Music Intuition Quotes

The writing process, the way I go about it is I do whatever the beat feels like, whatever the beat is telling me to do. Usually when the beat comes on, I think of a hook or the subject I want to rap about almost instantly. Within four, eight bars of it playing I'm just like, 'Oh, OK. This is what I wanna do'.

Some MCs don't take the time to take a beat home or just vibe with it and just figure out, 'How do I attack this track?'

I just hear a beat and start mumbling words. I just hear sounds and rhythms, and it just kind of comes intuitively. Formatting a song, figuring out a flow, how I respond to the beat.

Very few of the men whose names have become great in the early pioneering of jazz and of swing were trained in music at all. They were born musicians: they felt their music and played by ear and memory. That was the way it was with the great Dixieland Five.

What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

I don't really sing... I just hear notes so I know what it's supposed to sound like, if that makes sense. You ever hear someone try to teach a choir how to sing, but they can't sing? That's me.

I can't read music. That's not where I come from musically. I come strictly from feeling, and that feeling comes from rock & roll.

I've written arrangements for choirs and strings in the past, but I usually write music with my voice or a keyboard and then I'll get someone who is good at writing scores to write it out. Or, if I have the luxury of time, I will go in a room and hear the people perform and then change it through what I hear, not on paper. I can read music OK, but I probably rebelled a little - music changes into something else when you read it.

I have my songs ready in my head, gather the guys, play it and then let them go with it. [The music] finds its way, we do what the music says to do......the song is the producer.

It's easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.

You know, I've always said, I've never felt I was a particularly good singer, but I've always thought I had a great knack for picking hit songs.

My job is to be some sort of music/lyric psychic, to figure out that that's the right song to not fight the lyric.

It's a very interesting thing because I can start mixing a song and leave the room and come back and maybe just slide one lever to a certain point, and it just - it's a certain feeling that it gives you when you know it's right.

I know when something is going to work for me, and I feel when it's not, so I am going to carry that into the music.

I don't think you can have a calculated approach towards learning music.

Music doesn't need to be perfect, but you'll know when it's right.

As a kid, I could just pick up melody and harmony instinctively, and that's why I can play lots of instruments.

Music is in the air; it's my job to pull it out.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.

I could stop and say, Well that was a D minor, G seven, but I really don't want to know that. I just want to know that there's a combination of notes that makes a sound.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

People need to realize that even the greatest jazz musicians, when they listen to jazz, they're not like, analyzing it and deconstructing it - they're enjoying it. It's like listening to any other style of music. It's saying something to you, and you kind of just absorb it.

The song tells me what to play.

When I was first aware that I couldn't read music I didn't know I couldn't read because I could play the music that was in front of me.