Tom Waits Quotes

It's been very hard for the guitar as a serious synthesizer to compete with keyboards.

I generally use a lot of analog instruments, a few synths from the '80s like the Roland Juno-106, and an old Fender bullet guitar.

I had gotten one of the first Korg synthesizers with 300 presets.

My first bit of gear was a Roland JV-1010 sound module. I used to hammer the hell out of that.

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

So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.

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.

Currently I'm working with Parker Fly on a new Midi guitar to arrive next year.

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.

Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology.

I'm always interested in mixing technology and music. You know, maybe I'll have a MIDI bass pickup at some point, I don't really think that's the direction I would want to go.

I was always fascinated particularly with synths: how they looked and stuff that when you're a kid you're like this is the most incredible thing in the world just to play.

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

I play keyboards and Pro Tools, if you want to look at it as an instrument.

Like with me, like around '97, for Christmas my parents bought me an MPC 2000 sampler and a little eight-track cassette recorder. And I started sampling records and, you know, producing hip-hop beats. And it got to the point where I realized - I innately realized that the music I liked the most was made by people that played instruments.

There is nothing wrong in electronic music or synthesised music.

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.

A lot of the early Washed Out material was done on a couple of synthesizers that did most of the work, but that's the great thing about synths - you can recreate sounds or make an entire record with just one piece of gear.

In my solo work on my own albums, I have used voice synthesizers and vocoders quite a lot in connection with orchestral instruments.

I've got different drum machines that I use for different things, but I think the older ones are always the best when it comes down to getting that 808 bass.

I love Ableton's vocoder and Operator for basic side subs and general low-end.

I took to the synthesizer. My cousin had some synthesizers, and I'd always make stuff on those things.

Moog has been incorporated in a lot of our music. I know RZA has several of those machines. So, it did play a major role in a lot of music we were doing.

All of those 10cc 'Not in Love'-type synthetic choir sounds on 'Replica' are all from the Omnisphere. We used a lot of that.

Sometimes you cannot produce a specific sound you want with, say, a guitar or piano, and you simply need to use electronic elements.