Musical Texture Quotes

I don't want to be a lead player. I don't want to shred and play fast licks. I just want to be the best rhythm section ever.

The whole background of 'Avian' is rain. I was just playing with textures and realizing you can touch music.

Lyrically, I could be so much sharper. Melodically, I could be so much stickier. Musically, I could have so much more texture. So I'm constantly doing that, trying to find new ways to mix things up.

With 'Defenders,' we had some very barebones ideas, but the bulk of it came together very quickly over in Ibiza. The main thing I like about that record, looking back on it now, is the change in the texture of the production from 'Screaming For Vengeance.'

Even if chords are simple, they should rub. They should have dissonances in them. I've always used a lot of alternate bass lines, suspensions, widely spaced voicings. Dfferent textures to get very warm chords. Sometimes you're setting up strange chords by placing a chord in front of it that's going to set it off like a diamond in a gold band. It's not just finding interesting chords, it's how you sequence them, like stringing together pearls on a string. ... Interesting chords will compel interesting melodies. It's very hard to write a boring melody to an interesting chord sequence.

The same song can have drastically different feels and personalities just by changing some minor things. A different drumbeat or some vocal overdub could completely transform the song.

Harmonies are nice.

If you're sitting there going, 'Well, these particular genres are the only genres I like,' that's like saying, 'I only like books with this particular kind of cover.' Because that's all genre is. It's a discussion of texture.

There are a lot of cases where I'm using, if not an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar more as a rhythm instrument. Rather than blasting away, I use it to create more of an acoustic feel.

The only type of music I don't like is Dixieland jazz. It's just a little too happy and noisy for me. I like intervals and spaces in my music. There's just something about Dixieland.

I love a little distortion across the bass; I think it kind of adds something to the sound of the band when the bass is a little overdriven.

What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.

Since I first picked up the violin, I've been very interested in tone and texture: I would have very visceral reactions to the texture of a snare drum or a pedal steel guitar or a violin.

If some of our works are symphonies, then wrapped walkways was chamber music.

The really pop country stuff can sound a little bland because they put in strings and horns and all of that.

The thing with music education is that it is good at teaching technique, but not texture. You only learn about that from listening to music and experimenting on your own.

I'm a flutist so I know what they can deliver in terms of texture and sound and blurriness and softness. It's a very soft instrument.

When I first wrote for orchestra, I didn't realize, when you have 20 people playing a violin line, that is very different than one person playing that line.

I am about the arrangements and the layers of depth in the music.

Using open strings is a great way to add texture and atmosphere to any chord progression.

So I concentrated on the rhythmic side of things, and therefore left a lot of holes. I didn't want to use big pad chords everywhere. All of the songs are built up of small melodies and counter melodies all played very rhythmically.

The baritone can serve functions that the alto and tenor cannot, in orchestral voicing.

I seldom play in a trio, but acoustic music is likely to be lighter, quicker, and quieter.

Sometimes I write them down in musical notation as a trigger to remind me about certain directions to go. Or I can be specific about a sound I'm looking for.

There is no piece of guitar music that has the formal beauty of a piano sonata by Mozart, or the richly worked out ideas and passion of a late Beethoven string quartet, or for that matter the beautiful mellifluous poetry of a Chopin Ballade.