Musical Notation Quotes

I play keyboards and sing. I've written a couple of songs too.

When I was 12, I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, and I found a chord book in a shop, and I stuffed it down my trousers. And that's how I learned to play the guitar.

I'm a composer like every maestro on this earth.

Studying music involves a lot of mathematics and a lot of exercises of memory. Or you've got to be able to be like somebody, to play like somebody, to play Mozart's music the way he played it and how he intended it. You've got to make it perfect, and that's not what I want to do. Although it is beautiful.

In order to write music, you need lots of Tabasco sauce.

My grandfather and my father disagreed about music, not least of all because my dad wanted to improvise. It wasn't just that he wanted to play different music; it was just that he came off the dots.

I am a saxophone player.

It's so legato it's difficult to splice. Sibelius was famous for that.

When I write the music for any of my songs, I write as a composer-lyricist in my head.

I don't read music; I taught myself guitar.

When I was four years old, my mother put me into a school for early music education where you get perfect pitch and harmony and composition.

I usually dream of melodies. When I wake up I have them in my head. I usually come up with things in the middle of the night because that's when my mind is the quietest. I always have my tape recorder, pen and pad by my bed just in case.

Slowly, over time, I learned enough that I started considering myself a musician, where I actually knew how to play instruments. But still, when I talk to my real musician friends, they're calling chords out, and I have no idea what they're talking about.

I never had any lessons. When I first started playing I used to read music. I was very interested in music. But when I started playing in groups I did a silly thing and dropped it. It's great if you can write things down.

I can play anything - piano, drums, guitar, harp - I can even play a trumpet through another trumpet.

I can write songs, I've had songs in movies, but I can't compose film scores, you know?

I learned music from a book on piano theory. I was only interested in knowing about chords. From that, and from the 'Harvard Dictionary of Music,' I learned everything I wanted to know.

I do love using keyboards and I love writing keyboard parts, but I am not a player in the true sense of the word.

I bought a book with guitar tabs and forced myself to learn. I would go to school and then come home and sit in my room for hours figuring out the songs.

I learned to read music before I learned to read script.

There is a basic language of music that I think is important for communicating with other musicians - just the kind of terminology that might make it easier to describe your ideas to the other guys in your band.

That's the way I always listened to music. I'd listen and copy it. I play by ear so that's easier than reading.

Composer” is a word which here means “a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is going to play.” This is called composing. But last night, the Composer was not muttering. He was not humming. He was not moving, or even breathing. This is called decomposing.

I could read music before I could read words.

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.