Robert Moog Quotes

I'm a natural piano player. So all the practicing I do at this point is in my head. If I don't play for a year, my chops aren't going to get any worse. I've spent my time playing scales, and I don't necessarily want to play any faster than I play. So everything I do at this point is more philosophical.

Of course we all know when music's too much in the head, and we define our greatest players by the way they are able to communicate directly from their emotional selves.

The right notes mean more than 1,000 mph arpeggios.

Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?

Piano playing is a dying art. I love the fact that I can be one guy with one instrument evoking an emotional and musical experience.

Playing music is not really susceptible to theory much. Circumstances affect it so much.

I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

No one has any respect for someone who can play a million notes per minute but can't put together a decent tune that someone can sing to or feel some sort of emotion from.

Music has nothing to do with your technical ability.

I don't think I could have ever had a career as a pianist because I never ever wanted to play the notes the way they were written, I was too sloppy to learn them quite right.

A lot of people may not know how competitive it is to play classical music, because when you think about it, the music that you're playing is music that's been here for years. And all you're trying to do is improve upon it when you play.

I don't think so, in so far as I always aspired to play the way I do now but just couldn't get the sounds out always due to technical limitations - now I can pretty much play what I hear in realtime.

I've always thought that the act of playing the guitar was the act of trying to make a point of playing the guitar.

I just sit down at the piano and rattle it off.

Just because you have developed the craft on your instrument doesn't mean that you don't have the ability to be expressive emotionally on that instrument, or vice versa.

When you sit down and see someone play at a piano, you don't think, 'Wow - what a fantastic machine.'

Piano playing consists of common sense, heart and technical resources. All three should be equally developed. Without common sense you are a fiasco, without technique an amateur, without heart a machine. The profession does have its hazards.

I play music - I write my own music, but I play music, just background music really, and just let it happen.

In some ways, it's more rewarding to hear someone interpret a piece of music that you're a part of.

A lot of producers don't have any musical education. I couldn't make the music I make without playing the piano.

If you can say something special on the guitar, then you're going to perk my ears up. But if you're just gonna run through all the scales, then I can always find something else to listen to.

When I was 5 or 6, I was messing around with the piano, and I listened to everything from Chopin to boogie-woogie.

I came from a Conservatoire background where the idea of complexity was very much bound up with good music - good music was seen as complex and difficult to understand.

I know what my taste is, and I do like my touch on the piano.

To finally be able to actually play the piano with vocalists and actually do, like, a proper concert - that feels really good.