A Quote by Petra Haden

I got a new 4-track cassette recorder a year or so after high school. For a while I would just stare at it thinking, how am I going to do this if I don't play guitar or keyboards? How am I going to write and record a song if I don't know how to play any instruments? I mean, I played the violin, but I didn't know anything about how to work a 4-track.
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.
One interesting thing - I play bass and guitar and stuff like that. I know those instruments really well. But I don't know how to play clarinet or trombone or any of these other instruments. I don't actually know how to play ukulele even though I've played it a lot in the past. Because of the weird tuning it's not exactly like a guitar. That's one of the reasons I like that instrument - it makes for surprises. It's not so predictable as the bass or the guitar is for me.
I am not an evangelist. I am not a preacher. I am a musician. That is what I know how to do. I know how to write songs. I know how to write things that relate to my heart. I feel that I talk about God in every song, in everything I do - all of it! I really do not know how to respond. I do not relate to that.
People say people who spend too many years in prison don't know how to act when they get free. I don't know how I am going to act, how I am going to kill time, once I am not a fighter. Retirement scares me, and I have to think about how I am going to handle it.
I do get labeled as a guitar band, but the only reason is that's the instrument I know how to play. The guitar is serving the song I'm writing. But I'm learning how to play keyboard better now so that'll start serving the song as well; it'll be another flavor. I'm not going to switch it up with big, fat drum machine beats and real swoopy synths, but yeah...
I play the guitar. I taught myself how to play the guitar, which was a bad decision... because I didn't know how to play it, so I was a shitty teacher. I would never have went to me.
You get into the game and you know you're probably not going to be in there long. It's like, while I'm in here, I better not mess up. That's the completely wrong mentality to have. That works against how I play because how I play is 150 percent, going all out, going crazy.
After discovering the Ramones, I discovered really crude ways to multi-track by taking another cassette recorder and plugging that into the eight-track, playing it back, so that as I was recording with the mic in my guitar, I could have another cassette player I had recorded on feeding into the recording.
My Mom played violin and piano when she was growing up and she insisted, and I don't know if you can imagine how uncool it is to play the violin when you're eight and ten years old, but I told my Mom that I would quit every day until I went to high school and I met these other gentlemen who would become Yellowcard, and my friends, and I really fell in love with music and it wasn't just classical music, just submerged in the arts in the school I was in.
Get to the point where the songs sum it all up, and creatively, I'm just like, 'This is it.' I've also learned how to be patient and not really try to overproduce anymore. I used to add instruments, keep adding instruments, but nowadays - I know better now. I know how to let the track breathe.
My dad used to do a lot of music when he was young, so he had an 8-track MiniDisc recorder, and when he realized that I was getting on with it, he brought it upstairs to my room and showed me how to record and how, once you finished eight tracks, you can cut it down to two and have another six tracks to play with.
As we all saw in grade school, once you learn how to read a book, somebody is going to want to write one - that's how authors are made. Once we know how to read our own genetic code, someone is going to want to rewrite that 'text,' tinker with traits - play God, some would say.
I'm really interested in trying to learn how to play the guitar since I've got two of them! I can kind of mess around on the piano, but I'm going to start learning how to play the guitar.
I am more interested in how people interpret the phrase 'Elect The Dead' than what I may or may not have intended. I named the album after the track, which is a spiritual song about love, life and death and is the heaviest song on the album without having any heavy instruments.
I don't know how it got around that I play a lot of instruments. I really don't. I play the guitar and the mandolin.
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.
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