Music Innovation Quotes

The first time I saw 'Minecraft,' people wanted to have 8-bit style video game music. But I wanted to go around that and make something organic and partly electronic, partly acoustic, and see if that would be interesting.

The thing I find frustrating about rock music is, how different can you make an acoustic drum kit sound, an electric guitar and vocals?

I feel it's my job to continue being a student of music if I want to continue being an artist and a producer of other artists. You have to keep filling your mind with other music. You have to be ahead of the curve.

I first met Miles Davis about 1947 and played a few jobs with him and Sonny Rollins at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. During this period, he was coming into his own, and I could see him extending the boundaries of jazz even further.

The band that changed my life was The Who. It's hard to pick just one album, but if I had to pick the one that really showed me how things could be done, it's 'The Who Sell Out.' They really went to town on that, doing something that no one had ever done before.

The thing about hip-hop producers, and the thing about hip-hop musicians, is that we listen to everything. And we're inspired by everything. I'd say even more so than any other genre of music.

I think we're in a very low point of music right now.

DJs are in incredible competition, musically. And they are the most musically creative and sensitive people in all the music charts. I am amazed how they are.

I was using computers for music in the '70s, '80s and '90s, and people didn't get it. They thought you should only use computers for your taxes and making pie charts.

What you have to understand is that blues... it's in a line from the oldest forms of African music. If you're playing it like it's an echo of the past, it would be a lot less exciting, but this music lives today.

I've been devoting quite a bit of my time to harmonic studies on my own, in libraries and places like that. I've found you've got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.

We are at a crossroads in the music business: with the rise of the internet, the world we live in has changed, and the past is not coming back. But I see the glass as half-full: the internet and social networking are new avenues for the next Bob Dylan to be born on.

Bob Dylan enabled rock & roll to grow up and survive. He injected the power of language and ideas into the music.

We were totally confident that we would make it internationally. We had no money or instruments. We used cake tins or bottles with water in them - anything to make sounds.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

I grew up around electronic instruments. To me, the turntable is an electronic device. At the same time, I had access to drum machines and keyboards through my uncle; then track recorders into computers. At an early age, I was messing with computers more than most hip-hop musicians.

People in rock had this idea that rappers aren't talented. In my opinion we're better writers, we think deeper, and our concepts are harder - Rap evolves faster than any other genre.

There's so many people doing interesting things with the Internet and technology, there could be so many ways of making music and listening to it.

When I started making my tracks in the style that people call tropical house, I didn't do it on purpose to make it sound tropical. I made whatever I felt sounded good. I just wanted to make my own thing, and then suddenly people started calling it tropical ... I'm like, 'Yeah, that's probably a good name for it.'

The public doesn't want new music.

I wouldn't specifically say rock n' roll is dead, but I don't see a lot of charismatic performers in the way of new blood who are edgy and dangerous on stage, like Marilyn Manson, who you never quite know if he's going to make it through his own show.

The American dream is Chance the Rapper, or 'little Chano from 79th' who hails from Chicago's Southside and became the first artist to win a Grammy without selling one physical copy of his album.

I'm one of the people who was a pioneer in encouraging musicians, early in the game, to get interested in technology, and now all the musicians are getting into it.

There are lots of really good guitarists, but they play with the same pedals that everybody else does. Everybody buys the same pedals, so the sounds tend to be the same. I am looking for different ways of doing that without having to spend days and weeks and months fooling around with pedals, which I don't enjoy.

I grew up learning carnatic music but I also enjoyed english music so I always thought I could marry the two words and we tried the idea once and it was a hit.