Shankar Mahadevan Quotes

Learning music is a birthright. And you have to start young.

My mom would give me a piece to play, but I wouldn't do any theory because when it came time to do it I would sneak back upstairs and watch TV. So, I had these kind of nonchalant lessons for years, then it just started soaking in.

My mum was very good at making me take up musical instruments, so although there was no popular music she made me learn the recorder when I was three, the violin when I was five and the piano when I was seven. I took up the guitar myself when I was 14.

In the United States, we spend millions of dollars on sports because it promotes teamwork, discipline, and the experience of learning to make great progress in small increments. Learning to play music does all this and more.

Music is an element that should be part and parcel of every child's life via the education system.

You can never learn enough about music.

We have started to make music at age seven. That was a hard work.

I'm not likely to forget where I've been and what I've done and learned. I think it's just as important to play new instruments as to play new pieces. The old ones are getting scarcer and the new ones more and more wonderful.

I would just listen to records and learn what I could, then just roll it over and over and over.

I started playing the trumpet when I was about eight.

I grew up in a school that had a big music program, and it was incredible. It's what I looked forward to during the day. I had chorus, strings, band.

I'm very interested, for instance, in music in education - getting young people not only to listen to, but participate in the music that I write. I consider this one of the most vital aspects of my work.

The Silverlake Conservatory is a nonprofit music school in Los Angeles where we teach music, mostly to kids, but to people of all ages - people who are old, people with beards, all kinds of people.

The key to longevity is to learn every aspect of music that you can.

I don't go around, the way many musicians do, with earbuds in my ear listening to my iPod all day and just sticking my head in the music all the time.

I'd like to teach kids how to write songs. This will be my first year so I'm just as green as some of the rest of the folks. It's like a music camp and I get to hang out with some of the past contestants.

They taught us because they wanted to pass the knowledge on and educate young musicians. It was not because they had to teach because they failed as musicians. There is a huge difference in the reasons why someone is teaching and what they can offer and what they cannot offer.

But without the experience of actually singing or playing these things yourself, you don't have the same kind of involvement or understanding of what these musical moves mean. And that is a very big problem in addressing the future of music.

I would like to teach music. It's weird the way they teach music in schools like Julliard these days.

I took a private lesson, but it didn't really work out, so I went back to playing along with records. That's really the thing that got me into playing a lot - getting excited about playing along with my favorite bands like Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.

I think it is most important for a teacher to play the pieces and studies that are being played by the student.

My mother also had us take piano lessons, and this had a similar effect. I hated those lessons, but I now play regularly for pleasure and have even tried my hand at composing.

Surveys of thousands of gamers have shown that they're more likely to play real music if they play a music videogame. So it's an interesting relationship where the games aren't replacing something we do in real life, they're serving as a springboard to a goal we might have in real life, like learning to play an instrument.

Music will always be there. I own a piano. I have it in my apartment. I play it every day, and I have a lot of musician friends who I play with.

When I was a kid I never learned to play. I actually got in bands through watching people play and copying them.