Top 53 Synthesizers Quotes & Sayings

I had gotten one of the first Korg synthesizers with 300 presets.

It is the individual voice, present to itself, that needs to be heard. We need to hear the process of the musician working on himself. We don't need to hear who is more clever with synthesizers. Our cleverness has created the world we live in, which in many ways, we're sorry about.

[Paul McCartney] never, at the time, was going back to leaning back on the roots of his old band. He always built upon where he was, which was in London. And he didn't overuse synthesizers. He used them just enough. It's such a cool sound.

From early on, when synthesizers were first introduced into music, I liked the idea that you could get a big sound with them - electronic, but like an orchestra. And I could play it all myself. That was exciting.

I'm not thinking about the next record really yet. I kind of want to do a bunch of stuff with Jonathan Zawada, the guy who did the album art. I'd like to do some crazy art installations and design some weird synthesizers and work with other people and make some fun stuff for a bit. Maybe tap into virtual reality stuff or maybe write another record.

I normally start at the computer with something really simple like a four-bar loop of a drum sample or a bass line. And then I just start adding layers of synthesizers.

When I was a teenager, I got into four track recorders, drum machines, and synthesizers, and I started producing instrumental music.

Synthesizers were looked at as stealing the soul of music, but then there were these new bands who used it to contradict that idea.

People don't realize enough how important and influentical John Carpenter has been in electronic music. He did his soundtracks by himself, using mostly electronic and analog synthesizers. He's a cult figure with DJs these days for good reasons.

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.

That big hit 'Get Lucky' is a disco song - not only the melody and the whole concept, but we had one of the great disco guys and one of the best guitarists ever, Nile Rodgers, to play on it. So that's great disco, but a modern disco, because it has great vocoders and synthesizers.

I love synthesizers and I love electronic music and I love the avant garde and I always want to try and have some kind of element of that in the music. So once the music is put down and recorded, that's when I start to tinker with it using synths.

I'd like to play live, but the thing I do now with my synthesizers, almost everything is vocoder-driven.

I had invented my own system, my own way of making electronic music at the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, and I was using what is now referred to as a classical electronic music studio, consisting of tube oscillators and patch bays. There were no mixers or synthesizers. So I managed to figure out how to make the oscillators sing. I used a tape delay system using two tape recorders and stringing the tape between the two tape machines and being able to configure the tracks coming back in different ways.

A lot of the early Washed Out material was done on a couple of synthesizers that did most of the work, but that's the great thing about synths - you can recreate sounds or make an entire record with just one piece of gear.

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

When synthesizers appeared everyone was a composer suddenly.

I love camping, everything about it - tents, the camping stove, sleeping bags. I'm obsessed with technology, be it synthesizers and speakers or tents and Gore-Tex.

There are hundreds of manufacturers always producing dvices that in general do the same things. Since they have slight structural differences if you take one and fool around with it and give it a good kick it will actually do something that it wasn't designed to do. I have this relationship with my synthesizers. I've had them for so long, and I've never had them serviced, so that now practically all of their functions operate differently from what they were designed to do. They do very interesting things now, but that means nobody else can use them either.

I really love a lot of Japanese music, like Ryuichi Sakamoto and this guy I got really into, Tatsuro Yamashita. When I was a little younger, I thought synthesizers meant Kraftwerk, cold, robotic, weird, Autobahn. But these guys are having a lot of fun on these things. Sometimes. Sometimes it's very somber. They could go either way.

All modern MIDI synthesizers are capable of polyphony, which means they can play more than one note at a time and more than one instrument at a time.

Synthesizers can be programmed with more imagination than a real, 'human' performance. It's a joyful thing.

I'd like to do some crazy art installations and design some weird synthesizers and work with other people and make some fun stuff for a bit. Maybe tap into virtual reality stuff or maybe write another record... We'll see.

I mean, take 'Chariots Of Fire.' That opening scene, the long shot of the runners along the beach, and then you hear that music... I think that was one of the first times synthesizers were really used in movie music. I just flipped! I didn't even care what the story was going to be. Give me a nice marriage of sound and music.

I grew up with synthesizers and weird, spacey music-hip-hop, R&B, modern rock-that I heard on the radio. That's influenced the way I play music. It's natural for me to go with what I feel. If I didn't let that other stuff out and stuck to a certain format, I would feel like I was missing out on something. I'm just enjoying my ride and being who I am.

That's where my influences lie, in the blues with people like Muddy Waters and Tina Turner. At first I didn't really like the idea of working with synthesizers but now I think they're fun, there are no restrictions. Not that I understand how they work.

We were touring the States tied to a load of drum machines and sequencers and synthesizers, playing to hundreds of thousands of people and yet feeling strangely removed from the music.

The first thing I ever heard about synthesizers, they were being used in rock.

Many were starting to use computerized synthesizers & drum machines to produce an entirely new style of music. It was being punted by the critics that the guitar was old hat; I was reminded of the way my father & his clarinets were written off in the late Fifties.

I love listening to old school stuff. I listen to some new cats out here, but I'm really into, like, Tech N9ne and his clique; I really like Eminem and those guys - cats that got real flow: I really connect with that. But I do love rock. I love a lot of electronica because I love programming synthesizers.

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.

Certain things are done intentionally opposite - like there's no sound at the end or synthesizers or all that stuff. Anything that drowns the movie, no. Anything that makes you sit up and watch it, yes. So, some are expecting a very sad theme going on.

When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.

In my solo work on my own albums, I have used voice synthesizers and vocoders quite a lot in connection with orchestral instruments.

From early on, when synthesizers were first introduced into music, I liked the idea that you could get a big sound with them, electronic, but like an orchestra. And I could play it all myself. That was exciting.

I have the utmost respect for synthesizers - Soft Cell, early Depeche Mode. But that's become a cliche for the '80s.

I have all these computers and keyboards and synthesizers, and I rattle away. For instance, with The Lion King I wrote over four hours worth of tunes, and they were really pretty -but totally meaningless. So in the end I came up with material I liked. We worked on The Lion King for four years, but I wasn't toying until the last three-and-a-half weeks properly. On Crimson Tide, on the other hand, I just went in and within seconds I knew what I wanted.

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.

The adventure is when people don't know what they're doing at all. Like, I think that the first pop band to use synthesizers as their main instrument and take it seriously was probably Silver Apples. And they sure didn't know what they were doing, and they sure don't sound like anything else.

There are only so many instruments you can layer on top of each other that aren't perfectly electronically programmed. "Long Vermont Roads" just cannot be performed live, because it's just too cluttered if it's played by humans. Synthesizers stay out of each other's way in a way that hand-played instruments never can.

I have mostly software synthesizers and software drum machines. I'm very lazy. I don't really like to plug in a lot of equipment and external boxes and everything.

Who's going to save rock 'n' roll? It's so silly. Remember like in '86 or '87 and synthesizers were going to take over the world? And remember "rocktronica" in 1997? It's ridiculous.

It's so much easier to use the default sounds in the synthesizers in Logic than it is to make your own thing or to learn how to play an instrument.

Working with devices and guitar pedals and mixers and synthesizers is what I do, and I prefer people not focus on that because it's kind of distracting from what the point should be. At least for me, it's to have the primacy of aurality in the experience of that evening.

I am pretty antisocial and have difficulty communicating with other human beings. I know that if I were in Philly I'd still mostly be hanging out in my apartment reading books and playing with synthesizers. That said, I grew up in Philly, went to college in Philly, lived in Philly afterwards for a while - almost every formative experience in my life has happened in Philly. Whether I like it or not, Philly is all over everything I do for the rest of my life.

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.

By the time I got to building synthesizers, I had perhaps 20 years' experience building electronic musical instruments.

I'm interested in finding sounds and ideas that help bring the audience into the world that we [moviemakes] are all trying to create. Sometimes that's with synthesizers, and sometimes that's with French horns. I love using all of them, depending on the scenario.

I made an electronic record in the vein of Cluster. I was programming synthesizers and drum machines and that sort of thing.

By the time I got to building synthesizers, I had perhaps 20 years experience building electronic musical instruments.

My main interest in synthesizers when I was an older teenager was to escape from the spell of the 12-tone system or, in a more broad sense, the spell of the European modern-music system. That led me to explore towards electronic music and ethnic music.

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

Some thought it strange that we incorporated synthesizers in our music but the equipment was there so we just figured out a way to use it.