Quotes & Sayings About Playing Instruments

I've played drums since I was 15. My sisters and I all played instruments. I kind of started with piano and then I actually played saxophone with a jazz band in middle school. So, any knowledge I had of jazz music was from playing alto-sax back then. — Miles Teller

When I was playing with synth players, I was still within a conceptual framework of playing music. When I started playing solo, I became much more aware of the acoustic phenomena that the instruments were producing. — Z'EV

Know the names of past and current artists who are most famous for playing their instruments. — Marilyn Vos Savant

I think the world is very much embracing this whole concept of musicians going out and playing their instruments and playing music for music as opposed to music that has something to do with some form of image or imagery. — Les Claypool

I've been playing one way or another since I was about three years old. I don't remember not knowing how to play any instruments. — Frank Fairfield

I still think that I'm playing instruments, not just pushing buttons and there it goes. It's interactive and alive with the sound and the manipulation and it plays like instruments. — Ikue Mori

Usually I'm only using my instruments when I'm recording or playing a gig. — Max Tundra

Your violin has only two strings," I say. "You're missing the other two."
Yes, he says. He's well aware.
"All I want to do is play music, and the crisis I'm having is right here. This one's gone," he says of the missing top string, "that one's gone, and this little guy's almost out of commission." His goal in life, Nathaniel tells me, is to figure out how to replace the strings. But he got used to playing imperfect instruments while taking music classes in Cleveland's public schools, and there's a lot you can do, he assures me, with just two strings — Steve Lopez

I love Coldplay. The lights, and the sound quality They really play their instruments. Sometimes, during the show, they'll make a mistake and stop. I think they do it intentionally just to show you they're really playing it live. — B.o.B

I wish I were more musically gifted, more intuitive in playing instruments. — Edward Norton

Terror works like a musical composition, so many instruments, all in tune, playing perfectly together to create their desired effect. Sorrow and horror and fear. — Nancy Gibbs

And then the last album, 'Get It', was done over a shorter period of time and I started using other musicians, as opposed to playing all the instruments myself like I did on the other two. — Dave Edmunds

You were playing your instruments? Or do you have tape recorders under your seats? — Prince Philip

I got my MacBook in the first year at university, and that's really when I stopped playing live instruments and started geeking out on my laptop. — Ryan Hemsworth

In actual pieces of music, the pitches of a chord may be duplicated and heard in many different octaves depending on the number and type of instruments playing. — Jonathan Peters

Stuffing birds or playing stringed instruments is an elegant pastime, and a resource to the idle, but it is not education. — John Henry Newman

If I think about music in the future, I imagine it often as not involving electricity, in some dystopian, post-apocalyptic future. And that's what I get from Penderecki: people making music by taking these instruments out of boxes and playing them. That's a very bizarre and modern thing. — Jonny Greenwood

We are God's gift to each other. Like a master composer, He brings all the instruments together, each with a different tone, each playing a different part, and He makes it turn out so beautifully. — Jack Canfield

A guitar is a very personal extension of the person playing it. You have to be emotionally and spiritually connected to your instrument. I'm very brutal on my instruments, but not all the time. — Eddie Van Halen

We have two different ways of working. One is completely unstructured where somebody just starts playing and somebody joins in and then the other person joins in, and something starts to happen. That's occasionally what happens. What more often happens is that we settle on some sort of a few sort of structural ideas, like, "Okay, when I put my finger up, we're all going to move to the extremes of our instruments. So, that means you can only play either very high or very low or both. And we're going to stay there until I take my finger down." — Brian Eno

Sharon went on to play classical but we actually went into totally different instruments which was lucky for the band because otherwise we'd all be playing the same thing!! — Caroline Corr

I wandered the sidewalk watching all the street performers doing their juggling acts, playing their musical instruments, busting their asses to avoid work. I liked that. But I wanted to tell them there were easier ways to avoid work, like cab driving. — Gary Reilly

Every artist is different - the pop mentality is different than bands for me, because I'm playing a lot of the instruments. — Matt Squire

I love playing anyone that does stuff that I don't do. The fun of playing an assassin is that I've never killed anybody. The fun of playing a brilliant musician is that I don't actually play any instruments. — Eric McCormack

I think of myself as a jazz player, and my music as a natural extension of the jazz tradition. What I'm doing is completely free improvisation ('composing in real time') with nothing predetermined. I've had a lot of experience playing many different kinds of music and several different instruments, and since I tend not to waste anything, it all shows up somewhere in the music I'm playing now. — Richard Grossman

Ourchestra: So you haven't got a drum, just beat your belly. So I haven't got a horn-I'll play my nose. So we haven't any cymbals- We'll just slap our hands together, And though there may be orchestras That sound a little better With their fancy shiny instruments That cost an awful lot- Hey, we're making music twice as good By playing what we've got! — Shel Silverstein

I like "Julie Gold's song "From a Distance". Her song reminds me of the world as seen through an observer's eye. Seen from a distance, we are people in the same band playing music for everyone. We are artists who play the most beautiful instruments in the world - life. — Ilchi Lee

Don't worry about saving these songs! And if one of our instruments breaks, it doesn't matter. We have fallen into the place where everything is music. The strumming and the flute notes rise into the atmosphere, and even if the whole world's harps should burn up, there will still be hidden instruments playing — Jalaluddin Rumi

Jumping back into it was easy as apple pie, it was natural. Honestly, I'm not trying to be nostalgic and talk about the old days but I really believe wholeheartedly that the three of us, Woody Weatherman, Mike Dean & myself really learned how to play our instruments together and now that we are playing together again it can't be anything but natural. — Reed Mullin

I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin. — J. Cole

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

A lot of it starts with playing instruments and working with other people. Some of the new generation is doing it on computers and they don't have a clue as to how to play anything. That's probably one of the problems. They don't know how to make the melody, go through the chord changes. They're not starting from that same school of thought. — Ray Parker Jr.

A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without any help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument
a piano, say, which is a little orchestra in itself. Such a man is a little world in himself; and the effect produced by various instruments together, he produces single-handed, in the unity of his own consciousness. Like the piano, he has no place in a symphony; he is a soloist and performs by himself
in soli tude, it may be; or if in the company with other instruments, only as principal; or for setting the tone, as in singing. — Arthur Schopenhauer

JULY 20. I've just walked into the opera house. I have no programme. Strange new players are premiering a piece by a flamboyant new composer. Front and centre, three, maybe four, whales begin - a swelling string section - discordant, irresolute harmonies fill the concert hall. Then two more whales, stage right, come in, playing eight octave clarinets, counterpointing the string section. And then they, too, are counterpointed by occasional glissando slurs and passages played pizzicato by whales at the rear of the stage. But suddenly, a programme change: The orchestra members switch clothes and pull new instruments from their cases. The French horn players begin wailing on shiny, sleazy saxophones. The trumpeters spit rapid-fire bursts into an underwater echo chamber - the deep, rocky corridor of Johnstone Strait. — Erich Hoyt

Playing guitar as a young teen, I didn't really have the little light bulb in my head that said you're committed until when I was about 16. By the time I was 16, I was like, I'm guna do this. I don't care what happens. I'd play whatever other instruments fell into my hands along way. — Steve Kimock

I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down. — David Byrne

I was in a Led Zeppelin cover band in high school, and my highlight was playing "Misty Mountain Hop" at a coffee house in Wayne, Pennsylvania. I wasn't allowed to play any instruments; I could only be the singer because I was a girl. — Victoria Legrand

I grew up playing about 15 instruments and the way that I was able to accomplish that was by cutting my classes, hanging out in the band room all day, and going from one instrument to the next to the next, until I learned how to play everything by ear. — Flavor Flav

Your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they've been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don't explore; you only play what is confident and pleasing. I'm learning to break those habits by playing instruments I know absolutely nothing about, like a bassoon or a waterphone. — Tom Waits

I didn't follow the standard rules of bass playing, and many musicians on many different instruments who became noteworthy for their unique or particular style did a very similar thing. — Billy Sheehan

If our hearts and minds are not properly transformed, we are like musicians playing untuned instruments, or engineers working with broken and ill-programmed computers. The attunement of the heart is essential to the outflow of grace ... We must aim at building the structures of God's kingdom but recognized that we will only create these through the transformation of our experience. Concentration on reformation without revival leads to skins without wine; concentration on revival without reformation soon loses the wine for want of skins. — Richard Lovelace

All of the combined sounds of the various instruments knitted together into beautiful strains that washed over me and made my brain and body hum with a gentle peacefulness. This was why I loved playing in the orchestra. Making music on my own was wonderful, but working together with so many others to create something with so much depth and so many layers, that was something else altogether. — Sarah Fox

From my opinion, 'geisha' means a woman skilled in the arts, like dancing, singing and playing musical instruments,. — Zhang Ziyi

I guess I'm interested in pushing the boundaries of the cello without giving up on the idea of playing the cello, if that makes any sense. I have no real interest in putting the cello through different effects to make it sound like a guitar or other instruments. — Okkyung Lee

Words are the instruments you play to the song of your ideas, you're just playing covers. — Ze Frank

The chief objection to playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player. — George Bernard Shaw

There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of 'Heaven' ridiculous by saying they do not want 'to spend eternity playing harps'. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs. — C.S. Lewis

I had been playing for about a year and a half when the Beach Boys formed. When our folks went to Mexico on business, we would take the food money they had left us and we would rent instruments. — Carl Wilson

When I get intimate with my paintings, it's a real good spiritual thing to get off my chest. Same as playing the instruments is a great release. — Ronnie Wood

I love playing instruments that I don't know how to play or am not familiar with. I like the idea of danger and innocence that comes from it. As an artist, I feel I should be able to do something with anything I get my hands on. The music becomes minimalist because of my limited knowledge. — Gustavo Santaolalla

I wrote a post about wanting to buy a banjo - a $300 banjo, which is a lot of money, and I don't play instruments; I don't know anything about music. I like music, and I like banjos, and I think I probably heard Steve Martin playing, and I said, 'I could do that.' And I said to my husband, I said, 'Ben, can I buy a banjo?' And he's like, 'No.' — Mena Grabowski Trott

The instruments were all half desired, half forgotten. It was as if they were left behind by a ghost right in the middle of playing. — Hannah Lillith Assadi

Not everyone's cut out to have one," she said. She wished for a moment that she had the words to explain it properly: how loving someone more than you loved yourself gave you strength and courage; how seeing yourself in your parabatai's eyes meant seeing the best version of yourself; how, at its best, fighting alongside your parabatai was like playing instruments in harmony with one another, each piece of the music improving the other. — Cassandra Clare

I used to play a few instruments including guitar and snare drums, but I think a musical background is an important part of a career. If you start out playing instruments you create a better instinct and feeling for music. — Nicky Romero

The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has a medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball ... I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon. — Frank Zappa

I had been playing single note instruments and I wanted to hear a guitar played as a piano. — Leo Kottke

Because you have things like 'American Idol' and you've got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it's easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock. — Dave Grohl

I started playing instruments. Writing didn't come until later. I didn't know how to play a keyboard but I'd listen to hits off the radio, learn them, then my hands would be ready to play. — Amanda Perez

All this has been happening around them all the days of their lives though they couldn't see it, then one day, Prayer removes the veil and everything changes. Think of it this way: Picture a man whistling a tune, when out of nowhere, first a harmony joins, then another, and then suddenly he is taken up into a whirlwind of music, countless instruments playing soaring complexities that the man's whistling is, indeed, a part of, but now he begins to see how small a part; the longer he listens, he realizes that his is not the melody and where he had thought he was whistling alone, the truth had always been the music playing, though never before that moment heard, and now what had been noise becomes symphony. — Geoffrey Wood

I get a lot of joy from playing instruments, and I have a different personality on each instrument. I like to let that come out. I get kind of selfish. — Lenny Kravitz

My father had a phase of having jukeboxes all over the house. He was a music lover but he was also into musical machinery. Not instruments, he was never interested in playing particularly but there would be these odd objects, like valve amplifiers being dismantled on the kitchen table. My mum wasn't massively keen on that, but it was part of the environment. — Squarepusher

I could always hold a melody, but I was never like, I'm going to be a singer. So I'm able to use that when I write. I'm actually playing the beat with my voice. Instead of thinking about coming up with melodies, it's like filling in the instruments. So sometimes it's better to have beats with less melodies in them, because then I can play more with my vocals. — Kid Ink

I really like Caravan Palace's electro swing stuff. They incorporate the electronic, but when you see them live, they're all on stage playing live music. They're all playing their instruments. They drop these beats with the DJs that are so incredible. — Drake Bell

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. — Billy Sherwood

The Listening Exercise
Relax. Close your eyes. Try for several minutes to concentrate on all of the sounds you hear in your surroundings, as if you were hearing an orchestra playing its instruments. Little by little, try to separate each sound from
the others. Concentrate on each one, as if it were the only instrument playing. Try to eliminate the other sounds from your awareness.
When you do this exercise every day, you will begin to hear voices. First, you will think that they are imaginary. Later, you will discover that they are
voices of people from your past, present, and future, all of them participating with you in the remembrance of time.
This exercise should be performed only when you already know the voice of your messenger.
Do this exercise for ten minutes at a time. — Paulo Coelho

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. — Aristotle.

I'm convinced that the world, more than ever, needs the music only you can make. And if it takes extra courage to keep playing in spite of your loss, many will applaud the effort. And who knows? Others may be inspired to pick up their broken instruments, their broken lives, and begin again. — Steve Goodier

I believe I love my guitar more than the others love theirs. For John and Paul, songwriting is pretty important and guitar playing is a means to an end. While they're making up new tunes I can thoroughly enjoy myself just doodling around with a guitar for a whole evening. I'm fascinated by new sounds I can get from different instruments I try out. I'm not sure that makes me particularly musical. Just call me a guitar fanatic instead, and I'll be satisfied. — George Harrison

Of course, an exhausting day at sail lines and nets left little energy to expend on running or laughing. Perhaps that was why her parents couldn't appreciate her music-it wouldn't appear to be hard work to them. Menolly shook her hands, letting them flap from her wrists. They ached and trembled from the constricted movements and tension of an hour of intensive playing. No, her parents would never understand that playing musical instruments could be as hard work as sailing or fishing. — Anne McCaffrey

I got into playing the jazz. I played jazz for a good while. I did the popular stuff first. You got the "Twelfth Street Rag" and those kinds of things. Then I got to hanging around with a bunch of guys starting to playing jazz. We'd go from one place to the other and take our instruments, just perform for free. — Papa John Creach

If we admit instrumental musick in the worship of God, how can we resist the imposition of all the instruments used among the ancient Jews? - yea, dancing as well as playing, and several other Judaic actions? or, how can we decline a whole rabble of church-officers, necessary to be introduced for instrumental musick, whereof our Lord Jesus Christ hath left us no manner of direction? — Cotton Mather

We were gradually playing larger venues and in the early days PA systems were kind of non-existent. So to play loud, we had to use louder equipment. The PA systems back then didn't mic the instruments - only the vocals. — John Entwistle

When you're making music or playing a song, I find the moments when there are no instruments being played even stronger than when they are being played. Because they add tension. It's also an ego-less thing - a place where you have no ego - when you're with a bunch of musicians who stop and listen instead. — Sarah McLachlan

Today a record producer is even more involved and is often the production's sole musician, one person playing all the instruments one-by-one. — Tony Visconti

It happens to us quite often-it feels as though I'm not playing my instrument, something else is playing it and that same thing is playing all three of our instruments. That's what I mean when I say it's frightening sometimes. Maybe we'll all play the same phrase out of nowhere. It happens very often with us. — Ginger Baker

The Violins waltzed. The Cellos and Basses provided accompaniment. The Violas mourned their fate, while the Concertmaster showed off. The Flutes did bird imitations ... repeatedly, and the reed instruments had the good taste to admire my jacket. The Trumpets held a parade in honor of our great nation, while the French Horns waxed nostalgic about something or other. The Trombones had too much to drink. The Percussion beat the band, and the Tuba stayed home playing cards with his landlady, the Harp, taking sips of warm milk a blue little cup.
But the Composer is still dead. — Lemony Snicket

Those clocks are sophisticated instruments that calculate time by measuring electrical charges called coulombs
given the rapidity and volume of electrons that move through the measuring device the calibrator must adjust at certain points which was the delay you see
the delay is just recalibrating for the clock moving too quickly during the 10
10ths of a second before the delay
this insures that the actual playing time during a period is exactly 20 minutes That is not an opinion
that is science
amazing devise quite frankly. — Dean Lombardi

My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby, you fool!
Before today my body was useless.
Now it's tearing at its square corners.
It's tearing old Mary's garments off, knot by knot
and see - Now it's shot full of these electric bolts.
Zing! A resurrection!
Once it was a boat, quite wooden
and with no business, no salt water under it
and in need of some paint. It was no more
than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her.
She's been elected.
My nerves are turned on. I hear them like
musical instruments. Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.
Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped
into fire. — Anne Sexton

When I'm making my music, I'm writing it, I'm producing it, I'm playing all the instruments, I'm performing. It's my own world where I do what I feel, and nobody tells me anything. — Lenny Kravitz

When we first started playing in the early days, none of us really had any idea about writing our own songs yet. We were struggling how to learn our instruments and play songs to be able to perform for people. — Wayne Kramer

I was not a band geek, per say. But me and my two older sisters played instruments, so I would come home and my sister Dana would be playing the clarinet or playing the piano, and I would play the saxophone, my other sister would be singing, my mom would be singing. I was not afraid to be musical. That was not something that I thought was uncool. — Miles Teller

Too many talented people string and unstring their instruments without ever playing their music. — Ken Standley

I don't let the children watch TV on weeknights. They practice playing musical instruments instead. Both my sons play piano, drums and guitar, so my husband and I listen to them in the evening. — Jane Seymour

You would never do stand-up without an audience. I mean, no one would even consider it. It's like they're the instrument you're playing. — Louis C.K.

I didn't decide to start to playing piano until I was almost 13 years old when my friends and I thought it would be fun to start a band. None of us actually played any instruments so the band never quite got off the ground, BUT it made me go home and ask my parents for piano lessons. That was really the beginning for me. Once I started, it was all I wanted to do. — Andrew Hollander

Simon looked from one of them to the other, and shook his head. " When did you two get so buddy-buddy? Last night it was all, 'I'm the most elite warrior!' ' No, I'm the most elite warrior!' And today you're playing Halo and giving each other props for good ideas. — Cassandra Clare