Top 1200 Piano Playing Quotes & Sayings - Page 7

Seriously, Jamie Cullum could be the smallest person on the planet. He might be lovely and charming and you might think we all should spend more time talking about his piano-playing techniques but, seriously, have you seen how short he is?

I took piano lessons when I was really young, like five years old, and I didn't really enjoy that very much. It was kind of too strict. So when I was probably 11 or 12, I started playing guitar and just kind of taught myself.

I'll just sit at the piano a lot an play like through different chord exercises and kind of just throwing my hands down on the piano from one chord to the next to see what happens.

I got to sing solo in the junior choir when I was 10 or 11 and won a competition, and my sister's piano playing improved to a certain level. One time my sister and I worked together. The first song we ever sang in High School was Rags to Riches by Tony Bennett.

I did it all, singing, the harp, piano. But I was so shy, I'd wake up at six to practice piano because I didn't want anyone to hear me play. But then I'd do a big show in school where everyone would see me, and that was actually alright.

I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they're a necessity. When I'm playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected - to my music.

I certainly miss playing piano, and I really wish I did it more - it's really a very therapeutic thing to do for me. I just need to be home for more than a few minutes to be able to play more, I guess.

When I do my own books, I take it as more of my own confessional, but when I illustrate for other people, it is intriguing because I feel like I shouldn't be stepping too much into the limelight. It's like playing the piano while someone else is singing.

I became really creative around the time I started understanding that people could be creative with music and that that was allowed. I stated taking piano lessons at age five, but I never did what my piano teacher told me to do. I would just do whatever I wanted.

I started playing piano with a little band in high school. I was terrible. I thought I had absolutely no talent. I couldn't keep time. I only got into McGill, which was a lousy music school, because they were taking American music students.

Music is something I couldn't live without. My dad was into music, he played for pleasure - guitar, piano. I started off doing jazz, singing with a lot of fabulous musicians here in London before I went to the States. And I still take piano lessons every Wednesday.

I consider myself very fortunate. I mean, I think there's that old saying, 'Where there's a will, there's a way,' and I just have such a passion for jazz music and playing the piano that I just find a way to make it work, so to speak. Fortunately, I have so far.

I'd go over to my grandmother's house, and she'd be playing opera. They loved opera. Not only did they play it on the radio, but they played it on their piano. Everybody learned how to read music and how to play.

I stepped back from being out front to playing bass. So we started switching: I'd play bass on one song, we'd switch on the next song; I'd play piano... we'd play mandolin.

To know the piano is to know the universe. To master the piano is to master the universe. The spectrum of piano sound acts as a prism through which all musical and non-musical sounds may be filtered. The grunts of sheep, the braying of mules, the popping of champagne corks, the sighs of unrequited love, not to mention the full lexicon of sounds available to all other instruments-including whistles, scrapes, bleatings, caresses, thuds, hoots, plus sweet and sour pluckings-fall within the sovereignty of this most bare and dissembling chameleon.

I'm an intense guy. I run 10 miles a day, which helps alleviate my intensity. Also, singing helps defuse my intensity. Playing the piano helps, and writing helps.

Instead of the metaphor of scales in balance, I prefer the idea of a jazz quartet: you're trying to make music that feels and sounds good, and sometimes you only hear the trumpet or just the bass and piano. Sometimes all four are playing at the same time, but perhaps at different volume.

Well, my sister played trumpet. Can you imagine having a sister blowing the trumpet around the house, Fred? And my brother, he played piano. Everybody was playing some kind of music, so it was natural for me to get into it.

I had been inspired by an organ player named Earl Grant, who played organ and piano together. My mom took me to see him. So I went home, put my piano and organ together, too.

I never planned on being a live performer. My whole forte was about being in the studio, producing, playing the piano on recording sessions. I was all about the studio.

I've never really not played the piano. I've played it since I was six or seven and it's something I've always done - I don't think I could ever really play anything else, I would be a bit out of it without a piano.

They teach real young kids and when I was about five my Mom took me to enroll in this thing and they said I could do it. It was definitely my choice, but I would have never thought of it. There's pictures of me playing piano when I'm real, real little, that kind of stuff.

I tend to think about so many different things on a recording. I'll be trying to tune into what the drummer's doing, trying to keep everyone playing the groove and other things like making sure the piano's in a nice pocket.

I was very quick; I did nothing but play the piano apart from being at school. I was at home with my mother, saying, 'Go out and get some fresh air.' No, I wanted to play the piano all the time I could. I was completely obsessed.

I came from a really musical family. I studied classical piano because my grandparents were piano teachers, but started doing musical theater at age nine in Fresno, California, and went to a performing arts high school. That was my life.

I have to be composed; I have to be poised. I have to remember what my first piano teacher told me: 'You do not touch that piano until you are ready and until they are ready to listen to you.

But it's funny, I really was quite introverted as a child. I just liked music, so mum and dad bought me a piano when I was seven - I actually got up to Grade Seven at the London College of Music on piano.

I played piano growing up. I played classical piano since I was 5, and I sang in choirs, and I sang in plays and musicals.

When I was playing piano, it was like, 'I'm going to write a song using all the white keys.' My music director, who knew my jazz background, suggested I try big-band music, so we spent a year experimenting with it in concert, and the audience reaction was really good.

I have always wanted to learn the piano, but because I travel so much, I can never get any consistency of lessons. So everywhere I go, if I can find a piano, even if it is in the lobby of a hotel or something, I go on YouTube and pick some songs to learn.

I was 11 years old, and I had been playing classical piano for three years, and suddenly the guitar came and landed in my arms. I fell in love with that instrument, and I still love it today. I love it so much.

God gave me a gift of singing and playing the piano, and when I do it, it's exciting, of course. But it's more than that. It's truly the way God created me to release my soul and my spirit, to really worship him. ... I'm made to create music.

A lot of my work is about these moments you find, like when you're driving alone at night by yourself, or you sit at home and smoke a cigarette and all of a sudden there is beautiful music playing - for me it is sad piano music - and think, "I'm so in love and I don't even know with what." You want to freeze this moment.

You can't be different if you look at it. Being gifted is different. I had that in my piano playing. I'm very thankful for that. I'm very aware of that. The style and what I fed is just me. I never worked at it. It just happened.

Sometimes I'll write without the guitar or the piano, but most of the time I'll be playing and just improvising some words. And when I get something that sounds good, a line with a story in it, I'll try and tease it out and figure out where the story is going.

I've been touching instruments since the day I was born. My mother is Brazilian, and she listens to Brazilian music. My father was a musician, and I've seen pictures of him when he was in a band playing guitar and piano. He loved country music, Frank Sinatra, and stuff like that.

It takes great technique, tremendous discipline and energy and practice, and damn few are capable. Art is confidence. Technique makes it possible to achieve artistic greatness, but doesn't guarantee it. The great piano artists are not the ones who are best playing Clementi exercises.

If you force yourself to write away from the piano, you come up with more inventive things. If you're too good a piano player, as some composers are, the music may become flavorless and glib. And if you're not a very good pianist, you're limited to the same patterns.

I've been making electronic music since I was 12. I was making music as soon as I knew how to make sounds on a piano. My parents had a baby grand, and the piano is still my favorite instrument. I look at it as a songwriting machine.

I love anything that gets me outside of my own head. I love music because it's really just - I tried to play piano as a kid. I was awful. It didn't help, and this is absolutely true, that my piano teacher had arthritis. And that's not a good way to learn.

I think my love of music comes from my dad. I was born with an ear for music, like him, and started with the piano when I was 4 but fell in love with the drums. My dad always has music playing.

The atom can't be seen, yet its existence can be proved. And it is simple to prove that it can't ever be seen. It has to be studied by indirect evidence - and the technical difficulty has been compared to asking a man who has never seen a piano to describe a piano from the sound it would make falling downstairs in the dark.

I sat down at the piano and my hands began to browse over the keys. Thensomething happened. I felt as though I could reach out and touch God. I foundmyself playing a melody, one I'd never heard or played before, and words came intomy head - they just seemed to fall into place.

I'm a piano player and singer who can't play piano very well or sing very well. That isn't a recipe for success. I have to get better.

I normally write on acoustic guitar, although piano is the instrument that I actually studied. Occasionally, I'll write on the piano or sometimes with no instrument at all.

I don't like the piano player music of the movies, the Michael Nyman, and sometimes that piano music makes me puke. It's not really romantic. It's just trying to get your Pavlovian juices flowing because it's a technique now.

Music has been a huge passion of mine ever since I started playing the piano at age 3. Going to concerts, performing on my own, and listening to my favorite artists growing up confirmed that love for music and made me want to pursue it as a career.

I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize - out of like 5,000 kids!

I grew up not really listening to guitar players. Especially when I was studying music, I was just interested in piano players and arrangers and composers; I came to playing in a band from the perspective of someone who never expected to play guitar in a band.

For a while, I was working on transcribing rap lyrics and then converting them into rhythmic patterns on the piano. And so in my mind, when I was taking a solo, I would be saying the lyrics and trying to play actual notes to their rhythms. Now, the influence just comes in and out in my playing.

I just wanted to release an album of piano music for music's sake. I'm not expecting to sell millions of albums. It's was just nice to be able to sit down at an acoustic piano and make some music.

My father had left behind an old piano. My sister was already going to school, my mother was out working, and I stayed at home alone with my adorable grandmother who understood nothing I said. It was so boring that I stayed at the piano all day long, and that saved my life.

I was always into classical music and opera because I played the piano as I went through school and was very interested in Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and stuff like that. That changed into heavy metal at around the age of 14 or 13, and I dropped the piano and started to play the guitar.

Oddly, when I started to make the record, I wasn't aware I was making a record. I just was sort of disgusted with the whole thing and sequestered myself in the basement and started playing the piano just for something to do.

My entire life, I've always known that I wanted to be a performer, but I didn't know exactly how, where or when. I never learned or studied the craft, formally. I grew up doing martial arts and playing piano. But, something inside of me always said that I was going to do this, as far back as I can remember.

My dad was a self-taught stride piano player. The myth is - I don't whether it's true or not - that he taught himself to play by watching a player piano.

What I love about piano and vocal is it's incredibly pure, and it gets down to the essence of the song because you're not distracted by an orchestra. When it's just a piano and a voice, it's about the purity of singing the song.

My father was an amateur oil painter, so some of his oil paintings were on our walls. There was one above the piano of a famous Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, playing an instrument known as a bandura. I remember that one kind of resonated with me; it was always central in the living room.

Chopin was the first piano composer who knew exactly how to make piano sound reach fullness, radiance and grandness. What to regard and what, by all means, to avoid. Chopin was keenly aware of the overtones and he did take care of them so artfully.

A MIDI file contains coded instructions to play a particular series of notes on an electronic music synthesizer. A MIDI file is more like a piano roll in a player piano than any type of sound recording.