We get notes sent to us backstage from college students that say, ‘My parents used to play your albums all the time! I grew up with you, and I love the new stuff.’
I could read music and sing all the right notes at the right time. And over time, I literally found my voice, found a way to make sound.
I use my computer to take notes more and more because my handwriting is so bad. I’m a lefty and it’s getting worse and worse.
When goods are exchanged between countries, they must be paid for by commodities or gold. They cannot be paid for by the notes, certificates, and checks of the purchaser’s country, since these are of value only in the country of issue.
I played in the high school band. I was the one baritone saxophone out of 80 other people. No one could tell whether I was hittin’ the right notes or the wrong notes.
But when you have to deal with notes, and to be able to make a full definition of what a sound is – if you are not around that environment, then you’ll find you lose that feel, that momentum, you lose all that.
I myself never make any notes. Usually, if I write something down, I can’t read it afterwards.
The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.
After my husband died, I could not write much – I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes – not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.
I have definitely had experiences where I can feel the shift from simply living my life to being slightly outside of my life and taking notes.
I’ve been thinking about a cookbook. I’ve been making notes and promising myself I’ll do it some day. I have an idea for a cookbook and music together.
I always say, when I play the first few notes and people scream… if you’re tired of that, you should try retail. What else are you looking for?
It’s not about the individual notes. It’s about the energy.
In the 1930s, all the novelists had seemed to be people who came blazing up into stardom from out of total obscurity. That seemed to be the nature of the beast. The biographical notes on the dustjackets of the novels were terrific.
I’ve been making notes of my life, but when it finally came time to write it, it took me back, and I cried many tears. But I also think that it’s liberating.
A MIDI file contains coded instructions to play a particular series of notes on an electronic music synthesizer. A MIDI file is more like a piano roll in a player piano than any type of sound recording.
There are only so many chords and notes in the world.
An ex-ABT ballerina, while staging a ballet for the company, once followed a dancer into the bathroom to deliver notes through the stall door. She was known to bark – literally, like a dog – during private rehearsals.
I first started reading about Barack and taking notes when he won the Iowa caucuses in January 2008 because I was embarrassed that, at that point, I knew virtually nothing about him.
I don’t write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.
I’d love to be a diva. But I’d then have to send so many apology notes for my abhorrent behaviour.
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
In a digital age, I still love sending and receiving cards, hand-writing notes, and wrapping gifts.
Using string bends instead of just playing regular, unbent notes can definitely help give certain riffs a cooler, heavier edge.
It doesn’t matter where we are. We can be marching down the streets of New Orleans, or we can be onstage in front of 15,000 people. As long as I know that I’m about to put my horn to my mouth and play some notes, that’s what I most look forward to.
I never use notes, they interfere with me.
Using a typewriter, at times, feels more like playing piano than jotting down notes, a percussive exercise in expressing thought that is both tortuous and rewarding.
I’ve tried to start my kids on ‘Doctor Who,’ but they’re just not there yet. Someone had given me these TARDIS stick-em notes, so I gave them to Tucker, and he finally put them all over his locker. I’m like, ‘You’re the coolest fifth grader, ever!’
From paying off friends’ tax bills to rescuing stray dogs and stuffing £20 notes into the hands of homeless people, I can’t get rid of my money fast enough.
I don’t have a drawer full of ideas. I kind of look around and take notes and wonder what could actually be a whole movie. And each time, I think I’m going to do it more commercial this time; I’m going to get a big budget and make it. But I always come up with some small idea.
I always write authors after I read their books. I’ve been doing it for years. I write a formal letter and send it to them in care of their agent. My mother always taught us to write thank you notes, and if an author puts themselves out there, they like to hear that their book connected with someone.
I used to get very angry as I was getting older, because my voice was breaking. So I’ve trained my voice so religiously through my teenage years, because I wanted to be able to hit the notes that those females hit. And I can, which is great.
Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father’s deathbed.
It’s impossible to play a run with as much feeling as a single note. I’ve never been so much into runs as making single notes cry.
I never kept a diary, but I wrote detailed notes of my travels.
I don’t make any notes, but I do know where to find things. Suppose I need to know where Wexford first talked about his love of the countryside or where he quotes Larkin or what was the beginning of his hatred of racism or where he first encountered domestic violence; I would be able to find it straight away.
People always send me notes saying they’d love to be a speaker, but they could ‘never speak as well as you do!’ I’m like, ‘Girl, of course you won’t. You’re just starting out… everyone stinks when they start!’
When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed – from song lyric to tragic speech – must make its point, as it were, without reference back.
Growing up in a bluegrass or acoustic-oriented world, the musicians become so focused on performance, as far as playing. We tend to overanalyze the notes, so you’re always trying to sharpen everything up.
With proper acting, I don’t know what I would play – I got sent a script for a play, and it said in the notes that my proposed character was ‘hideously fat and ugly’. That made my day. I mean, I do know I am no oil painting.
Being in a class with kids, meeting new people, and borrowing notes from other students – I’ve never done that before. I’ve always had to fend for myself.
As time has gone on I’ve felt less and less need to play too many notes. That’s something you do when you’re younger, you play far too much and too fast.
I was a good college kid, all-American and baseball-playing, living in the dorms with a million barbarians. I did not expect to be claimed by Fitzgerald hook, line, and sinker. ‘This Side of Paradise’ – that sweet, sophomoric pastiche of notes, scenes, poetry, and plays – I felt like he’d written the book just for me.
People don’t go to the record store anymore. It’s crazy. The culture used to be so much stronger. People would go and support you, and go pick up the album. Not just for the music, but for the liner notes, for the artwork, just for the whole thing and to have it, and be able to say, ‘I have this album.’
Conducting is about communication. You don’t play any notes, but you communicate with the musicians.
When I’m interviewing somebody, I take notes with a Bic Cristal, the classic black-cap, clear-body, medium-weight pen. It works on many levels: You can chew the cap, and if you’re really bored, you can bite the end off the back.
No ideas are harmed in the making of my books, by the way. All I do with my best ideas is run with them, fast as I can, taking notes and occasionally suggesting a left hand turn rather than the right hand one which might have taken us both over a precipice.
I’m happy we’re about to start inviting people into the thing we’ve been working on!! It’s called Pinwheel, and it’s a way to find and leave notes all around the world.
As a singer, you kind of are able to feel notes.
In comics, there are depths that don’t reveal themselves immediately, and the stuff that you might consider anal about ‘Watching the Watchmen’ – like the notes where I plot the rotation of a perfume bottle through the air – might not be particularly obvious to anyone who reads it.
Who am I, if I’m not this singer with big high notes? I identify with my voice. But I’m more than just the acrobatics.
Two or three notes of music can instantly make you feel sad or tense or afraid or angry. To do that in words is much more difficult.
