Keyboards Quotes

That it's a lot harder to make a keyboard sound not-cheesy than a guitar. ~ Julian Casablancas

You could make your fingers reproduce exactly what you felt, if you really worked at it. I achieved it, not only spending a lot of time at the keyboard but finding ways I could make my fingers reproduce my deepest feelings. It meant, when you hit a note with a finger, you sank into that note all the way to the bottom of the keyboard until it went pow! Right? ... ~ Lennie Tristano

Here's the first major lesson: Writing is not an activity. It's not something you sit down at the keyboard, and just start doing. That's called 'typing.' Typing is an activity ... Writing is a process. And if you start thinking of it as a process, life gets so much easier. ~ Jeff Bollow

It can't be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean! ~ Thelonious Monk

I'm writing new songs for a Broadway version of Tarzan, which is very interesting. I think what I learned from the Brother Bear score side of things, I've brought into the new Tarzan songs. Thinking outside just guitar, bass, drums and keyboards. ~ Phil Collins

I have been playing a lot of keyboards, especially in the last five or six years. I suppose it gives you more scope than the guitar, although it does tend to make you write a different way. ~ Mick Ralphs

Look at it, every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping games, jerking off, streaming endless garbage- ~ Thomas Pynchon

Writers are married to their keyboards, as to their passports. ~ Adam Gopnik

It would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level, at least -- an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name -- its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to sort of a standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Maybe it's true that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. But you'd go mad reading all of their rough drafts, ~ James Browning

With the help of modern technology, I can compose intricate keyboard parts and then I have to go back and learn them in order to perform them properly. ~ Geddy Lee

I do enjoy my solo time ... I want to stay home and do soundtracks and watch TV in my underwear with a keyboard on my lap and just be a couch potato. ~ Ariel Pink

The problem is that once I start on a song and get a rough idea of where I might go with an arrangement, I try dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different things on a song. The bass, the backing guitars, the lead guitars, the keyboards. It's a long process. It's like 100 steps forward and 99 steps back. ~ Tom Scholz

Software-industry battles are fought by highly paid and out-of-shape nerds furiously pounding computer keyboards while they guzzle diet Coke. The stakes aren't very dramatic. Life? Liberty? The pursuit of happiness? Nope, it's about stock options. ~ Nathan Myhrvold

I compose my own stuff. I've been writing songs with words. I've been playing more on the keyboard because I can transpose it to sheet music on the computer. ~ Alicia Witt

I tend not to write on guitar very often. I tend to start off with keyboards. ~ Brian May

I do love using keyboards and I love writing keyboard parts, but I am not a player in the true sense of the word. ~ Geddy Lee

In the age of revolution you have to be able to imagine revolutionary alternatives to the status quo. If you can't, you'll be relegated to the swollen ranks of keyboard-pounding automatons. ~ Gary Hamel

Cats have been all over the Internet for many years. This makes total sense, as they seem to spend half their lives trying to stand and sit on the keyboards of our laptops. ~ Tom Cox

I either write songs on guitar, or ... I don't ever have a keyboard with me, but like, my keyboard on the laptop. ~ Jay Watson

The music was intended to replicate or even enhance the mind-altering experiences of the psychedelic drugs. They were using electric guitars, wah-wah pedals, loop music to create ostinato patterns, electric organs, synthesizers (nobody even had any idea what that was at the time, but it was cool to throw it into a conversation), electro-mechanical polyphonic tape replay keyboards, fuzz box effects, backward tapes, you name it. Anything went ~ Karl Wiggins

When Maurice touched a keyboard, it was like something from a movie, magical. He would always give you something from a movie, and you'd go, what did you just play ... immediately inspirational writings, amazing. That's what we're going to miss. ~ Robin Gibb

The melody that the loved one played upon the piano of your life will never be played quite that way again, but we must not close the keyboard and allow the instrument to gather dust. We must seek out other artists of the spirit, new friends who gradually will help us to find the road to life again, who will walk the road with us. ~ Joshua L. Liebman

Well, I've heard a lot of people, but I think I would say a Brazilian musician named Hermeto Pascoal was one of my biggest influences. Through the years he mastered the keyboards. He use to play the organ Hammond B3, flute, saxophone, percussion and guitar. He is one of the most complete musicians that I ever met. Not too long after we came to the United States, Airto Moreira introduced him to Miles Davis, who recorded three of Hermeto's compositions on his album Live Evil. ~ Flora Purim

How about keyboards in your mouth? How fast can you type with your tongue? People will think you're just masticating, when you're really talking to your girlfriend. ~ Nolan Bushnell

I am very aware of the fact that it's highly unlikely anyone will write an article via their mobile phone. I've done it, but it's painful. And it's not just about the small keyboard and the small screen - though that's awful. It's the emotional experience of writing an article. ~ Sue Gardner

The bass should be the note of the bass drum, and then you've got the engine of the band that everything else builds on. Everything else, the guitar, the keyboards, is a colour. ~ Suzi Quatro

If you truly are going to be a writer, there must be somewhere within you the drive, the desire, to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, and actually write. ~ Kaye Dacus

If human misery and efficient boredom could be beautiful, there would have been a kind of beauty in the endlessly replicated, hot-desking, rack-mounted workers and their swiftly exchangeable work stations. Lit up by the dead light of our monitors we would constantly scratch at our keyboards - it could have been sadly romantic, if it hadn't been for the sirens. Hanging ~ Mike Daisey

Whoever came up with "hold the shift key for eight seconds to turn on 'your keyboard is buggered' mode" should be shot. ~ Linus Torvalds

Using a mouse, keyboard or gamepad make my arm tired, so I can't use them in a continual manner. The only device I can use for an extended period of time is a joystick. It's posing problems when I'm test-playing something in progress. ~ Masahiro Sakurai

Playing with the Barbie-size keyboard on my new phone. Phones are like toys now. They fit in your pocket, light up and vibrate like joy buzzers. Plus, you can get-I mean, "access"-the Internet and find anything you want. Music. Maps. Porn. Anything. If cell phones came with a cigarette dispenser, they'd be the greatest stupid invention ever. ~ Richard Kadrey

There is no real reason why Disney should not buy up the human genome, which is currently being sequenced, to turn it into a genetic attraction. Why not cryogenize the whole planet, exactly as Walt Disney had himself cryogenized in liquid nitrogen, with a view to some kind of resurrection or other in the real world? But there no longer is a real world, and there won't be one – not even for Walt Disney: if he wakes up one day he'll get the shock of his life. In the meantime, from the depths of his liquid nitrogen he goes on annexing the world – both imaginary and real – subsuming it into the spectral universe of virtual reality in which we have all become extras. The difference is that, as we slip on our data suits or our sensors, or tap away at our keyboards, we are moving into living spectrality, whereas he, the brilliant precursor, has moved into the virtual reality of death. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Something in the movement of fingers on the keyboard enhances thought. Fingers pull your thoughts forward. Fingers are in some way an extension of your brain, with a lot of cortex associations at their trigger. Get them going! ~ Josip Novakovich

I took piano lessons when I was real little. And you know ... I hated it.
But by the time I was in junior high, I had some kind of knowledge of the keyboards. In my very early years I played keyboards and bass. ~ Anne Boleyn

When I'm not at the keyboard, I'm generally reading, practicing tai chi or middle eastern dance, or cooking. ~ Sarah Zettel

Recruit your pet as a study partner. Cats are usually more than happy to do this - in fact, you may have trouble keeping them off keyboards and books - and dogs will often serve as well. Few things are more relaxing than having a warm, furry creature next to you as you study. ~ Stefanie Weisman

Dark forces dragged me away from the keyboard, swirling forces of irresistible intensity and power. ~ Boris Johnson

Music has always been in my family, but it was mainly keyboards. I learned to play classical piano, but when I first heard the amazing bass guitar of James Jamerson, who played on all the big Motown hits of the '60s and '70s, I knew bass guitar was my instrument. ~ Suzi Quatro

I always make sure that the lid over the keyboard is open before I start to play. ~ Artur Schnabel

You know, I'm a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard - in other words a netbook - will be the mainstream on that. ~ Bill Gates

Just moving one keyboard or synth is a pain in the ass. ~ Prefuse 73

My only real hobby is playing music. I write a lot of music on guitar and keyboards and hope one day to make a record or maybe even write the score for a film. ~ Graeme Base

Translating how that latter fact came to life in the studio, engineer Chuck Zwicky explained from his own observations during the recording of the album that "the way that Prince's music comes together has everything to do with how he views the individual instruments, and for example, when he's sitting down at the drums, he's derivatively thinking about Dave Gerbaldi, the drummer from Tower of Power, and that's a real fascile and funky drummer; and when he plays keyboards, he's thinking about James Brown's horn player, on one aspect; and when he's playing guitar, other elements creep in, because he loves Carlos Santana, and Jimi Hendrix, and this other guitar player named Bill Nelson, a rock guitar player from the 70s. And so these aspects all come together to make this unique sound that is Prince, and it's not rock, it's not funk, it's not jazz, it's not blues - it's just his own kind of music. I remember there was one particular moment when he started playing this keyboard line, and I'm thinking 'He can't play that, that's Gary Newman.' And at that moment, he stops the tape, and turns and looks at me and asks 'Do you like Gary Newman?' And I said 'You know, the album Replica never left my turntable in Jr. High School after my sister bought it for me. I listened to it until it wore out.' And he said 'There are people still trying to figure out what a genius he is. ~ Jake Brown

The telkine growled and muttered as he tapped on his keyboard. Maybe he was messaging his friends on uglyface.com ~ Rick Riordan

I was writing tons of music in my spare time. I might be on location somewhere, and I'd go home and I'd have my guitar and my little keyboard or something and write music. Or if I was at home, on my piano. I've always been a late bloomer with a lot of things, just in general, so I think this was something that needed to come to fruition in this particular way. ~ Zooey Deschanel

One of the saddest sights to me has always been a human at a keyboard doing something by hand that could be automated. It's sad but hilarious. ~ Boris Beizer

I like Stevie Wonder as my favorite non-pianist pianist. I mean, I shouldn't call him a non-pianist, because he's really a great pianist, but he doesn't feature it that much - he uses his keyboards and his piano technique to support his great songs and so forth, but he can really blow. ~ Chick Corea

It had the old double keyboard, an entirely different set of keys for capitals and figures, so that the paper seemed a long way off, and the machine was as big and solid as a battle cruiser. Typing was then a muscular activity. You could ache after it. If you were not familiar with those vast keyboards, your hand wandered over them like a child lost in a wood. The noise might have been that of a shipyard on the Clyde. You would no more have thought of carrying one of those grim structures as you would have thought of travelling with a piano. ~ J.B. Priestley

Never angrily rant into your web cam. While smashing a keyboard in half over a game of 'World of Warcraft' may seem totally justified in your head, to the rest of the known universe you look like a raging psychopath. ~ Ray William Johnson

I've been writing music since I was a teenager. I play keyboards. I'm not much of a player, but I can write. That will come along. I'd like to do a musical. ~ Paul Eenhoorn

I spent ten years playing classical piano, and that was what led to keyboards and eventually to production and to Linkin Park. ~ Mike Shinoda

I am all for cracking down on inappropriate digital behaviour. Too often the connected world is an excuse for some coward hiding behind a keyboard to bully someone else. ~ Tony Parsons

While it is becoming increasingly obvious that the fundamental architecture of a system has a profound Influence on the quality of its human factors, the vast majority of human factors studies concern the surface of hardware (keyboards, screens) or the very surface of the software (command names, menu formats). ~ Lewis M. Branscomb

About 70 percent of everything is really sketched out on my keyboard beforehand, because I do want accidents to happen in the studio. ~ Scott Walker

Sit me at the keyboard of any computer in the world with access to the Internet, and in just 24 hours I'll earn at least $24,000 in cash. ~ Robert G. Allen

Usually now a song starts just in my head with a melody or a lyric idea coming first.Then typically I'll go to a guitar, unless it's a instrumental then I'll usually build it on a keyboard instrument. ~ Eliot Lewis

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

When I'm online, I'm alone in a room, tapping on a keyboard, staring at a cathode-ray tube. ~ Clifford Stoll

Whenever I try to map things out they inevitably change. Which doesn't mean I don't map them out - I just try to embrace the better ideas that come along as my fingers are flying around the keyboard mid-draft! ~ Ransom Riggs

With every stroke of their keyboards they hacked a path through the forest that others would be required to follow. ~ Michael Lewis

I can play songs that I hear from a movie and just play it a few times on the keyboard. I will hit all the notes on the keyboard until I find the right key, and then I will play the rest of the song. ~ Callan McAuliffe

I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard. ~ Lily King

Mozart encompasses the entire domain of musical creation,
but I've got only the keyboard in my poor head. ~ Frederic Chopin

It was a matter of not seeing the woods for the trees. Glorious songs have been in Ireland forever, but a lot of these were so popular they were sung only by drunken men at weddings. They didn't have any regard for the song at all. So, I picked out 14 songs that I had grown up with, songs with great melodies. After 35 years as a songwriter, I appreciate the value of a good melody because I know how hard it is to write one. So I presented them in a new way, with piano, keyboards, strings, and a contemporary rhythm section. I just treated the melody with a bit of dignity and a bit of style. ~ Phil Coulter

Think of the press as a great keyboard
on which the government can play. ~ Joseph Goebbels

I do take a computer to do some processing live and I might use a couple of plug-in synthesisers, 'cause obviously you can take quite a lot of power in terms of sound generation on a computer that I can trigger from a couple of keyboards. And it means I don't have to take some of my vintage stuff and have it trashed by various airlines which has happened in the past. But I still take some vintage stuff with me, I'll take that risk because I like using all that stuff. ~ Thighpaulsandra

The most exciting mobile trend is full Qwerty keyboards. I'm sorry, it really is. I'm not making this up. ~ Mike Lazaridis

Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent. Mozart was hardly some naive prodigy who sat down at the keyboard and, with God whispering in his ears, let music flow from his fingertips. It's a nice image for selling tickets to movies, but whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won't know how to harness the power of that kiss. ~ Twyla Tharp

Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them. ~ Brian McKnight

I don't even own a computer. I write by hand then I type it up on an old manual typewriter. But I cross out a lot - I'm not writing in stone tablets, it's just ink on paper. I don't feel comfortable without a pen or a pencil in my hand. I can't think with my fingers on the keyboard. Words are generated for me by gripping the pen, and pressing the point on the paper. ~ Paul Auster

My place in Scotland is in the middle of nowhere, so you've just got a keyboard, guitar, a little drum machine and you know if you can work stuff out like that, if you can hammer out songs that sound good just with those three things and a voice, you're on your way. ~ Jay Kay

Guy struck a jangling chord on the keyboards and then another. 'You know,' he announced, sitting back and crossing his arms. 'We need some new material. We've got to write some new songs.'
'Like what?'
He shrugged. 'I don't know. Throw out some ideas.'
'Love! Death! Existential struggle!' Emily intoned dramatically, rattling out a drumroll. 'Agriculture! ~ Francine Pascal

Geeks are not the world's rowdiest people. We're quiet and introspective, and usually more comfortable communing with our keyboards or a good book than each other. Our idea of how to paint the
Emerald City red involves light liquor, heavy munchies, and marathon sessions of video games of the 'giant robots shooting each other and everything else in sight' variety. We debate competing lines of software or gaming consoles with passion, and dissect every movie, television show, and novel in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.

With as many of us as there are in this town, people inevitably find ways to cater to us when we get in the mood to spend our hard-earned dollars. Downtown Seattle boasts grandiose geek magnets, like the Experience Music Project and the Experience Science Fiction museum, but it has much humbler and far more obscure attractions too, like the place we all went to for our ship party that evening: a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Electric Penguin on Capitol Hill. ~ Angela Korra'ti

On the keyboard of life, always keep one finger on the escape key. ~ Scott Adams

I used to play the piano in the band, and so there's some horrendous scenes of me playing the keyboards. ~ Caroline Corr

I sometimes wonder how many hours of my life I have wasted bitching about keyboards. The use of keyboards and synthesizers is the Roe v. Wade of '80s metal. It was-without question-the lamest instrument a band could use. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I was a pretty lousy bass player. But the band I was in couldn't find a bass player in our small town and it was more important to have a bass than keyboards, so that's what I did. ~ Anne Boleyn

...we are changed as technology offers us substitutes for connecting with each other face-to-face. We are offered robots and a whole world of machine-mediated relationships on networked devices. As we instant-message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude. We talk of getting "rid" of our e-mails, as though these notes are so much excess baggage. Teenagers avoid making telephone calls, fearful that they "reveal too much." They would rather text than talk. Adults, too, choose keyboards over the human voice. It is more efficient, they say. Things that happen in "real time" take too much time. Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world "unplugged" does not signify, does not satisfy. After an evening of avatar-to avatar talk in a networked game, we feel, at one moment, in possession of a full social life and, in the next, curiously isolated, in tenuous complicity with strangers. We build a following on Facebook or MySpace and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. We recreate ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances. Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. Sometimes people experience no sense of having communicated after hours of connection. And they report feelings of closeness when they are paying little attention. In all of this, there is a nagging question: Does vir ~ Sherry Turkle

Most composers and arrangers these days use computer programs and keyboards, but I'm one of those dinosaurs that still writes it down on score paper and still dreams it up in his ear first. ~ Phil Coulter

I wrote, recorded and produced everything myself. I played the guitars and keyboards while the drums were programmed. As a producer, I think music technology has reached a point, where the results that can be achieved in this way, allows me to create the music and sounds I envision. ~ Paul Wardingham

We weren't listening to guitar bands, we were thoroughly ashamed of being a guitar band. So we bought loads of keyboards and learned how to use them, and when we got bored we went back to guitars. ~ Thom Yorke

The program should know if someone is at the keyboard or joystick or if it is just sitting there idle. It should know if someone is proficient in its use or a novice. ~ Bill Budge

Are still men, and not keyboards of pianos over which the hands of Nature may play at their own sweet will. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Letters from the Underworld ~ Eugene H. Peterson

It's not easy to strap yourself down to a desk and bash on a keyboard when you know you can direct lots of films, because directing films is fun and interactive and gregarious. Writing isn't. ~ Guy Ritchie

First of all you are a writer, a writer is what you are, so it doesn't actually stop the moment you leave your desk, your computer, your keyboard, whatever. Something is operating the back of your mind. ~ Terry Pratchett

When the musical keyboard was created in the 1970's, you had electronic geeks that had no background in music created these devises and gave them to musicians that had no background in electronics. The result was some of the wierd sounds that came out in the '70s. ~ David Bowie

The Geezer album, Black Science, had a lot of keyboards and it did not work. ~ Geezer Butler

Of course I knew The Band's Canadian keyboard player, the late Richard Manuel, but I didn't play that night because I was there as a guest with my record executives. People ask, "why didn't you play?" If I had known I was going to be playing then I would have been prepared for it. ~ Gordon Lightfoot

I've got four or five records in my head at a time that I try to work on and I would like to do a guitar trio record next - since The Police I've mostly made records with keyboards. ~ Andy Summers

I have an elaborate wind-down ritual, which combines reading, ESPN, movies, and jamming the blues on my keyboard. There's still a part of me that's a little kid who is psyched because I no longer have a bedtime! ~ Tohoru Masamune

Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings. ~ Wassily Kandinsky

I'm a bit of a gunner on the QWERTY keyboard. ~ Jay Watson

Still being ambitious to want to play on the record, I was a mediocre keyboard player. And uh, I seized the opportunity and played the organ. ~ Al Kooper

In the back of my mind was the constant hankering, almost yearning, to write but something always stopped me in my tracks. Or if I did find my way to put a pen to paper or finger on a keyboard I'd give up after a few minutes. I'd find other things to do: Anything but writing. ~ Mary Garden

My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness. It's quiet. ~ Neil Gaiman

I started piano lessons at age six but didn't take music seriously until I was a teenager, when I thought about a career in music. I studied classical music, and my instruments were guitar and piano. I played keyboards in bands, and after high school I went to Vienna to study at the Academy of Music. I also became a session player, which culminated in my work with Tangerine Dream. ~ Paul Haslinger

I didn't know anything about music when I started a band. I barely knew how to play a guitar. I didn't know how to produce records. I learned how to play bass guitar and keyboards in Rilo Kiley. I picked up a lot from my collaborators. ~ Jenny Lewis

Fong's obscenity-spattered fit about keyboards. So what to look ~ Vernor Vinge

But I always wanted to do a theatrical stuff. But when you're in a metal band of course you're limited because five people in the band, um, you've got no keyboards ... you're limited. And I wanted ... to go over-the-top, you know. Literally. I wanted to make an album that people would either hate or love. ~ Arjen Anthony Lucassen