Having the facility to have this multitrack at home, I could try experiments with sort of all of the instruments, giving them different treatments so they didn’t actually sound, necessarily, like the instrument itself.
I play as many instruments as Prince, and I can write as many songs as him, but he’ll be way better than me forever.
Some people like the same thing forever, but I don’t know. We kind of, like, listen to loads of different stuff, and our attention spans aren’t good enough. So there was a bit of frustration when you’re, like, having to play the same thing all the time because we play all, like, loads of different instruments.
As a kid, I could just pick up melody and harmony instinctively, and that’s why I can play lots of instruments.
Performing arts buildings are complex. The acoustics, the sight lines and all that have to just be perfect. So you begin with just making these things sublime as musical instruments. And if you fail there, you have failed it all.
A cello can sound like so many instruments, but it’s only one, you know, like a guitar; it has percussive qualities. It can sing like the violin, you know, like a voice.
My parents were always supportive of me in terms of expressing myself artistically. Art, musical instruments, singing – whatever I did, they were just really supportive.
Just the actual physical ability to hold four instruments simultaneously and do some of the things that Vivien was able to do is mind blowing to any surgeon. He never went to medical school and he became one of the great teachers of medicine himself, people are just amazed.
I think that the more that you play and the more instruments you play and the better you get at them, then you will be better off for it as a guitarist.
I mean, on the food chain, do instruments really rate? I don’t think so.
We must never relent in our efforts to resolve conflicts through diplomacy and through all of the instruments bestowed by the Charter of the United Nations.
It’s interesting because neither of my parents play instruments. They both love music, but neither of them are musicians. Somehow, I was drawn to it.
The steep decline in America’s image and standing after 9/11 is a direct reflection of global distaste for the instruments of American hard power: the Iraq invasion, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, Blackwater’s killings of Iraqi civilians.
I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.
I found a way to connect with lots of instruments rather than just fixating on one of them. I just loved making noise on anything.
When I was 8 years old, there was a showcase of all the instruments you can learn at my school. This guy was playing the trumpet. I heard it and was like ‘Oof I got to learn to play.’ The sound – everything was amazing. I was blown away.
I grew up playing about 15 instruments and the way that I was able to accomplish that was by cutting my classes, hanging out in the band room all day, and going from one instrument to the next to the next, until I learned how to play everything by ear.
Identity is made up of lots of different things now. Different colors and patterns stand out at different times. Different instruments in the symphony of being are more distinct than others at different times.
Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.
My father set a strict regimen for me. He insisted that I learn to play many musical instruments before I choose one.
To me, the appeal of opera lies in the fact that a myriad of singers and instruments, each possessed of different qualities of voice and sound, against the backdrop of a grand stage and beautiful costumes, come together in one complete and impressive drama.
Banjos are funny instruments. They can get pretty irritating.
I’m a rock and roll kid, but to me, rock and roll isn’t just four idiots banging their instruments really loud.
Bachata is expensive to produce because of all of the instruments.
My mum was very good at making me take up musical instruments, so although there was no popular music she made me learn the recorder when I was three, the violin when I was five and the piano when I was seven. I took up the guitar myself when I was 14.
With ‘Innerspeaker’ I was trying to do these hypnotic ’60s grooves, but it was so hypnotic and repetitive that they sounded like they were sampled. It was making electronic sampled music but using real instruments to do it.
I started taking piano lessons when I was about 5, and there was always a lot of music in my family: my parents both play instruments, my grandparents were classical violinists, and my grandfather was actually a music professor and a conductor.
Every day I look forward to getting with my instruments, trying new things.
Computers were never designed in the first place to become musical instruments. Within a computer, everything is sterile – there’s no sound, there’s no air. It’s totally code. Like with computer-generated effects in movies, you can create wonders. But it’s really hard to create emotion.
I’m not one of those guys who can just take a guitar into a room and come out with a song. I need all my instruments dotted around.
I’m not likely to forget where I’ve been and what I’ve done and learned. I think it’s just as important to play new instruments as to play new pieces. The old ones are getting scarcer and the new ones more and more wonderful.
I don’t have a huge amount of gear, but on the software side, I have a number of plug-in chains that act as abstracted versions of real instruments.
I would go to school and try to talk to my mates about music and playing instruments and stuff, and they would turn around and go, ‘What’re you talking about? Shut up.’ And I realised that I was the weird one.
When we were younger, we sang at the dinner table. We started doing two part harmony, then three part, and then we added back up tapes and instruments.
Today a record producer is even more involved and is often the production’s sole musician, one person playing all the instruments one-by-one.
Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air.
I’m triggering acoustic instruments. I’m literally beating, smacking, hitting, blowing, doing physical things. It’s an incredibly exciting way to make music.
The Reformers, therefore, as instruments in the hands of God, in delivering the Church from bondage to prelates, did not make it a tumultuous multitude, in which every man was a law to himself, free to believe, and free to do what he pleased.
I’m always thinking ‘how can I blend something?’ whether it’s musical instruments, voices, or the people around me.
I’m a huge fan of the series of books by Cassandra Clare, ‘The Mortal Instruments.’
I want to show people all of me, because that’s what I haven’t been doing. To be able to play so many instruments, and no one’s ever seen me play, it seems like someone who’s bluffing.
When I’m making music, I can hear all the parts, all the instruments. I can hear what it should be.
As a rock band, you’re slightly one foot in the past, playing instruments like guitar, bass and drums.
Being outside is a loose theme on ‘Paracosm.’ Acoustic-sounding instruments have that warmth to them that is really important to communicate. It was really important for me to tell a story – my favorite records have a narrative feel.
I write on all instruments.
I always just sit down at the piano and make the main hook – what I want the track to be about melodically – and then I’ll build everything else around that. But growing up, I did not play any instruments.
God gave me the gift to be able to play instruments and I have to play.
If we are really serious about preventing another crisis like the 2008 meltdown, we should simply ban complex financial instruments unless they can be unambiguously shown to benefit society in the long run.
I mix Indian instruments with Western instruments all the time.
The majority of the high schools and the public schools in N.Y.C. don’t even have band programs. Hip-hop in a lot of ways is an outgrowth of a lack of instruments and a desire to play music, so we can’t really fault the kids for that.
I like big shows, a lot of volume and a lot of energy. I love electric instruments. But I do love mixing those with bluegrass instruments and cranking those up, too, with a little bit of that rock energy.
I never started learning instruments with the hope of having a career in it. It was more kind of I quite enjoy messing around and writing or playing with the family and stuff like that.
The Internet was supposed to be the greatest tool of global communications and means of sharing knowledge in human history. And it is. But it has also become the most effective instrument of mass surveillance and potentially one of the greatest instruments of totalitarianism in the history of the world.
I came from somewhat of a musical family. I had an uncle on Broadway. My dad kind of knows how to play instruments. Although, I always find it annoying when he does play an instrument.
On ‘Sullivan,’ you sang live. Not only that, you sang with a 40-piece band. So you had instruments that weren’t even on the original record! So this was when the rubber met the road – when you had to really learn how to perform. And it was for 10 or 12 million people. So that was a challenge.
