Guitarists From The United States

"I guess I shoulda closed my eyes When U drove me 2 the place Where your horses run free. 'Cuz I felt a little ill When I saw all the pictures Of the jockeys that were there before me.Believe it or not, I started to worry I wondered if I had enough class. But it was Saturday night I guess that makes it all right And U say, "Baby, have U got enough gas?""

"Once you have a basic grasp of the theories underlying music, you can pretty much pick up any instrument you want."

"I've been fascinated with arcane chord progressions since I was young. The trick is to keep them interesting, while still in the realm of 'normality' (otherwise the listener has no context to appreciate the progressions in)."

"Silicon approaches certain fundamental limits; organic bliss is the soul catcher."

"One of the issues these days is the sheer amount of music out there to be listened to. There are more bands than one could ever hope to explore."

"Ideally, a song should contain both elements of high melodic tension, and low melodic tension. No listener wants to sit through a totally high-energy 180 BPM non-stop 6-minute ride through synth mania unless they are already busy grooving madly on some dance floor in a smoky club somewhere. Also, unless your listener is on heavy sedation, he or she will not enjoy your sparse 18-minute ambient tune which consists of the same languid piano riff repeated over and over again."

"Well anyone can make a 'weird' [chord] progression by randomly picking triads."

"I find a lot of club music extremely boring."

"I think as a musician you really have to have a wide variety of tastes, or else you will unconsciously get into a rut."

"If anything I probably gravitate to things with great melodies/harmonies, and interesting/syncopated beats."

"There's a big difference between playing shows for fun, and playing shows because you're in desperate need of the money."

"A song is not just a collection of melodic riffs, it is an emotional statement."

"If someone gave me a million dollars to run a music label, I would focus on creating a specific artistic point of view, and creating some channel to build a fanbase. Warp Records was a great example of a label that had a particular style, and many people would buy records just because the artists were associated with the label."

"Some people are like "Oh, I hate guitars." How can you hate a guitar? It makes no sense. It's just an instrument."

"As with any collaboration, you have to find someone that's in your 'mode' of making music."

"One of the most common failings [when writing a drum track] is repetition. Nobody wants to hear that same stupid 16-line bass-snare pattern throughout the WHOLE song. Didn't your mother ever teach you that variety is the spice of life?"

"I feel that music is the art which can best express the emotions which flow within us. It conveys something bigger than it is."

"Usually musicians have egos and personality quirks which makes it difficult to form collaborative efforts (for long periods of time, anyways)."

"I'm starting to realize that touring really involves a lot of waiting around doing nothing."

"I love philosophy. It's fascinating to try to discover how perception, or experience, or memory works. I've always been a diehard relativist at heart, and I find it very interesting to read other people's philosophical ideas and how they see the world through their particular lens."

"I'm not a big fan of asynchronicity just for its own sake - a lot of people push rhythmic variation so far that the basic pulse of the music gets lost (and the listener is confused)."

"I think much of the conflict in the world is directly the result of people's varying interpretations of reality, or perhaps you could term it the "distortions" in their lenses. The best one can do is to try to consume as much knowledge as possible, both from your experiences, and from the words of others, in order to try to form a complete picture of the world."

"There was a new popular music of protest. Pete Seeger had been singing protest songs since the forties, but now he came into his own, his audiences much larger. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, singing not only protest songs, but songs reflecting the new abandon, the new culture, became popular idols. A middle-aged woman on the West Coast, Malvina Reynolds, wrote and sang songs that fit her socialist thinking and her libertarian spirit, as well as her critique of the modern commercial culture. Everybody now, she sang, lived in "little boxes" and they "all came out just the same.""

"I don't mind failing in this world, I'll stay down here with the raggedy crew, 'Cause getting up there means stepping on you, so I don't mind failing in this world."

"There was a little boat sailed down the river, Hull was a cup and sail was a feather, Cum peedle ump pump pay."

"And there's doctors and lawyers, And business executives, And they're all made out of ticky tacky And they all look just the same."

"Love is something if you give it away, Give it away, give it away. Love is something if you give it away, You end up having more. It's just like a magic penny, Hold it tight and you won't have any. Lend it, spend it, and you'll have so many They'll roll all over the floor."

"If you are a piano, You will laugh on ev'ry string, And if you are a girl or boy, You'll sing."

"Train whistle blowin', Makes a sleepy noise; Underneath their blankets Go all the girls and boys. Rockin', rollin', ridin', Out along the bay, All bound for Morningtown, Many miles away."

"A human is a complicated organic/electrical system, which is immersed in a culture. Try raising a monkey like a human, it won't work, you need the human's certain brain characteristics (including self-reflection) in order to create a truly intelligent creature. The brain processes inputs and perception in very particular ways, and I think until we understand the underlying processes better, there is no way to really simulate it in software. Computers will continue to be good at simplistic analysis, and raw processing power, but the subtlety of emotions is something intrinsic to the human organism and culture."

"Religion is a simplistic answer that society has created in order to make people feel better, but there is little evidence as to its validity. There are thousands of religions in the world, each with their own "correct" answers, and each contradicting each other. For now the most sensible explanation to me is that we are the result of a lucky combination of cosmic factors, we're the "mold" that has grown on this particular planet and in a universe as vast as ours, it's expected that somewhere this would happen."

"They don't know my head's full of me And that I have my own special thing, And there's no hole in my head. Too bad."

"There may not be a high-level purpose for humanity, but that doesn't mean we can't find inspiration in the world. I think there is a combination of psychological and environmental factors that combine to create various urges in humanity -- most importantly the urge to create, to contribute something to the world, to express your personal worldview and see how the world responds. Art doesn't happen in a vacuum, and if it were only for personal gain then nobody would ever release music to the public. The process changes you, and also changes the world itself, creating ripples of inspiration which flow between the artist and the listener."

"The usual problem with progressive rock is that the band can get so wrapped up in their own fantasy land that their music becomes completely inaccessible. "Wanky", if you will."

"I have a love for cheesy music. I don't want to list any bands and embarrass myself ;D"

"I think [Britney Spears] is a perfect example of an artificial construct -- someone with a decent voice and a very marketable image, that producers and business people turned into a pop star. Unfortunately, I think it took a toll on her, mentally, and I feel bad for the trouble that success has brought onto her. However, her music is pretty disposable, and she doesn't have the intelligence and cultural impact of someone like, say, Madonna."

"Imagine presenting a Nirvana or BT track to someone from the 1850's, they would probably see it as noise and not much else. Society as a whole has a much more nuanced and wide view of what music can be now. It still usually contains various rhythmic, melodic, and vocal components, but they can be combined in so many interesting ways now."

"Little man stood at the Mayor's door, No one had ever seen him before, Dressed in clothes of a gayer mood Than ever are seen in Hollywood."

"The problem these days is again just the sheer amount of music available, and that music isn't as important an experience in people's lives in the 21st century as it was previously."

"You could argue that there's maybe some mathematical interest in a Bach fugue, say, but the only thing that music does really well is "move" people -- make them feel something."

"So, if you played a C major chord to pretty much any person on the planet, they'd say that it sounds "harmonious" (or pleasing, or happy, etc, etc). But now when you want to put chords and melodies in an ordering and make a larger piece called a "song", then that is a much more difficult process, and gets very subjective. At that point, it's not just the chords, it's the lyrics, rhythms, instrumentation, tempo, intensity, any number of other things that goes into a song... so many variables that it's almost impossible to predict how a song will affect a given person."

"Certainly there are songs out there that are massively popular, and you can use some reverse analysis to see how they're put together, but it's difficult to reliably engineer a "hit". Add to this the constantly swirling winds of cultural taste, and you can see that the music industry is more akin to playing the lottery than anything else. Having some talent or taste can give you a bit of an edge, but it's still a huge roulette wheel.."

"To impact someone emotionally, [a musical piece] has to contain "interesting" melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic content, and what defines "interesting" is up to the listener."

"Music is nothing but ratios and harmonic math, anyways."

"A lot of my tracked music was written when I was very young, relatively speaking. I was very optimistic, I had finally discovered some sort of public musical outlet, it was generally a very happy time. So, the music of that time sort of reflects that, I think? By the time I started the Alpha Conspiracy project, I was older, a bit more sophisticated (and, well, cynical), and so the music got more complex."

"Well, when music "moves" someone, it doesn't necessarily have to be in a positive direction. Some people certainly get moved by darker music, and there are all sorts of emotions which music can create that are interesting -- aggression, foreboding, anger, fear. Not everyone wants to feel happy all the time :)"

"We started out in the middle ages creating music which had certain desirable physical properties (for example, a major chord sounds "nice" because the frequencies are in integer ratios to each other). And then as society evolved, we created these emotional contexts for certain instruments and progressions. Major-chord arpeggios sound "happy", minor chords sound "sad", chromatic scales can sound "scary", et cetera. In the 20th century, film soundtracks reinforced this point as people associated certain kinds of music with certain visual and emotional experiences. It's a giant feedback loop, really; once you grow up in a given culture, it leaves this musical fingerprint on you which colors your experiences."

"Stylistic evolution comes from listening to what other people have done and making a Darwinistic modification."

"I'd like to see people try to sample the sound less and try to sample the style a bit more. Some people see this sort of 'copying' as offensive... I'm inclined to think the opposite - all music is built on imitation and expansion."

"Unfortunately Sting's jazz work isn't nearly as inventive as his rock songs."