Music Preparation Quotes

When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.

We're very much perfectionists, so when we're putting on a huge show and want to play to the best of ability, we rehearse intensely. And I have a guitar pretty much in my hand for at least five hours before doing a show. I'm just noodling and mucking around and working on some of the songs here and there.

I would play all the parts of the song, show them the way it went together. Then I'd basically break down an arrangement - I wouldn't plan endings or beginnings - so they knew everything that was going on. I had the lyrics on a prompter so that I could remember everything I'd written, and I was able to just get into the groove and play with them. I think "Peace Trail" is one of the exceptions, where it's a later take. It just happened really quickly.

I would have to work on the song and figure out how they wanted the song done, because they're such high-intensity songs. We figure that out first, then I go back and listen to it and go over and rehearse stuff with it and try to get a feel for the words.

I always want to pick songs that are really crazy rangy, and sometimes those low notes aren't there. But I started taking it way more seriously after a certain point, and I started doing vocal warm-ups every day, even when I wasn't singing, sometimes twice a day.

Getting ready for a tour is a big process, and I enjoy every part of it.

I went along and basically learned a few of the songs they were doing at the time, which were quite a few of the songs we ended up doing on our first album.

Mixtapes, it's for everyone and you throw them in the trash quickly. While an album is an object that only your real fans take the trouble to buy and know you have prepared something special.

I learned how to play the drums. When we were in pre-production, when we were still in LA, I had a couple of drum lessons and then some in Toronto. I got the one beat down and that was it.

It's like swimmin' without warmin' up, yuo know what I mean? So [cackles] we use the drum machine, and we take it out.

We played all of the songs on the first Johnny Winter AND every day before we recorded them, so that when we got in the studio, it was totally easy, as we knew exactly what we wanted to do.

I will have a playlist ready that I'll play out to the audience before I walk on stage, and I'll listen to that same playlist in the room, so by the time I walk on stage, I'm in the same frame of mind the audience is.

I listen to Prince on my iPad. And I use a Chords & Scales app to warm up before performing.

If I had had a chance to tour with Van Halen before the record, I think it would have been a different record.

The night I was recognized for 'Daughters' at the Grammys was the night this record started. I knew I had bought the time to learn everything I needed before I started this one. 'Continuum' is not a shot in the dark, it's not a guesstimation.

Coming into the music industry, even when I was a kid, one thing I learned is timing is everything. You being prepared is everything.

They gave me four weeks, and I asked if the first week could be just music with the two main conductors. So, the conductors came over to my home, and we worked in the music room, and I learned my two little songs.

I try to be prepared for the moment, through understanding, and being warmed up, knowing all about chords and scales, so I don't even have to think and I can get right to what it is I want to say.

Before I record for real, I know pretty much exactly how I want them to feel.

Every guitarist has a special quality of sound. The best ones will use a good ear, much sensitivity and a thorough knowledge of music to prepare the nuances and colors of sound.

When you do a show five days a week and one night a week, the way I was doing, you use up so much music every day that pretty soon you find yourself hustling for material.

The music kind of takes care of itself because we've done all that as preproduction in the practice room. So by the time it gets onstage, each song has about one hundred hours of way too much mothering gone into it. So when you see us play live, that is the product of ninety days of practice, over a year of writing, listening to demos on the weekends after practice.

Typically in Korea when I perform I have a full band, a ten-piece band, and that's a completely different monster in itself to prepare and rehearse.

Let me say that I've never thought to conduct because the conductor has to think to the music before the orchestra. And the orchestra comes later. For me, it's terrible.

The song 'Hello There' was written because we never got a soundcheck. 'Hello There' was our soundcheck.