Roy Ayers Quotes

On record dates like that I never felt too nervous because everything was really overdubbed. When we did that album, we were in the studio for probably a week, so you had a lot of opportunity to fix things.

I write the songs, go in and record them, then I listen to everything and decide how it all fits together.

We always record with the whole band. That's key to capturing the feel, especially trying to get a good basic track.

When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.

I sit and write songs alone and then get together with people to help me flesh it out into a recording.

My idea is to play with the people who you know want to get it right. Then it's fun and easy to record, and you can get down to details, like taking out cymbals so the verse doesn't dwarf the chorus, something like that.

You can do a lot to shape the feeling of a song by the way you record it.

I usually make records very quickly. I usually go in and record them and mix them, and I'm done within a couple of weeks.

Usually, when you go in to make a record, you have 30 songs, and you record 30 of them, and 12 of them make it to the record.

We'll set up a demo session and try to knock out eight or ten songs and make them sound as close as we can to a record with the money and time we have.

The records I make, I'm there from the writing of the first note through the click tracks to the miking of the drums to the editing of everything to the production to the vocals to the artwork.

Putting together a hit record is like putting together a puzzle.

A lot of times, when you record something, the album becomes less about the music and more technical.

For me, it's always just about playing the song and recording it and giving it what it needs as a song.

The first record we made, we recorded and mixed in a day. The second record was recorded and mixed in a week. The third was recorded and mixed in a month, and 'New Wave' was mixed and recorded in six months. It was an epic project.

Creating a record on my own and deciding who plays and how the songs were structured, it was fun to do.

When you're producing, you're really just making a series of decisions.

When you make a record, you get to live in an imaginary world where you have the best kind of band on every song.

Making an album is always a puzzle: you start by seeing a lot of different pieces, and they all need to come together into one picture.

You don't really know what you're going to get until you're actually in Abbey Road. That's where I did all the music, in The Beatles' place.

I like being in a recording studio. I like watching a song go from the simplicity of the original music.

I've got my own studio, so I sit in my studio writing and if I get a great take, that's the take.

When I produce a record, I roll up my sleeves; I'm not one of those passive guys. I really get in there and make sure every note is measured. I tell the bass player, 'You have to play it like this,' or I tell the drummer, 'It's got to be like this.'

Analog, electronic, whatever it happens to be, I simply love and adore literally every aspect of making music.

I've got the recording process down, and I can knock it out very quickly.