Ben Gibbard Quotes

One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.

There are certain choices you make as a songwriter, based on vowel sounds and melody and chord changes.

If the chords change a lot over the course of a song, it's better to stay within the same melodic structure.

A scale is just the notes that are in a chord played one at a time instead of together. That's what has allowed me to go through the possible notes that work with a chord and make choices about which ones I like best. I go through by ear; you can do it by theory too, but the best way is to learn by ear.

When I listen to my favorite songwriters, they have such simple melodies and chords. I occasionally manage to stop at the right time, but all too often I keep on going until I have way too many notes and words. But that's just what I do.

Yes, basically, like you said, I'll work out a chord pattern and work out the lyrics over that.

Songwriting's a weird game.

Even if you're improvising, the fact that beforehand you know certain things will work helps you make those improvisations successful. It really helps to have a certain amount of knowledge about musical structure.

If you play more than two chords, you're showing off.

I liken movies to playing a piano: Sometimes you're playing the chords and different notes with unresolved cadences and playing all major chords that are all over the place, and you're enjoying yourself with a great, simple melody.

In some types of music I'm working out all the chords one bar at a time - the whole structure, because it's about that. And there are other pieces which are really about - okay, the melody is going to start here and play through to here.

When I hear the piano played in a compositional way, like in a songwriter's way in a compositional way, there's a certain arc to that that I love.

If you listen to a lot of the songs that are popular now, there's very little melody in there. People love the beat. But to musicians, it's melody, because we understand how elusive it is and how hard it is to hold.

I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

Generally my songs are just some riffs slung together as an excuse for a guitar solo.

Sometimes it's cool to play major third and minor third diads back-to-back, or a minor third followed by a root/fifth diad - whatever combo sounds good.

I was classically trained. But more than just the fact that I play violin, there's a lot of classical elements in the way I write, in the way I hear chords. A lot of times, I think of my songs as a symphony made out of electronics rather than instruments. And I love to do orchestral arrangements of my songs after they're done.

To be honest, I don't have a particular recipe, but I normally start with the chord progression and then I build it from there. I listen to a lot of jazz, so the chords are really important to me.

I listen to everything and find parts about a song in the lyrics/melody/chords/production that I like and can be inspired by when I write my next song.

I always think about music horizontally and vertically at the same time.

I like inventive melodies and chord changes, a little bit of creativity.

After 35 years of bone-crushing rock guitar playing, I'm finally starting to get my head out of the harmonic sand and learning how to play over chord changes.

I don't like drums dictating the song; like when you hear a fill and then you know the chorus is coming up.

I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.

I began to learn a lot of chords and rhythms. It was a bit boring at the time but came in very handy later on.