The speed of change today is faster than the human psyche seems able to handle, and it’s increasingly difficult to reconcile the rhythms of our personal lives with the rapidity of a twenty-four-hour news cycle.
The whole universe is based on rhythms. Everything happens in circles, in spirals.
Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully.
I used my Schecter for all my rhythms and most of my solos, certainly the fast solos.
I’m from the East Coast; I think about things dialectically sometimes – in other words, antagonistically. The rhythms that I think of are polyrhythmic, bouncy, loping. The way that I want to approach that is to get, like, a flat-footed Connecticut hard-core drummer to play these bouncy, loping polyrhythms.
For a while, I was working on transcribing rap lyrics and then converting them into rhythmic patterns on the piano. And so in my mind, when I was taking a solo, I would be saying the lyrics and trying to play actual notes to their rhythms. Now, the influence just comes in and out in my playing.
Stravinsky influenced film music in general – those stabbing chords and rhythms from ‘The Rite of Spring.’
It was very challenging, trying to add an orchestra on top of these traditional African rhythms, because as soon as you add any kind of melody or chords over it, it stops feeling African.
The sounds and rhythms of words are really important to me.
The so-called commercialism includes elements like story, plots, rhythms and large big scenes.
I had a drummer in my band who started teaching me tricks to come up with interesting rhythms. Because I don’t come from a musical background, I’ve never studied music, and I don’t know music theory at all, so a lot of stuff I discover on my own are things students would learn in the first grade of music.
As we rise higher in the understanding of ourselves, the national and racial dissonances will be forgotten in the universal rhythms of Truth and Love.
In the end, we all want a wife. But the home has become increasingly invaded by the ethos of work, work, work, with twin sets of external clocks imposed on a household’s natural rhythms.
I’ve had experiences where I wasn’t allowed to change words around at all because you have to say everything, exactly as written on the page. That’s not fun for me. For me, part of being an actor is being able to contribute to a character’s rhythms. If there’s room to explore, you find a happy medium.
Rihanna is so into rock, and she gives me an empty canvas to work with. I get to do wild solos and crunch up the rhythms. It’s rock, it’s R&B, it’s hip-hop, it’s funky – all totally up my alley.
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