Instrumentalists Quotes

Whether you’re checked in or checked out, you’re always on a spiritual journey.

Whether it's string writing or whatever, I try to write for what each instrumentalist can do best.

They're great instrumentalists, singers and songwriters and they have this unique way of blending contemporary with traditional. The result is this beautiful mix of timeless music.

I don't consider myself a skilled enough instrumentalist to be able to create the atmosphere that I want with just my guitar by myself.

As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.

The thing that influenced me most was the way Tommy played his trombone. It was my idea to make my voice work in the same way as a trombone or violin-not sounding like them, but "playing" the voice like those instrumentalists.

When I arrived in America at the end of 1967, my only purpose was to observe (for a couple of months) my idols, which were mostly instrumentalists. I wanted to play jazz, not sing it.

What enables me to believe in anything is hope.

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on philosophers, but they have not been very kind to me... I have been variously called nominalist, an instrumentalist, a positivist, a realist, and several other ists. The technique seems refutation by denigration: If you can attach a label to my approach, you don't have to say what is wrong with it... I am sure that Einstein, Heisenberg and Dirac didn't worry about whether they were realists or instrumentalists.

Most of my music theory knowledge is based on piano. But I write on guitar a lot, too. I'm not a great guitar player by any means. I'm not a great instrumentalist. I play piano on stage. I don't play guitar on stage, but I use it to write quite a lot.

My dad used to say to me, 'You look more like me than I do.'

The waiting is the hardest part, every day you get one more yard. You take it on faith, you take it to the heart, the waiting is hardest part.

I fell in love with electronics, which for me was the terra incognita, because I had never heard such sounds. If you'd asked me 50 years ago, I would have said the future of music is only electronic, but I would have been wrong. I learnt how to produce everything I needed with live instrumentalists, so I don't need electronics.

I am very impressed by The Carrivick Sisters, one of the best young duos I’ve heard. The girls sing and play as one and their work is characterised by great musicality. They are not only very talented instrumentalists and singers but they write really good songs as well.

Do what you will while you're able, find what it is that you seek.

As I’ve said, I’ve never believed in God, which technically makes me an atheist (since the prefix “a” means “not” or “without”). But I have problems with the word “atheism.” It defines what someone is not rather than what someone is. It would be like calling me an a-instrumentalist for Bad Religion rather than the band’s singer. Defining yourself as against something says very little about what you are for.

Since I started composing I have always worked with series of tempos, even superimposed the music of different groups of musicians, of singers, instrumentalists who play and sing in different tempos simultaneously and then meet every now and then in the same tempo.

I remember performing with the Choir as an instrumentalist when I was still in school and it was wonderful to share the stage with them again more recently in Rhyl and at the opening of the Wales vs New Zealand rugby international at the Millennium Stadium. Here's wishing everyone involved in the Choir every success - I can't wait to perform with you again.

I started playing drums at a pretty early age because my parents were musicians. My dad was an amazing multi-instrumentalist and I can play a lot of instruments, but my dad actually played all the instruments I could play and then added another twenty five or thirty five different categories on there ...he was incredible! He got an act actually in Vegas, my parents Bobby and Phyllis Sherwood.

Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it; People become builders by building and instrumentalists by playing instruments. Similarily, we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones.

Storms make trees take deeper roots.

I was not able to understand how it could be right to pay an actor, or a singer, or an instrumentalist for entertaining the public and wrong to pay a ball player for doing exactly the same thing.

One of my rules is: Never TRY to do anything. Just do it.

You can't just will your dreams to come true. You have to work hard. You have to give 'em wings, arms, legs...whatever it takes to make your dreams come true.

I suppose when I started playing guitar, it was the means to an end. I never thought of myself as a fully fledged guitar instrumentalist. And my early excursions on the electric guitar were curtailed when Eric Clapton came on the scene, and I decided I was never going to be in the same arena as a Clapton or a Peter Green.

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

It's a great thing about being a musician; you don't stop until the day you die, you can improve. So it's a wonderful thing to do.

If you don't like the road you're walking, start paving another one.