Top 89 Play Notes Quotes
#1. Sometimes you just have to play the notes that you know.
Penn Stewart
#2. It is one thing to get all the notes right; any number of unsocialized conservatory prodigies can do that. It is another thing to play the thoughts within the notes, the light around them, the darkness behind them, the silence at the end of the phrase. That is what inspires awe.
Alex Ross
#3. Some pianists seem to really remember the keys and not so much the notes they play. They want to learn until it's a physical habit that can be replicated. For pianists, this is much more of a problem than for other instruments, like the violin, where you actually have to think of the pitch.
Carlo Grante
#4. When I was a kid I really liked the guitarist of The Doors [Robby Krieger]. He plays blues, but he plays a lot of melodic things. He plays scales that are kind of unusual, and some bent notes.
Stephen Malkmus
#5. I took some lessons as a kid but trained myself by ear. I did it the way jazz musicians used to learn years ago, which is to play records and slow them down to figure out the notes. At first I tried to imitate Red Garland, who was my favorite jazz pianist.
Donald Fagen
#6. It is more important to keep the horse going hard than to always play the exact notes.
Charles Ives
#7. I also generally play slide guitar in standard tuning, which enables me to switch back and forth between using the slide and fretting notes and chords conventionally without having to relearn the fretboard, as one must do when playing in an open tuning.
Warren Haynes
#8. As a composer I could never find use for over 4 or 5 notes in any musical number, and as a playwright most of my plays have two acts because i couldn't think of an idea for the third act.
George M. Cohan
#9. The music is used as a backdrop. I take the kundalini and I play against the notes with it. I do a light show inwardly and outwardly with the vortexes of energy as you sit there. It's no big deal. It's just what I do.
Frederick Lenz
#10. Since I was a kid, I always wanted to figure out how to make a bass line that was a pendulum - like, gravity would control it, and then you could make it play different notes.
Bjork
#11. Don't play the notes. Play the meaning of the notes.
Pablo Casals
#12. Chanel is composed of only a few elements, white camellias, quilted bags and Austrian doorman's jackets, pearls, chains, shoes with black toes. I use these elements like notes to play with.
Karl Lagerfeld
#13. Be music always. Keep changing the keys, tones, pitch, and volume of each of the songs you create along your life's journey and play on.
Suzy Kassem
#14. I can play songs that I hear from a movie and just play it a few times on the keyboard. I will hit all the notes on the keyboard until I find the right key, and then I will play the rest of the song.
Callan McAuliffe
#15. Do broken pianos play broken songs? Do they have busted melodies for busted hearts? Is there a song living inside it that's waiting to get out? Her keys are shattered and her notes long since silent but I can still hear her song. Just listen, just listen.
Tyler Knott Gregson
#16. Some of us are going to play faster than others. Hitting the right notes and getting your technique right is so much more important than speed.
Joe Satriani
#17. Now, when he sat at the piano, he did not play music for the company the notes provided him. He played the music so she might hear it, and come a little closer to him as she listened.
Meredith Duran
#18. If you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that you play that determines if it's good or bad.
Miles Davis
#19. I must tell you I take terrible risks. Because my playing is very clear, when I make a mistake you hear it. If you want me to play only the notes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake. Never be afraid to dare.
Vladimir Horowitz
#20. The human moral keyboard is limited, Adam One used to say: there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.
Margaret Atwood
#21. To him, money was like the toy bank notes in Monopoly: he wanted it, not for what it could buy, but because it was needed to play the game
Ken Follett
#22. Moral life becomes a jam session in which at any time I may improvise for myself rather than play the notes in the score.
J.I. Packer
#23. Lee Morgan used to stand behind me when I was playing a ballad and he'd be hollering, "Play the pretty notes, man, play the pretty notes." I thought I was playing the pretty notes, but you know, things like that help you to reach a little further.
Gary Bartz
#24. Don't let your hands dictate what you think you can do. Look at fingerboard charts and imagine your eyes dancing on the notes you want to play, and forget about whether your hands can do it or not. Just try it.
Allan Holdsworth
#25. If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.
Richard M. Nixon
#26. If you play it safe, middle of the road with all the right notes, you might win. If you are unique and have too much personality, you might easily score a '0' in competition.
Charlie Albright
#27. It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play.
Miles Davis
#28. One can only ask to play as well as possible the notes one is given.
Peter Hoeg
#29. Regrettably, many Americans don't pay much attention to the inconsistencies in U.S. foreign policy. People in other parts of the world who feel the impact of those policies play close attention. And they take notes.
Charles Kimball
#30. I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That's when I was born.
Charlie Parker
#31. Playing keys is more than just knowing what notes to play. You have to know about the buttons too.
St. Jerome
#32. And, as my father used to tell me growing up, "Play it beautiful, play it beautiful." He said, "I don't care if you don't hit all of the notes. If you don't move a person's heart, it's not music."
Christopher Parkening
#33. I always have loved the Stradivarius. My teacher, Josef Gingold, he had a Stradivarius. As a treat, he would put it under my chin and let me play a few notes, and I remember that feeling of the overtones, the complexity of the sound. It's like a great wine.
Joshua Bell
#34. A piano in the house, when I came home from school and was able to play all these different notes with all theses different sounds, I really found that fascinating.
Ella Henderson
#35. I'll tell you a little secret about the Blues: it's not enough to know which notes to play, you have to know why they need to be played.
George Carlin
#36. No one has any respect for someone who can play a million notes per minute but can't put together a decent tune that someone can sing to or feel some sort of emotion from.
Johnny Marr
#37. I play until my fingers are blue and stiff from the cold, and then I keep on playing. Until I'm lost in the music. Until I am the music
notes and chords, the melody and harmony. It hurts, but it's okay because when I'm the music, I'm not me. Not sad. Not afraid. Not desperate. Not guilty.
Jennifer Donnelly
#38. Lots of times it really doesn't matter what notes you play, but what notes come before and after a run.
Tommy Bolin
#39. I'm practicing the oboe. But I don't play. Just single notes, not an entire piece of music.
Lola Kirke
#40. To me, getting notes, honing the part, and refining the role is the real fun of the play.
Swoosie Kurtz
#41. I went through eight years of classical piano lessons without being able to read notes. I only have to hear a melody to be able to play it. It used to freak my piano teacher out when he finally noticed that notes don't make any sense to me and that I played by ear.
Liam Howlett
#43. If your going to learn to play lead guitar, get an electric guitar .. it doesn't have to be an expensive one .. acoustic guitars aren't good for learning lead, because you can't play up very high on the neck and they take heavier-gauge strings which makes it hard to bend notes
Eddie Van Halen
#44. It's just music. It's trying to play clean and looking for the pretty notes. The beat in a bop band is with the music, against it, behind it. It pushes it. It helps it. Help is the big thing. It has no continuity of beat, no steady chug-chug. Jazz has, and that's why bop is more flexible.
Charlie Parker
#45. In my world, the first thing I reach for is the sound. Technique is Ok, but if you got the technique and I got a good sound, I'll beat you every time. You can play a thousand notes and I can play one note and wipe you out. What I reach for is ... a sound.
Dewey Redman
#46. With music, you can create instant trust with an audience. You can hear three notes, and you surrender to it, whereas it takes you about ten minutes of language before people begin to trust you in a play.
George C. Wolfe
#47. If I can play one note and make you cry, then that's better than those fancy dancers playing twenty notes.
Robbie Robertson
#48. You have to know 400 notes that you can play, then pick the right four.
Miles Davis
#49. With proper acting, I don't know what I would play - I got sent a script for a play, and it said in the notes that my proposed character was 'hideously fat and ugly'. That made my day. I mean, I do know I am no oil painting.
Jo Brand
#50. Her graphite pencil scratches the thick paper and it is the soundtrack to my bliss. That, and her sound - dissonant, aching. Her breath and heartbeat and pulse are my new favorite symphony; I'm beginning to learn which notes will play when, and to interpret them.
Michelle Hodkin
#51. I picked up the guitar very late, in a very pagan way - I didn't know how to play, but I knew I had to. I drew and I had a diary, but it wasn't enough; I needed to express more. As soon as I learned two notes, I started to tell a story, which is why, I guess, my music resembles blues or folk.
Lou Doillon
#52. The worst words I could ever hear as a bass player was, 'Can you play the root notes?'
Peter Hook
#53. I wanted to play piano, and that slid quickly into writing - it wasn't enough to play other people's notes: I had to write notes too.
Luc Ferrari
#54. Take notes, boys! The ladies always love a man who can play an instrument!" Lindsay snorted, "Your instrument doesn't even like girls, Rusty!"
"Doesn't mean they don't like it!
Cora Carmack
#55. I don't think I could have ever had a career as a pianist because I never ever wanted to play the notes the way they were written, I was too sloppy to learn them quite right.
Jerry Hunt
#56. I don't just strictly sample. I build. I'm a musician: I play piano and drums, I read notes, I write music.
AraabMuzik
#57. I have a lyric journal that I write in a lot. When I'm going to play, I just sit down and have my books with me and my notes and tapes and whatever I need to refer to. I just play and try different things. It's a kind of discipline.
Amy Ray
#58. Occasionally, when I run into a great bass backstage at a festival I'll play a few notes on the low E string, just to feel the instrument vibrate against my belly.
Steve Swallow
#59. It's impossible to play a run with as much feeling as a single note. I've never been so much into runs as making single notes cry.
Robin Trower
#60. I'm not an amazing trumpet player. It's mostly smoke and mirrors. You shake the trumpet and it starts to vibrate in a ridiculous drunken way, or you flop notes at the right time and you don't have to play stuff that would take seven years to learn.
Zach Condon
#61. When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn't play it. I couldn't get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn't get them out on the guitar.
Pete Townshend
#62. If you want me to play only the notes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake.
Vladimir Horowitz
#63. Most musicians I know don't just play music on Saturday night. They play music every day. They are always fiddling around, letting the notes lead them from one place to another. Taking still photographs is like that. It is a generative process. It pulls you along.
Henry Wessel Jr.
#64. It's a magical thing, the guitar. It allows you to be the whole band in one, to play rhythm and melody, sing over the top. And as an instrument for solos, you can bend notes, draw emotional content out of tiny movements, vibratos and tonal things which even a piano can't do.
David Gilmour
#65. Two musicians could play the same notes and sound entirely different. Intonation was everything.
Liane Moriarty
#66. 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.
Charles Petzold
#67. I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I'm blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.
Anthony Hopkins
#68. We all want to play great music all the time, but if that is not possible, you have to hit as many right notes as you can.
Jose Mourinho
#69. I take it so seriously as far as meditation, notes, visualization, preparation, everything. I take it a lot more serious than a lot of people that play this sport. I'm obsessed with the game that I play.
Jon Jones
#70. In jazz improv, there is no such thing as wrong notes, only notes that are better chosen and it's not about the note you play, it's about the note you play next.
Larry Carlton
#71. When I was a kid, three years old, I couldn't walk by the piano without reaching up and trying to play a few notes on it. There are kids who are just drawn to listening to music and dancing to it and trying to conduct.
Michael Tilson Thomas
#72. Love is like music. You have to work at it. Love is ugly and painful sometimes, but it can also be pretty fucking awesome once you figure out how to play the right notes to the right rhythm
Kendall Grey
#73. It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.
Miles Davis
#74. Recording interviews is like magic. a) It stops you from taking notes in the middle and b) you can play that recording for people.
Emmett Shear
#76. I would play music every day from the time I was about 4 or 5 years old. Every time I would go from one end of the house to the other, I would pass the piano and play a few notes.
William Eggleston
#77. Why write a song when no one can play the notes or understand the lyrics?
Christopher Moore
#78. I don't judge people who just hit "play," but I would judge myself if I did that. I wouldn't feel like I was earning my money, I'd feel like I was putting one over on people. I have to play the notes.
Andrew Wyatt
#79. The melody is the most important thing that must stay in the minds of the people who listen to you. No matter how many notes you play, you can't let them forget what the song is.
George Benson
#80. You must not be afraid of playing wrong notes. Just forget it, play it wrong! But play!
Alan Watts
#81. The first notes I still play when I start a sound check are classical. Those are my roots.
Andrew Bird
#82. I'd rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.
Brian Eno
#83. My dad noticed some kind of talent on piano when he asked me to play a couple random songs on piano when I was 6 and I just did it. I attempted lessons but I was just so bad at reading notes. I would read "Three Blind Mice" by ear, so learning notes was almost impossible.
Christina Grimmie
#84. They're the salt of the earth, those girls. They don't sit each night and compare notes on groups, criticising lyrics, asking if it's valid. They just play the record ... yeah, and maybe they dance. I love them. I love them dearly
David Bowie
#85. I play more rhythmically than I do a lot of notes.
Bobby Keys
#86. I was teaching myself notes from three and then by seven I'd figured out how to play some chords, and at school I used to love writing poems and poetry, so I guess I kind of put two and two together and that formed my songwriting from an early age.
Ella Henderson
#87. Each stroke of your fingers is a different word that describes the story. By itself it's meaningless, but - " I pushed down on a few fingers helping her play a few notes. "String them together and you have a melody. You have a story. So, Saylor, what story do you want to tell?
Rachel Van Dyken
#88. If you hit a wrong note, then make it right by what you play afterward.
Joe Pass
#89. It's easier to play aggression and malevolence onscreen, often, than to hit softer notes.
Joel Edgerton
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
