Top 59 Synthesizer Quotes & Sayings

I think I was first to do live performances on a modern electronic sound synthesizer.

My music, my whole approach to the synthesizer has completely changed now.

If it's fast, no I don't have enough piano technique. In that case, it's probably been done on some kind of synthesizer or sequencer. Then the score can then be printed out and so forth.

You're forced to step into that performer role. I can't just hide behind a synthesizer forever.

Being a DJ is so easy. I can put headphones in this pocket, USB sticks in the other and that's it - I'm a DJ. But when I do the live show I'm bringing all this fragile analogue synthesizer equipment and dealing with three-hour sound checks and all that.

James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

I've always been fascinated with sound, since I was a little kid when my mother Dorothy Dean took me to my first piano lesson. Later on, my guitar, bass guitar, and synthesizer were my secret weapons.

Sometimes in Portland I'm like, 'Who is funding this city?' It's doing great - there's all these new shops; there's a synthesizer store. Where is this coming from?

The most obvious thing you can't do with a guitar synthesizer is to really sound like a guitar.

The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986. I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it.

I have an Otari with a Korg T2 Midi synthesizer, a drum machine and a few effects units.

I started working with synthesizer players, and I had to find new instruments. I needed a more complex sound, so I went to a surplus place and got a bunch of hard plastic stuff and stainless steel stuff, and that stuff worked. So from that point on, from the 70s on, I've made instruments.

It's been very hard for the guitar as a serious synthesizer to compete with keyboards.

People shouldn't knock the synthesizer. It's an aid, and it depends on how you use it, just like any other instrument.

My setup for a live performance lately has been just guitar and synthesizer. Sometimes I only bring one. The guitar is in pretty bad shape and isn't sounding the same. Most of the time my live approach has been pretty different from recording.

But synthesizer music has been accepted as emotional for long enough that it isn't a huge reach, conceptually, to think of a fake voice as 'emotional', especially since there's a human composing it.

To me, the original VCS3 synthesizer is like a Stradivarius.

If the guitar synthesizer is really going to stand as a synthesizer on its own, it needs to develop a more characteristic sound; I don' think it's gotten there yet.

As soon as people hear my voice and synthesizer together they hear Erasure.

People are tied together and yet isolated from each other by invisible threads of rhythm and hidden walls of time. Time is... a primary organizer of all activities, a synthesizer and integrator, a way of handling priorities and categorizing experience, a feedback mechanism for how things are going, a measuring rod against which competence, effort, and achievement are judged as well as a special message system revealing how people really feel about each other and whether or not they can get along.

I like large sounds and very complex sonorities, and I also tend to opt for creating a feeling of vast space. I could achieve this effect either by using a symphony orchestra, which for a dance piece is pretty much impossible these days, or by using a synthesizer on multi-channel tape and a superb sound system, to get that same sensation of expansiveness and depth.

In fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and, you can't notate that. You can't notate the sound of "St. Elmo's Fire." There's no way of writing that down. That's because musical notation arose at a time when sound textures were limited. If you said violins and woodwind that defined the sound texture; if I say synthesizer and guitar it means nothing - you're talking about 28,000 variables.

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.

I used to practice piano for hours, and now, with a synthesizer, you can input the music and the machine perfects the song. That's why we have so many people in the music business who should be plumbers. They don't really understand music because they haven't been trained.

I put all those synthesizer sounds behind "Decoy" and "Code M.D." A lot of things we write together. A lot of things are his, but they don't have that thing I want on the bottom. I often tell him, I say, "Bobby [Irving], if there's a melody, there's another one somewhere that goes with it."

I guess that I'm primarily thought of as a rocker, largely because of 'Frankenstein' being such a heavy song - you know, it was really hard rock, almost a precursor of heavy metal and just the image of the synthesizer. I happened to be the first guy to get the idea of putting a strap on the keyboard.

All those ethereal string sounds on 'Oxygene IV' come from the VCS3. It was the first European synthesizer, made in England by a guy called Peter Zinoviev. I got one of the first ones.

I took to the synthesizer. My cousin had some synthesizers, and I'd always make stuff on those things.

The thing that's good about music-making software like the DAW-kinda systems is that they're all generally the same; the kind of interface is normally laid out in a similar way. Depending on the program, the sounds might be quite different, but they tend to all have a drum machine or synthesizer or a sampler.

It means basically I'm using the synthesizer more to change the sounds of other things rather than to use it as the source of the sound.

A guitar being played by an actual person is never going to be as precise and perfect as a programmed synthesizer. But we maintain there is value in the potential for human error.

The use of electronics is a natural extension of the instrument - it is an electric guitar. So we guitarists have been plugging into something since 1931, and we are not about to stop now. Current advances in technology means we can have a huge array of sounds at our fingertips, and this offers amazing possibilities to the contemporary composer. It is always a guitar (I don't play synthesizer) but it becomes something else all together - more like sculpting sound in real time using metal wires, 5 fingers and a pick.

I have a Chamberlain I bought from some surfers in Westwood many years ago. It's an early analog synthesizer; it operates on tape loops. It has 60 voices - everything from galloping horses to owls to rain to every instrument in the orchestra.

For me it always comes down to what is a good song and I'm very old fashioned in the way that I like to make songs that have something classic about them whether you can play them with an orchestra or an electro synthesizer or an acoustic guitar.

When you can inspire other people to do something they couldn't do before, that's a very satisfying feeling. Sometimes I meet people and they're over the top excited to tell me how much they love Razor. There is no shortage of synthesizers out there, every week there's a new synthesizer, especially plugins - there is a lot of competition - so if you make somebody really excited about synthesizer it really feels good, so it's a source of a lot of pride and satisfaction.

I've worked with the same Prophet 5 Synthesizer by Sequential Circuit synthesiser for 40 years.

If smart technology can transform 3-D from a crude novelty to a genuine visual enhancement, why shouldn't a sophisticated odor synthesizer follow a similar path?

I played a guitar with a file, and a synthesizer.

I'm really not into the idea of just faking songs with a synthesizer. That just isn't the music I'm making at all.

There's so much to be said for making your guitar sound like a synthesizer and try to make your drummer sound like a drum machine.

For many different reasons, my number one favorite horror movie is 'Halloween II.' I love the way it's shot, and I love the way the synthesizer sounds on the score.

My first synthesizer was the VCS3. I got it in Bristol in the late Sixties, long before Pink Floyd used them. I had to sell an acoustic guitar and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to raise the money. You can do fantastic things with modern computers, but you cannot use them in the same intuitive, spontaneous way you can a VCS3.

For me, the guitar synthesizer is a great writing instrument.

For me, the tabletop is an easy way to eliminate the possibilities of chords, modes, melodies, and harmonies. It kind of confines you to this other sound sphere. I know anyone facing this kind of dilemma could always just find another instrument more suitable to their needs, such as a sampler or synthesizer, but I figured I have a guitar and amp so why not just use them?

I think it was inevitable that I get into synthesizer music. I always wanted to deal with sound more than anything else. I couldn't get the sounds I wanted out of the piano.

I was never worried that synthesizers would replace musicians. First of all, you have to be a musician in order to make music with a synthesizer.

The spirit of Burzum never changed, but my ability to make music changed dramatically when I was imprisoned. It is more or less impossible to record music in prison, and the only music I could record was electronic music, when I was allowed to have a synthesizer for a few months in 1994 or 1995 and in 1998.

Music has been taken over in this country by personalities and dominated by rock 'n' roll. There's been a synthesizer invasion and it's not going to go away.

I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice - if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.

There is far more sensitivity in acoustic guitar players than could ever be compared to any synthesizer. That's a personal point of view but that's the way I see it. I think that's what it's all about. The drive, the fire, the passion - it all comes out on the guitar.

To me, I don't see any difference between a synthesizer and an acoustic instrument. It's what's done on it that counts.

When I first heard the song 'Eruption,' which is Eddie Van Halen's most famous solo composition, I was confused because it sounded incredible, but I didn't know what it was. I didn't know if it was a guitar. I didn't know if it was a synthesizer or a keyboard. I couldn't figure it out.

On the delivery plate of the Nutri-Matic Drink Synthesizer was a small tray, on which say three bone china cups and saucers, a bone china jug of milk, a silver teapot full of the best tea Arthur had ever tasted and a small printed note saying "Wait.

If you're a guitarist, you should not be intimidated by using your instrument as a synthesizer, but you shouldn't feel that you have to own one, either.

Some tracks are with quartet and some tracks are with synthesizer.

I'm a synthesizer. We need to synthesize more the relationships between artists and scientists, and men and women.

More recently, I used guitar synthesizer extensively on the two albums I did with Robert Fripp.

But for me if I'm gonna read about something I'd rather read a pamphlet or the instructions to a synthesizer than a book on Buddhism.

Never let your wife prevent you from buying equipment. A car will not buy a synthesizer, but a synthesizer can buy a car.