Recording Quotes

Please welcome our hometown girl, a Winsor Cougar, a world-famous recording artist. Please welcome Chanin Anne. ~ Tim Mettey

The group-effort sound in recording of 'Sea Lion' is like, you really hear all the people in the room and hear them interlocking. There's a real freight-train energy of all these people at the same time playing. ~ Feist

By the time I'm in the studio recording my parody, 10,000 parodies of that song are on YouTube. ~ Al Yankovic

The parties happen when we book the studio. That's a safe place. Get alcohol, food, girls, homies, and have these small listening parties while I'm recording. And that energy always gets into the music. ~ DJ Quik

All that Lenin learned about business from the tales of his comrades who occasionally sat in business offices was that it required a lot of scribbling, recording, and ciphering. Thus, he declares that accounting and control are the chief things necessary for the organizing and correct functioning of society ... Here we have the philosophy of the filing clerk in its full glory. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

I have always felt a little held back by working with other people in recording. ~ Brian Chippendale

T Bone and I grew up together in Fort Worth, Texas. He had his own recording studio by the time he was seventeen years old. When we were both nineteen he made the first archival recording of my voice. ~ Betty Buckley

Maybe the idea of being a rockstar or being the one who's recording or playing, sort of doesn't really matter as much anymore, when you're surrounded by great musicians who bring their spirit, their own talent. ~ Adrian Grenier

I just fell into the Dylanesque idea of recording. He is real fast. ~ Bob Seger

The whole thing with recording is you have to know when to turn off the tape machine and just stop recording because you want to keep fixing, fixing, fixing, you know? ~ Linda Ronstadt

I want to allow others to reveal and celebrate aspects of themselves that are usually hidden. My camera is a witness. It holds a light up for my subjects to help them feel their own essence, and gives them the courage to collaborate in the recording of these revelations. ~ Joyce Tenneson

I could play it safe by recording songs that are familiar, but am I expanding myself as an artist by doing covers? It's a catch-22. It's called show business: The word 'business' is in it, and you've got to be a businessman. But then again, you have to be true to yourself as an artist. ~ Donny Osmond

My mom is a very religious woman. So when I began recording music, I was afraid she wouldn't accept it. But when I played her a song, she loved it. ~ Leon Bridges

Studying the world's oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is and how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it.

Writing as I would define it serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be played back like a wax cylinder recording.

The reader's eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inner message springs into life. ~ Irving Finkel

I don't feel guilty about the music I love. If you feel guilty about something you dig, then you should stop feeling guilty about it. One of my favorite albums to this day is the 10th anniversary ensemble cast of 'Les Miserables,' the ultimate cast recording, and it is still something I love listening to top to bottom. ~ Corey Taylor

The blinding Hiroshima flash ... literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war's recording surface, its film. ~ Paul Virilio

The Shins is, in a way, a recording project that turned into a live band. So I don't really keep myself beholden to any rules when I'm in the studio for Shins. I just gotta get it done as best I can. ~ James Mercer

Harmonies come really naturally to me. I don't have to labor too hard over them. I'll sing a lead vocal, and then I will immediately have all of these other ideas for vocal harmonies. I think that some of the most fun parts of recording, for me, are the vocal harmonies. ~ Juliana Hatfield

All writing, all composition, is construction. we do not imitate the world, we construct versions of it. there is no mimesis, only poesis. no recording. only constructing. ~ Robert Scholes

There are things I've given up on
Like recording funny answering machine messages.
It's part of growing older
And the human race as a group has matured along the same lines.
It seems our comedy dates the quickest.
If you laugh out loud at Shakespeare's jokes
I hope you won't be insulted
if I say you're trying too hard.
Even sketches from the original Saturday Night Live
seem slow-witted and obvious now. ~ David Berman

What we see in these passages is God meeting people, tribes, and cultures right where they are and drawing and inviting and calling them forward, into greater and greater shalom and respect and rights and peace and dignity and equality. It's as if human history were progressing along a trajectory, an arc, a continuum; and sacred history is the capturing and recording of those moments when people became aware that they were being called and drawn and pulled forward by the divine force and power and energy that gives life to everything. ~ Rob Bell

In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool. ~ Beck

I think it's great that people now have access to Pro Tools and other recording software at home. I've never understood how anyone could be comfortable in a recording studio ~ Michael Dumontier

A lot of ideas get re-used and made part of new songs if the first version didn't cut the mustard, and the stuff that gets left off usually contained the germ of something good but failed to reach a satisfactory state by the recording stage. ~ Bent Saether

Technology has helped me with the writing and recording processes, and it's a great way to reach out to fans of my music, ... Dell's combining all these different technologies and making it really easy to enjoy them. ~ Sheryl Crow

Through the years I've found that I prefer live playing to recording. I still do lots of recording - but I treasure the live shows. ~ Tony Levin

Still on speaking terms with the Toilet Paper People, they consented to a box full of Legos that overnight manifested itself into a recording studio. I quickly remembered the power of my hands, my imagination, my will, and my conscience. These were tools I would never let myself get bored with. I would find myself in Blue Ocean Strategy and in other defining ways. ~ Cherry Tigris

I think of all the things that I've gotten to do, all the wonderful people that I've played with, being in the recording studio with Phil Spector tops them all. And of course, now he is in prison. I hope to visit him, I still consider him a friend, and what can you say? A terrible way for a guy like that to be remembered. ~ Paul Shaffer

I love my music and recording people. ~ Edwyn Collins

When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying 'I don't want to die.' That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I hear these melodies. I hear horn lines and string lines. That's what's fun about recording with an orchestra. ~ Barbra Streisand

What made me want to become a recording artist; I was the first artist that was repeatedly asked by a label to record with them. That label was Def Jam Records. ~ Chuck D

I'm in a position I never imagined I'd be in as a musician. Bob Dylan built an audience through recording and live shows. The opportunities for an artist today are totally different. ~ Ben Sollee

My goal has always been to make classic records, classic albums. Sometimes the recording process and the era it was recorded in means the production leans in a particular way, but to me they are all part of the same process. ~ Steve Winwood

I really know so little about recording, and I'm learning as I go. ~ James Mercer

To me, there are 3 parts of the album process: writing, recording, and my favorite part: getting to sing the songs with the fans every night. ~ Eric Hutchinson

I think it's essential for writers to be involved in the recording process as things can often go wrong in this area. Voice actors are all too often presented with a wad of XL sheets, no proper character notes, context or reference and are just expected to perform. ~ Rhianna Pratchett

Duncan Aldrich has been my partner in most recording projects, and touring projects, for the past decade. ~ Warren Zevon

America was a land of machines, and it was through machines, the miraculous handmaidens of mob culture, that the muses of illiteracy brought America her voice and vision during the years of the immigrants' waves. Centuries ago, movable type had given literacy to the common man. Now, through these wondrous newer machines, he would give it back. ~ Nick Tosches

I am not a natural singer, but I can sing, and probably the way I sing is more imitative than from myself, which is why I am never going to be an amazing recording artist. ~ Tim Blake Nelson

I've just been recording mostly acoustic stuff, drums, and sax, and electric guitar. I'm just still writing songs and what not. ~ Phillip Phillips

I believe the true function of age is memory. I'm recording as fast as I can. ~ Rita Mae Brown

Some of the things floating about in the Well of Memory are not worth recording. ~ Margaret Deland

I recorded with Sinatra, but the recording business is a very strange strata right now. ~ Skitch Henderson

A recording of a performance is a recording of a performance. It's not the performance. ~ Mark Morris

I just want to keep playing music and keep recording. I feel like my best days are ahead. ~ Ricky Skaggs

Everyone has a black guy inside them. Mine is a Cuban sonero who is 80-something years old and sings better than I do. His name is Medoro Madera. Medoro has been recording since 1997. ~ Ruben Blades

We've never performed the song live outside of recording it in the studio. That was a dream come true because Whitney, she's an icon and she's been one of my main mentors in this business. ~ Deborah Cox

I worked a long time to get good at what I'm doing, and nobody handed me a recording contract because of who my father is. ~ Alexa Ray Joel

I'd somehow managed to get an executive stuck in a tree. Instead of a saucer of milk and 'Here kitty, kitty, kitty,' someone might want to bring a hedge fund and a recording of George Bush promising 'No new taxes. ~ Michael Gurnow

There are times when I'm under the weather and the corporate machine tries to put me in the recording booth anyway. It's always up to me to say, 'Guys, listen to me, listen to what I sound like. I'm not myself.' ~ Seth MacFarlane

Next time we need to be on drugs and have lots of suffering and alcohol abuse going on while recording, I'm kinda picturing a Jerry Lee Lewis session from the mid Seventies. ~ Jim Diamond

I think the most note-worthy part is that Stella [Mozgawa] had joined the band two weeks before we started recording, so that really influenced the way that the album was recorded. It was really important for Stella and Jen[ny Lee Lindberg] to lay down the drums and bass first for most songs, because they were determining how they needed to lock in together, and Stella was still kind of learning and figuring out her parts. ~ Theresa Wayman

I'm just like anybody else: I have stuff to do in the day, whether that's writing a song or recording a song. I try to treat everything I do as just work. ~ Adam Schlesinger

The act of writing bears something in common with the act of love. The writer, at his most productive moments, just flows. He gives of that which is uniquely himself. He makes himself naked, recording his nakedness in the written word. Herein lies some of the terror which frequently freezes a writer, preventing him from producing. Herein, too, lies some of the courage that must be entailed in letting others learn how one has experienced or is experiencing the world. ~ Sidney Jourard

My first song was Hula Hoop Song, in 1955. It was a novelty song. I had to find someway to reach out and it was with a novelty song. Now, all of my recording obligations have been taken care of. I made 14 albums for Warner Brothers. Five for United Artist before that. ~ Gordon Lightfoot

I'm never tired of going to the studio. I enjoy recording and documenting everything and trying new things. ~ Aretha Franklin

It's time for a streaming service that is centred around and driven by the artist community directly. Artists are prolific beyond a new recording every two years. They perform, tour, record, and collaborate constantly. Uprise.fm will not only make these rare and unique recordings available, we will ensure that the artists are fairly compensated for this work. ~ Daniel Lanois

Time has a doomsday book, upon whose pages he is continually recording illustrious names. But as often as a new name is written there, an old one disappears. Only a few stand in illuminated characters never to be effaced. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a 'record shot'. My first thought is always of light. ~ Galen Rowell

I've got the recording process down, and I can knock it out very quickly. ~ Neal Schon

The point I'm trying to make is that by recording my progress every day, I had the data I needed to start optimizing my daily writing. ~ Rachel Aaron

Even before I wrote any songs, I had this idea of a triangle where the voice was at the top, some sort of guitar element on one side, and then some sort of really basic rhythm on the other side. That's where I started from in the recording process. ~ Panda Bear

My intention when I came into this industry was to be a musician, not necessarily a recording artist, just a musician in general. And that's the reason I went to college and got my degree, which has been great for me. It's helped me a lot with my career. ~ Jon Secada

It's a difficult path that we tread, us Indie self-publishers, but we're not alone. How many bands practicing in their dad's garage have heard of a group from the neighbourhood who got signed by a recording company? Or how many artists who love to paint, but are not really getting anywhere with it hear of someone they went to art school with being offered an exhibition in a gallery? How many chefs who love to get creative around food hear of someone else who's just landed a job with Marco Pierre White?
There's no difference between us and them. There is, however, a huge difference in how everyone else perceives the writer. And there's a huge difference between all of us – the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen - and the rest of society in that no one understands us. It's a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we're wasting our time when the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating.
It's acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it's a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been floating around your brain forever. ~ Karl Wiggins

I don't work out a lead section and practice it for a day and then lay it down. I don't do that. The first time I do something I think is expressive or really cool, that's what's actually on the recording. ~ Tom Scholz

He [Andy warhol] went out every evening to five or six parties with a tape recorder in one pocket and a camera with extra film and batteries in the other pocket, constantly recording and photographing everyone he came across. ~ Bob Colacello

I'm a keen musician. Me and my mates have a great times jamming and recording stuff. We have a great band behind us and have turned my nursery-rhyme songs into quite credible pieces of music. ~ Tom Felton

The recording industry has changed; they're enjoying such incredible success in the pop field. ~ Gerry Mulligan

I have a lot of songs, and I'd love to do some more recording with the band. ~ Mick Jagger

Pop was initially ignored as a moneymaker by the recording industry. In the seventies they were still relying on Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett for their big hits. You know, most of the budget for the record companies in those days went to the classical department - and those were big budget albums. ~ Tony Visconti

The band projects just took natural priority. I didn't really have a solo career, just wanted to share the music in another way and to learn more about writing, recording, etcetera. ~ Ken Hensley

Here's some free advice; like the folkies of yore, you need to be not just a writer of songs, you need to be a lover of songs, a listener of songs and a collector of songs. If you hear a song in a club that knocks you out or you hear an old recording of a great song you never knew existed, it does not diminish you to record it; it actually exalts you because you have brought a great song from obscurity to the ear of the public. ~ Michael Kosser

The actual Irish weather report is really a recording made in 1922, which no one has had occasion to change. "Scattered showers, periods of sunshine." ~ Wilfrid Sheed

Posttraumatic stress is something that's always existed. I think that the earliest recording was during the Trojan War, but it's only recently that we're beginning to be aware of it. ~ Janine Di Giovanni

The very first thing I ever did, I was doing some work for the French Cultural Center. They wanted a little recording set up. And I got wire. A wire recorder. The wire came off spools, and to cut and edit, you tied it together in little square knots. Can you imagine? ~ D. A. Pennebaker

Think for a moment about the process that humans have used to record events throughout history. The first evidence we know of is paintings on cave walls. A little further along in time, after many intermediate steps, we see the development of writing. In the more recent past, we see the invention of the camera, audio recording devices, and ultimately video. The manner in which humans have recorded history (and to a lesser extent our own lives) has evolved. We've come a long way. Consider the implications of time. Much of the technology we take for granted today was pure science fiction 50-100 years ago, a dream 200 years ago, and inconceivable 500 years ago. Using these groupings of viewpoints, we can project into the future and categorize the possibilities. In ~ Todd William

[Genesis] is not myth. It is not history in the conventional sense, a mere recording of events. Nor is it theology: Genesis is less about God than about human beings and their relationship with God. The theology is almost always implicit rather than explicit. What Genesis is, in fact, is philosophy written in a deliberately non-philosophical way. It deals with all the central questions of philosophy: what exists (ontology), what can we know (epistemology), are we free (philosophical psychology), and how we should behave (ethics). But it does so in a way quite unlike the philosophical classics from Plato to Wittgenstein. To put it at its simplest: philosophy is truth as system. Genesis is truth as story. It is a unique work, philosophy in the narrative mode. ~ Jonathan Sacks

When I first started recording, I was told by all of the experts in the business that the kind of music that I was doing was never going to sell. That disco was the coming thing and it was going to take over and what I was interested in was a minor sideline. ~ Tom Scholz

Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision. ~ Sebastian Smee

They wanted to manipulate our songs - our fantastic, well-written songs with a soulful drive - beautiful English R&B - and turn them into pop rubbish. We might as well have been writing children's lullabies for all that did for me. We had to get away from that asshole. ~ Diane Rinella

When Philip Glass asked me if I would be interested in doing a new recording of Jesus' Blood he assumed that I would do something similar to the first version and wanted to know what other pieces would be on the same CD. ~ Gavin Bryars

Expanding further on his own observations of Prince's writing style(s) during the course of the album's recording, fellow Paisley Park engineer Eddie Miller, who engineered the recording of 'Electric Chair' among other Prince recordings during the Batman era, recalled that "he would write all sorts of ways. I have to admit that I listened to some of his cassette demos that he would sometimes bring into the studio to reference (as I remember, he would hold the cassette player up to his ear, so you couldn't really hear it.). They were fascinating. His cassette demo technique was extremely crude but ingenious - it's like something you'd do if you had no access to any equipment. He'd use two cheap cassette recorders. If he wanted to hear drums, he'd record a human beat box rhythm for the length of the song - and most likely, he'd have the form of the song in his head while he was recording this. By the way, it was the same in the studio when he'd do his one man band approach to recording a song. He'd know the song in his head, and start out recording the drums for the song (it would essentially become the 'click track' - the way a click track should be). Back to the cassette demo - he'd then play his beat box groove over the speaker on the cassette recorder and sing the bass line while recording all this onto the second cassette machine. He'd build up a rhythm track this way, and then add vocals. And there's your demo. ~ Jake Brown

Each one of us had a little story to tell and each recording was based on that. Lou played all of the music but we both sort of kicked around some cords during the writing phase. ~ Phil Harris

It's kind of odd when you think of Loretta Lynn, when she was first traveling and recording country music. It was all built through word of mouth. If you pleased the fans, they would pass it around to their friends and family. ~ Patty Loveless

Those reporters, writers, photographers, and editors are the best Americans I know. They cherish the ideals of their imperfect profession and of the Republic whose freedoms, equally imperfect in practice have so often made those ideals real. They want desperately to do good, honorable work. In spite of long hours and low pay, they are insistently professional. They are also brave.

I can't ever forget that in Indochina 65 journalists were killed in the course of recording the truth about that war. . . .Reporters and photographers did not stop dying when Vietnam was over. They have been killed in Lebanon and Nicaragua, in Bosnia and Peru, and in a lot of other places where hard rain falls.

I can't believe that these good men and women died for nothing. I know they didn't. They died because they were the people chosen by the tribe to carry the torch to the back of the cave and tell the others what is there in the darkness. They died because they were serious about the craft they practiced. They died because they believed in the fundamental social need for what they did with a pen, a notebook, a typewriter, or a camera. They didn't die to increase profits for the stockholders. They didn't die to obtain an invitation to some White House dinner for a social-climbing publisher. They died for us.

As readers or journalists, we honor them when we remember that their dying was not part of a plan to make the world cheaper, baser, or dumber. They died to ~ Pete Hamill

Before recording my 'Homeland' audition on my iPhone in my bedroom in Streatham, I hadn't worked or had an audition in the U.K. for nine months. ~ David Harewood

Utilizing a unique acoustic blend never heard previously, the Aaron O'Rourke Trio has made a fine debut recording that is sure to please old and new grass fans alike. ~ David Grisman

The Bible writers didn't care that they were bunching together sequences some of which were historical, some preposterous, and some downright manipulative. Faithful recording was not their business; faith was. ~ Jeanette Winterson

ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY
In Proust's Swann's Way a sip of tea and a bite of a small scallopshaped cake known as a petite madeleine cause the narrator to find himself suddenly flooded with memories from his past. At first he is puzzled, but then, slowly, after much effort on his part, he remembers that his aunt used to give him tea and madeleines when he was a little boy, and it is this association that has stirred his memory. We have all had similar experiences - a whiff of a particular food being prepared, or a glimpse of some long-forgotten object - that suddenly evoke some scene out of our past. The holographic idea offers a further analogy for the associative tendencies of memory. This is illustrated by yet another kind of holographic recording technique. First, the light of a single laser beam is bounced off two objects simultaneously, say an easy chair and a smoking pipe. The light bounced off each object is then allowed to collide, and the resulting interference pattern is captured on film. Then, whenever the easy chair is illuminated with laser light and the light that reflects off the easy chair is passed through the film, a three-dimensional image of the pipe will appear. Conversely, whenever the same is done with the pipe, a hologram of the easy chair appears. So, if our brains function holographically, a similar process may be responsible for the way certain objects evoke specific memories from our past ~ Michael Talbot

[M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people. ~ Elizabeth F. Loftus

Dialogue, contrary to popular view, is not a recording of actual speech; it is a semblance of speech, an invented language of exchanges that build in tempo or content toward climaxes. ~ Sol Stein

Chronicler wiped the nib of his pen clean, "It's not really my place to comment on the story," he said placidly. "If you say you saw a dragon ... " He shrugged. Kvothe gave him a profoundly disappointed look. "This from the author of The Mating Habits of the Common Draccus? This from Devan Lochees, the great debunker?" "This from Devan Lochees who agreed not to interrupt or change a single word of the story he is recording." Chronicler lay his pen down and massaged his hand. "Because those were the only conditions under which he could get access to a story he very much desired. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

A diary is useful for recording the idiosyncrasies of other people - but not one's own. ~ Agatha Christie

I think one of the pitfalls of doing your own music is that sometimes you can never be satisfied with it: you're afraid to say that it's done, and you keep reworking it or re-recording it or re-writing it. ~ Adam Schlesinger

But they could be frightening, too. "Watching Watergate in Archie Bunker Country," said the cover of the June 18 issue of New York magazine. It began with the author, top-drawer trend journalist Gail Sheehy, recording what happened when the proprietor of Terry's Bar in Astoria, Queens, asked his patrons if he might tune the bar's TV to the hearings. Nine men cried "Forget it!" "The majority called for Popeye cartoons. But Terry couldn't find a channel that wasn't polluted with the 'search for unvarnished truth.' They had no choice. Television was suppressing their freedom not to know." These ironworkers, sandhogs, elevator operators, and beer truck drivers said things like this: that Ted Kennedy "killed a broad" ("Now there was a mountain, and they made a molehill ~ Rick Perlstein

Heart-to-heart journaling is a dialogue with God where both you and God are talking and you are recording it on paper. Heart-to-heart journaling is simply writing out your thoughts to God and what you sense to be His answer or response to you. ~ Linda Boone

I don't think of myself as a great improver. A lot of times there's long periods of silence when everyone in the recording studio is looking at their watch and waiting for me to say something. And I'm searching desperately in my brain for anything before something dribbles out. ~ Jack Black

Yes, alas, I've been on some recording sessions where the music wasn't good. Not so many, really, considering how many I've done. It's a very awkward situation because to do a recording well you focus on the positive of what will make the piece better. ~ Tony Levin

When we're recording, I always dress up. ~ Britt Daniel