A Quote by Ben Howard

There's force-feeding people synthesised music, then there's a skill in technically being able to play an instrument, even if that is some electronic pad. — © Ben Howard
There's force-feeding people synthesised music, then there's a skill in technically being able to play an instrument, even if that is some electronic pad.
In some ways it's hard to see electronic music as a genre because the word "electronic" just refers to how it's made. Hip-hop is electronic music. Most reggae is electronic. Pop is electronic. House music, techno, all these sorts of ostensibly disparate genres are sort of being created with the same equipment.
There is nothing wrong in electronic music or synthesised music.
I used to play in rock bands. Then I went to the first school of electronic music in the world. It was in Paris headed by one of the most important people involved in electronic music.
It is possible to enjoy the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet. In fact, you can learn to be an expert connoisseur of music without being able to play a note on any instrument. Of course, music would come to a halt if nobody ever learned to play it. But if everybody grew up thinking that music was synonymous with playing it, think how relatively impoverished many lives would be. Couldn't we learn to think of science in the same way?
With the violin, for example, one understands culturally that the sound comes from the instrument that can be seen. With electronic music, it is not the same at all. That's why it seemed so important to me, from the beginning of my career, to invent a grammar, a visual vocabulary adapted to electronic music.
I could create music that sounded as strange as any electronic music, because you see, my opinion about electronic music is that the real composer is the guy who invented the instrument. Pressing buttons is not composing. Composing is about creating something.
Music was segregated in the '80s, and then in the '90s the boundaries started to break down, and rock kids got into electronic music. But then you got this reverse snobbery where people would only listen to electronic music and not rock.
In most musical instruments the resonator is made of wood while the actual sound generator is of animal origin. In cultures where music is still used as a magical force, the making of an instrument always involves the sacrifice of a living being. That being's soul then becomes part of the instrument and in the tones that come forth, the 'singing dead,' who are ever present with us, make themselves heard.
Don't be lazy. Learn your instrument and the kids should be learning that stuff. We have to get back to the musicianship of the music. It's called music, so at some point somebody has to learn how to play an instrument.
I despise people who revel in the ignorance of not being able to play their instrument.
I'm trying to fly the flag for the days of electronic music where people who are making it are also building the gear because that was what was happening in the very early days of electronic music. And that spirit is one of the things that really appeals to me about electronic music so I'm putting this forward as a way to keep that.
The music usually occurs to me as a complete sound, and then I have developed the skill of being able to translate that into a fully realized song.
Music was a big outlet for me. Being able to play an instrument and sing was definitely a good way for me to escape things I was dealing with: family issues, growing up, being a kid and not knowing what I wanted to do with my life.
I love some electronic music. I'm not a big fan of dubstep, but there is so much good electronic music out there.
When you see the orbiter headed out the launch pad and then crawling up the hill and being hard down on the pad, it does something to you.
People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious. "Ah, yes, that's electronic music." But they don't realize that so is the concept of actually taking a piece of extant music and literally re-collaging it, taking chunks out and changing the dynamics radically and creating new rhythmic structures with echo and all that. That's real electronic music, as far as I'm concerned.
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