Every concert I’ve finished with the knowledge I’ve played a fistful of wrong notes.
There are rhythmic ideas which sometimes only work up to a point. In writing there are moments when it just comes off the page, it’s not just a collection of notes.
I am an old-school guitar player. I’m not an ’80s-’90s sort of shredder who plays a million notes a minute. I am way more ’60s-’70s kind of style, and I write very ’60s-’70s.
I hope to refine music, study it, try to find some area that I can unlock. I don’t quite know how to explain it but it’s there. These can’t be the only notes in the world, there’s got to be other notes some place, in some dimension, between the cracks on the piano keys.
On Pinwheel, you can find and leave notes all around the world. The notes can be public or private, shared with an individual, a group, or everyone.
I get notes posted on my windscreen wipers and through my letterbox.
I love my stuff – you’re not supposed to say that. But because I’m performer as well as a writer, I’m constantly interacting with my own work. I always get to find these little secrets that I left for myself, little notes – I find them all over the scores.
It didn’t make a lot of sense for us to be doing Lotus Notes implementations.
On Saturdays, I get up early, spread out my notes from the week on the kitchen table, and create stories from them.
The year after I graduated college I had a job in a library. When people underlined passages in the library books, or made notes in the margins, the books were sent to me. I erased the lines and the notes. Yes, that was my job.
A lot of the time, in pop music especially, there’s reverb. And the reason is that reverb makes vocals sound better 99% of the time. It makes the notes ring out.
I still do not know where the notes will come from when I accept a commission for a new work.
Over time, I’ve paid attention, taken notes and forgotten easily half of everything I’ve gone through.
It’s easier to play aggression and malevolence onscreen, often, than to hit softer notes.
I work like every journalist works so I have recordings, I have notes.
One of the important things, which I wrote on yellow post-it notes and stuck on the wall during therapy, was that we are the product of our own thoughts.
My earliest memory as a kid was when I was about six, my dad used to take me and our Labrador Glen for a walk. We used to take a wind up camera and go searching for crop circles. We’d make little notes and I’d take photos of the circles.
What I learned about music is that it can have nothing to do with words, instrumentation, image, message, or meaning. The meaning is the melody, the notes, the rhythm – music for the sake of its own beauty, with nothing more required to express itself.
A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
Pretty much everyone’s career starts the same way: with grunt work. Not just the cliched fetching of coffee, but other lowly tasks: taking notes in meetings, preparing paperwork, scheduling, intensive research – even flat-out doing our bosses’ work for them.
What we look for when we need to find someone who can fit in with our music, the vocals and the harmonies and the way they blend are very important to us because if you listen to Beach Boys music, the harmonies, not only are the notes being sung, but there’s a blend to it. The voices have to blend.
I don’t sing operatically, and I sing very intimately, but I still do the scales, and I think in terms of intonation and making sure that I’m hitting the notes right on the head… and having it appear quite effortless.
Music should be able to invoke the natural emotions in all human beings. Music is not notes fixed on apiece of paper.
Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.
I play more rhythmically than I do a lot of notes.
American readers are so polite; their reactions make it seem like I’ve received thousands of thank-you notes. It’s just lovely, and amazing the things people tell you that have touched them and related to their own lives.
In 1962, I wrote a series about 42nd Street called ‘Welcome to Lostville.’ One result was that the young Bob Dylan read it and invited me to his first concert at Town Hall; the result was a kind of friendship that years later led to my liner notes for ‘Blood on the Tracks.’
I still struggle with my low notes. It’s just always been something for me: I’m not a low singer. I have a really high voice.
I keep all of my letters, postcards, and thank you notes. I’ll keep them forever!
Am I afraid of high notes? Of course I am afraid. What sane man is not?
If I’m playing a real-life person, I would take notes, I think that’s important. For instance, when I played Rosemary Clooney, I was lucky enough to meet her; thankfully, she was still with us. And I talked with her and read her book, so when it’s a real person, I want to find out everything I can.
When I practise scales I will play four notes on one string. If I’m playing a C major scale, starting on F, I’ll play the F, G, A, and B on one string and the C will be on the A string, etc, etc. Because I found not only was it good for my hands but it was really good for interconnecting things.
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
If the story wasn’t overly long, I’d type it out. And I’d carry it around with me for a week and jot notes on it, and then I’d throw it away and do another one.
Children who open their lunchboxes and find mothers’ handwritten notes telling them how amazingly bright they are tend to falter when they encounter academic difficulties.
Consider what a romantic expedition you are on; take notes.
The worst words I could ever hear as a bass player was, ‘Can you play the root notes?’
On those long notes behind the trumpet solo, if anyone lets his mind wander for a minute he is dead.
The biggest lesson to me is that I got the music from somewhere else – the notes, the music my parents listened to, and the stuff I listened to at every age. All of that inspired the music that I made.
One day I’d love to release a coffee table book of all the crazy notes I got from Disney Channel’s S&P and legal department.
Now I can broadcast to an audience of several million people on the ‘Today’ programme. I can talk about the day’s news. But on radio, believe it or not, we have notes and scripts. And while we might ad lib the odd wryly amusing asides, they come at the frequency of a suburban bus. About one every 90 minutes.
My writing process hasn’t changed – it’s is the same whether I’m working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper – and get to work.
When I’m sniffing around new territory, I often choose, rather randomly, one general book and then follow its bibliography and notes to other, more specialized works and to the primary source material.
When Kanye gets to a point where he can actually put a couple of notes together either vocally or two bars of valid music playing an instrument, then he might have a right to criticize somebody else.
I read the script and try not to bring anything personal into it. I make notes, talk to the director and we decide what kinds of shades should be in the character.
Sometimes that’s a year, sometimes it’s 18 months, where all I’m doing is taking notes. I’m reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
I have a box of things from Becca, my high school girlfriend, and Vanessa; and each one of them was love. I have the notes, the valentines, 20 mixed tapes, all of it. It’s important to keep that stuff.
I feel like maybe I get more nervous when I’m singing. One, it’s live. Two, there’s a lot of people watching. And three, you have to make sure you get the right notes and everything.
When I read, I take notes and underline things. So reading is a vigorous process for me, but I read in bed. My poor husband is trying to go to sleep, and I’m reaching over him to get the Post-it notes.
I always want to pick songs that are really crazy rangy, and sometimes those low notes aren’t there. But I started taking it way more seriously after a certain point, and I started doing vocal warm-ups every day, even when I wasn’t singing, sometimes twice a day.
In many college classes, laptops depict split screens – notes from a class, and then a range of parallel stimulants: NBA playoff statistics on ESPN.com, a flight home on Expedia, a new flirtation on Facebook.
Like a Star’ has a very simple melody, and when you play it, it’s only about three notes for ages, and it’s quite boring. But when you hear the chords, the chords are sort of different than the melody, and it’s pulling it around and making it mean something else.
There are two types of session guitar players. One reads and only plays what the ‘dots’ say. The other adds that something special and plays notes and solos you dream of. Big Jim Sullivan was such a player.
My scripts, they’re pretty serious. I basically just describe stuff. I don’t put too many notes and letters to the editors. But when I wrote ‘KGBLT,’ in parentheses I wrote, ‘Well this is the best thing I’ve ever written. It will all be downhill from here. I’m so sorry for the rest of my career.’
