Ali Shaheed Muhammad Quotes

Music is composed on computers and other electronic equipment; producers don't want to spend money on orchestra.

I was using computers for music in the '70s, '80s and '90s, and people didn't get it. They thought you should only use computers for your taxes and making pie charts.

I've been really excited about some new cutting edge electronic music and technology.

I like tinkering with the tribe beat boxes and love using Reason as a beefed up beat box.

Somebody gave me this drum machine and somebody else asked me to program something for a project. I really liked programming and I was really interested in using the drum machine.

Sampling is kind of prehistoric, given the technology and the textures you can create.

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 also very impressed with the best people in experimental electronic world, like Peta and Eckart Aillers and Finez and Jim O'Rourke and Oren Umbarci and Francesco Lopez. Most of them use the computer as their main instrument.

Most of today's music is done electronically.

I happen to think that computers are the most important thing to happen to musicians since the invention of cat-gut which was a long time ago.

I really wanna make hip-hop music, but I don't know how to use any of the tools. Electronic, computer skills, I don't have those for engineering or making beats. I don't know how to use a sampler well. I don't know how to use any of these things.

I love 808s - not only the Auto-Tune but just, in general, the embrace of a kind of digital style of working.

If you know Down South production, Roland 808 is in almost everything.

Somehow, magically, I've become an electronic musician, and I have a recording studio that looks like the bridge of the Enterprise.

Today, computers help us making the music. It's really a tool.

I think the indie-rock world is very creative. They're always looking for something new, and I think of all the instruments we have in the world, the ones that are the most creative and interesting are the electronic ones. There are so many sounds and plug-ins you can use.

There's a confusion sometimes with the laptop being the current tools and where electronic music initially comes from.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

I never had any plans to become a producer when I was a kid. I wanted to be a DJ, like most other kids at the time. Then my mum bought me a Casio keyboard and I started to sample sounds that I liked.

I have always been far more interested in sound than technique, and how sounds work together, how they can be layered. I think electronic music, in its infancy anyway, allowed us to create music in a way that hadn't really been possible before. It created a new kind of musician.

But some great records are are being made with today's technology and there are still great artists among us. Likewise there are artists today who are so reliant on modern technology, they wouldn't have emerged when recording was more organic.

I've always been fascinated with the juxtaposition of technology in music, not only in recording, but in the keyboard. It's amazing the way you can apply technology to an art form.

People are approaching electronic levels in music; although not all of it happens to tickle my fancy.

I started with the organ and drums, and I later got into drum machines as a teenager.

Technology means the kind of music you can make on your own if you've got an imagination is amazing. It's crazy that I can sit with a Mac and a keyboard and a mic and create a symphony.