Musical Variation Quotes

If you are playing repertoire material, you're stuck. There's not huge amounts you can do.

A lot of songs are derivative of each other. Sometimes you need to take a departure from what you do to something that's slightly different in order to get inspiration.

I think you can't repeat beats. If you're doing something in one book, you can't do the exact same thing in another book.

From a technical viewpoint, I have certain things I'd like to present in my solos. To do this, I have to get the right material. It has to swing, and it has to be varied.

I think that, as well as Strapping Young Lad kind of having the name for themselves based on brutality and aggression, I think there's also something to be said to the fact that every Strapping record is different. They're all different.

You listen to Handel operas, right? And there are a thousand of them, right? And they all sound alike. If I look back on my work, maybe it's the same thing.

I only have one note, let's be honest. But I'll play a different version of that one note.

There are only seven chords, and I believe every song has already been written.

Everybody was tellin' me that I had to do something different, and I kind of agreed that I did need to vary it a little bit. I still love some rock 'n' roll too.

Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously.

I sang 'Nessun Dorma' twice with Pavarotti, and he told me he'd heard 'Smoke' about five or six times, and every time was different. He was so jealous because if he deviated one jot from the traditional interpretation of the famous arias, he'd be crucified. We have the freedom.

I try not to repeat myself in fills in all the Rush songs unless it is something simple or something I feel is my own characteristic thing.

Twenty percent of my records, you'll find a loop, like two or three loops per album out of 13 or 15 songs. I'd rather keep it like that.

I love hearing the same songs over and over again - as long as queens challenge themselves to come up with new ways of performing them.

There aren't any labels - all jazz means is improvization and you can never play a tune the same way twice. So jazz spills over into everything.

You could play probably a span of 50 years of me playing St. Louis Blues, and most of the time it will be different every time.

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

The way jazz works is that we take a theme, and then we write using the same structure, same chord changes, and then we can do different tunes.

The danger in playing a piece over and over again lies in getting stuck in a rut where you don't ask questions anymore and you always play it the same way.

'Iceman' covers a bigger scope than 'Long Day's Journey.' But they're both fabulous pieces of work. 'Iceman' is like a symphony. It's got all the movements, all these different voices. 'Long Day's Journey' is more like a beautiful string quartet.

The same song on a different day was a different song.

I can make any type of music, so I wouldn't want to describe myself as having one type of sound. I think music is about keeping it diverse.

You don't always do the same things you've done the night before. That's what makes playing live so interesting as opposed to being in the studio.

The element of change has been the thing, really. We put out the first one, then the second... then a third LP totally different from them. It's the reason we were able to keep it together.

I don't think I ever sing the same way twice. The blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life.