll give you trademark Mannie Fresh, but it’s not about keyboards and a drum machine.’
I already have it, but a good keyboard is invaluable when you spend a lot of time typing. My favorite one is the ancient IBM Model M I have at home.
The rest of the band were basically friends, So it was me following them around and begging them to let me be in their band for two or three years. And they finally let me in on the harmonica, actually, and then the keyboards, and finally the guitar.
If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.
I used to listen to songs on the radio and play that junk back on that little keyboard.
