A Quote by Sixto Rodriguez

I'm not a visual guy. I'm audio. I'm a musician. I know what I do. I play guitar, and in my category I'm doing O.K. — © Sixto Rodriguez
I'm not a visual guy. I'm audio. I'm a musician. I know what I do. I play guitar, and in my category I'm doing O.K.
I am a musician who stopped working with music. Now I work with visual music, or audio-visual music.
Yes, for me audio-visual performance has its roots in my experience working as an improvising musician and composer.
As human beings we're visual creatures, and it's so easy to play the guitar by looking at it. It's a real challenge to go from that visual way of perceiving the guitar to getting back to that pure sound connecting to the instrument.
I was a musician who began playing with computers, to see if they could make some tasks simpler. I developed some "tricks" or strategies for working with audio files, and then discovered that the same tricks could be applied to video files, or really, any type of data. Previously I made many different kinds of music. I did some work as a composer of film scores. In that role, my task was to create audio to match and deepen the visual. In my work now, the role is often reversed: I have to create images to match and deepen the audio.
As a musician, I don't think I'm the greatest guitar player. I'm a bigger fan of the drums than I am the guitar; I just happen to play guitar. I play drums almost every day at my house. I wrote a lot of songs behind the drum kit, just having the music and vocals in my head and playing the rhythm.
Dance fascinates me, and it is perhaps the most enriching audio-visual realm for a musician. Film-making also fascinates me.
I'd like to be able to get more girls to play guitar. I think with a girl playing electric guitar, sometimes it's seen a bit like a guy doing ballet. All the people I learned guitar from have been guys. There are some great female players, like Bonnie Raitt and Jennifer Batten, but very few.
As a musician and a guitar player, I can noodle as well as anybody. But from my background as a session musician, I always try to play what is called for by the lyric and listening to the song. As a writer, that's what I do, too.
I've been a visual artist my entire life, so translating music to imagery has always come naturally to me. Tycho is an audio-visual project in a lot of ways, so I don't see a real separation between the visual and musical aspects; they are both just components of a larger vision.
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.
Every now and then, I like to take a break from the visual arts and play a few songs on guitar. I don't play them for anyone.
I foresee online gaming changing when there are good audio-visual links connecting the participants, thus approximating play in a face-to-face group.
If you are having trouble making a chord, get a book, that is how I learned. There are guitar tuning apps so you can tune your guitar, and just learn how to play along with your records. And it's great to be able to play along with another musician. That is like trial by fire.
I was doing someones hair the day I first saw my guitar ... a guy was walking down the street with it, and knew that guitar was mine (a 1953 weathered Fender Telecaster) .. I said I'll get you the most beautiful guitar you've ever seen and I'll trade you straight across ... I found him a purple Telecaster and said here's your guitar ... that was it, it was like he knew that guitar belonged to me.
So Nemerov showed us this picture, which is of Apollo flaying Marcius. You don't think of Apollo as being the sort of person who would skin someone alive. But the story behind it was that there was this guy who was a really great musician, and all the women loved him, and people started saying he was the best musician in the world, so Apollo got jealous and he challenged this guy to a musical dual. They would each play a song and the muses would judge who was the better musician.
Well, I'm known as a guitar-rock guy, you know? You're not supposed to play with synthesizers. This is not in the rulebook.
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