Tonal Variation Quotes

It's like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.

But if you listen to great piano players, both classical and jazz, there's a huge range of dynamics and colors and emotional expression that's possible with the instrument.

When I started to play with my fingernails, it was not just for volume. The most important thing was giving the guitar different colors in its voices.

By using patches of color and tone it is possible to capture every natural impression in the simplest way, freshly and immediately.

In the real world there are many tones, from white at one extreme, through a large number of medium tones to black at the other extreme. To achieve a three-dimensional effect on paper you need just three - white, black and medium gray.

Paint pictures with sound. First, find your white-the deepest, roundest sound you can play on the guitar. Then, find your black-which is the most extreme tonal difference from white you can play. Now, just pick the note where you've got white, pick it where you've got black, and then find all those colors in between. Get those colors down, and you'll be able to express almost any emotion on the guitar.?

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.

The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese.

I adore Stanley Kubrick, all of his films were different, not just in subject but tonally.

The sound of tap is not 'clickety clickety tap tap,' this monotone thing. The sound of tap has depth. We want you to hear the different highs and lows, the bass, the trebles and the melodies, if you can.

In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.

Some people like very predictable melodies, and others prefer the less likely notes.

I search for different tonalities in my taps. But my greatest pleasure is hearing a note I haven't heard before, hearing a chord that sparks something new.