Keyboard Instrument Quotes

Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of 'somedays'. Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English." [The Instrumentalities of the Night: An Interview with Glen Cook, The SF Site, September 2005]

Give yourself a winter night, long candles, unfamiliar music, a typewriter, keyboard, an instrument, or canvas, to set fire to your mind. Surrender. Be with art. Let the room become a constellation, trust it and ride.

Love is the most melodious of all harmonies and the sentiment of love is innate. Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.

I sometimes wonder how many hours of my life I have wasted bitching about keyboards. The use of keyboards and synthesizers is the Roe v. Wade of '80s metal. It was-without question-the lamest instrument a band could use.

The feeble clavichord did not carry far; the harpsichord was only a little stronger; but Cristofori in Italy was working at these defects; he built a machine he called clavicembalo piano e forte — a keyboard instrument to play "soft and loud." Contrary to all experience, we now call it simply "a soft.

All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, “She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.” The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it. At one end of it, we are with Emma and this very solid instrument “whose strings buzzed,” and at the other end of it we are across the village with this very concrete clerk in his list slippers. With regard to what happens to Emma in the rest of the novel, we may think that it makes no difference that the instrument has buzzing strings or that the clerk wears list slippers and has a piece of paper in his hand, but Flaubert had to create a believable village to put Emma in. It’s always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.

I can’t play a musical instrument. Or at least I can’t play one well enough to expect people to listen to me. Yet I have the strong desire to perform music. From the beginning, therefore, my intention was to write as if I were playing an instrument. I still feel like that today. I sit tapping away at the keyboard searching for the right rhythm, the most suitable chords and tones. This is, and has always been, the most important element in my literature.

Through the dark he found his way to the Thing, to its mouth. He touched it softly, and it answered softly, kindly. He shivered and stood still. Then he began to feel it all over, ran his finger-tips along the slippery sides, embraced the carved legs, tried to get some conception of its shape and size, of the space it occupied in primeval night. It was cold and hard, and like nothing else in his black universe. He went back to its mouth, began at one end of the keyboard and felt his way down into the mellow thunder, as far as he could go. He seemed to know that it must be done with the fingers, not with the fists or the feet. He approached this highly artificial instrument through a mere instinct, and coupled himself to it, as if he knew it was to piece him out and make a whole creature of him. After he had tried over all the sounds, he began to finger out passages from things Miss Nellie had been practising, passages that were already his, that lay under the bone of his pinched, conical little skull, definite as animal desires.

The keyboard is my path to having thoughts, and also my path to sharing them. I can’t play an instrument, but I can bang on this literary piano, and when it’s going well, a certain percussive rhythm develops. Sometimes—not every day, certainly, but sometimes—knowing where the letters are allows me to feel like I know where the words are. I love the sound of pressing keys on a great keyboard—the technical term is “key action”—but what I love most about typing is that on the screen or on the page, my writing is visually indistinguishable from anyone else’s.

What started as ways to amuse the Sforza court soon became serious attempts to make better musical instruments. “Leonardo’s instruments are not merely diverting devices for performing magic tricks,” according to Emanuel Winternitz, a curator of musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. “Instead, they are systematic efforts by Leonardo to realize some basic aims.” 14 These include new ways to use keyboards, play faster, and increase the range of available tones and sounds. In addition to earning him financial stipends and an entrée at court, his musical pursuits launched him onto more substantive paths: they laid the ground for his work on the science of percussion—how striking an object can produce vibrations, waves, and reverberations—and exploring the analogy between sound waves and water waves.

Translating how that latter fact came to life in the studio, engineer Chuck Zwicky explained from his own observations during the recording of the album that “the way that Prince’s music comes together has everything to do with how he views the individual instruments, and for example, when he’s sitting down at the drums, he’s derivatively thinking about Dave Gerbaldi, the drummer from Tower of Power, and that’s a real fascile and funky drummer; and when he plays keyboards, he’s thinking about James Brown’s horn player, on one aspect; and when he’s playing guitar, other elements creep in, because he loves Carlos Santana, and Jimi Hendrix, and this other guitar player named Bill Nelson, a rock guitar player from the 70s. And so these aspects all come together to make this unique sound that is Prince, and it’s not rock, it’s not funk, it’s not jazz, it’s not blues—it’s just his own kind of music. I remember there was one particular moment when he started playing this keyboard line, and I’m thinking ‘He can’t play that, that’s Gary Newman.’ And at that moment, he stops the tape, and turns and looks at me and asks ‘Do you like Gary Newman?’ And I said ‘You know, the album Replica never left my turntable in Jr. High School after my sister bought it for me. I listened to it until it wore out.’ And he said ‘There are people still trying to figure out what a genius he is.

Right,” said Ben, taken aback. “What instruments will we play?” Clovenhoof yanked the dust-covered keyboard out of the cupboard and held it up triumphantly. “It’s years since I’ve played it,” said Ben. “It wheezes like an asthmatic and occasionally picks up CB radio signals.

You need to be able to read music. For the last three parts you need to be able to play a keyboard instrument well enough to navigate at least most of the musical examples. It helps to have previously investigated the overtone series, or be ready to (the text helps you). Also, the more you are in the habit of listening to the music of the world’s various cultures, the more insight you will bring to this study.

Think of your brain as being like a Steinway grand piano. All the keys are in place, ready to work at the touch of a finger. Whether a beginner sits down at the keyboard or a world-renowned virtuoso like Vladimir Horowitz or Arthur Rubinstein, the instrument is physically the same. But the music that comes out will be vastly different. The beginner uses less than 1 percent of the piano’s potential; the virtuoso is pushing the limits of the instrument.

Treble strings: Treble strings are wires beginning at one tuning pin, round a hitch pin and back to where it started. Tuning pins: The tuning pins are steel pegs that are usually one and a half inches long everywhere a string is wound. Leg: The legs are a wooden patch that forms the foundation for the piano, they add beauty to the instrument. Wheel: The wheels are used for moving the piano around. Hammer: The hammer is like a mallet covered with felt and used to produce sound by striking the strings when a key or keys are pressed. Keyboard (white and black keys): The horizontal stretch of keys

The voice is a precious instrument, an emotional instrument. There is nothing between you and your audience. There is no guitar plank to hide behind, no giant stack of keyboards, no battery of tom-toms. There is nothing and no one to blame except yourself, and an audience will murder you and dance on your grave in a heartbeat if you let them.

Musical connoisseurship was a vital part of pleasing the opposite sex, and the pianoforte was one of the few instruments appropriate for ladies. Strings required too many quick, powerful movements, giving the impression that the female player might suffer from a choleric temperament. The violoncello sat between a woman’s legs, arousing male listeners in ways not in keeping with music’s higher purpose. The pianoforte had elegant lines and a keyboard that emphasized a woman’s graceful fingers and dainty wrists. Many a marriage proposal followed a recital, as long as the music was pleasing to the ear and didn’t rattle the gentleman’s composure.

First, never watch your hand as you make finger motions. These include: Simply pressing a finger down to play the note directly underneath, Reaching sideways with a finger to play another key (called a "reach" or an "extension"), and, Crossing the thumb under a finger or a finger over the thumb ("crossovers and crossunders"). When your "fingers do the walking" your eyes should NOT be watching. Second, when your hand must be picked up and moved sideways to a new location, you CAN glance down at the keyboard and back up to the music. But....you will now have to learn to glance down and back up to look directly at the exact point of the music where you need to be looking. That’s a separate skill altogether. Unlike typing, music has a beat and you better not miss it.  I mentioned above that “losing your place” would be discussed. Many more advanced players still have trouble with this, and it's a lack of this skill. The rewards of not watching? Let me spell those out clearly: There is probably nothing you could do which would give you greater speed, better expression, and more confidence than to learn to play without watching your hands. In summary, glance at the really hard hand motions, those with significant sideways displacement. Don't watch anything else. Do this for six months and you will be a completely new musician, a player with skills which will reward you for the many years of your

Let's name some names, shall we? Good arrangers deserve your sheet music dollar: Dan Coates, Richard Bradley, Dan Fox, John Brimhall, Denes Agay, Phillip Keveren - these are all excellent arrangers you should buy. There are others.

How do we learn to perform, then? The answer is simple: practice performing.  Once a day, decide to sit down and play straight through some music (simple music is better at first!) ignoring all mistakes and somehow keeping the beat going. No pauses. No "instant replays" of messed up measures. Play from start to end with no breaks. It's hard! The urge to correct is intense. But have you ever heard a professional musician perform, make a mistake, turn to the audience and say, "Wait!" and then replay an early section of music? Nope. Professionals performers (and I know since I am one) get so good at moving right on through their errors that people never even hear them.

It was a vast, low-ceilinged room in the lower levels of the basement. The ceiling was supported by pillars at regular intervals. The room was almost impossible to navigate, being crammed with sixty years’ worth of electronic flotsam and jetsam. He slowly worked his way backward, deeper into the room and further into the past. Toward the back, he came across a large cabinet that he mistook at first for an antique computer. It contained over a hundred vacuum tubes, each with its own set of inductors and capacitors. Then he uncovered the piano-style keyboard with the name HAMMOND above it. “Oh, that must be the Novachord,” said the Teleplay Director. “It’s like an organ, except not. It was used on various radio dramas for a few years, but when we got the Hammond B3’s it went into storage.” Philo told Viridios about it. “They have a Novachord?” Viridios said in surprise. “I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never played one. It was so far ahead of its time that nobody really knew what to do with it. It’s not an organ at all. It’s more like a polyphonic synthesizer.” “That’s not all,” said Philo. “I found some of your old equipment. It’s marked ‘Valence Sound Laboratory.’ It doesn’t look like musical equipment at all, more like scientific equipment. There’s an eight-foot metal cabinet full of circuitry like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The front panel is full of knobs and jacks labeled with mathematical symbols.” Viridios was astonished. “It still exists!” he exclaimed. “I thought it was dismantled and sold for scrap.” “What is it?” “That’s the instrument we used to create the soundtrack for Prisoners of the Iron Star. It’s called a Magneto-Thermion.

Preliminary discussions threw up the idea of a record created entirely out of sounds that had not been produced by musical instruments. This seemed suitably radical, and so we started out on a project we called ‘Household Objects’. The whole notion seems absurdly laboured now, when any sound can be sampled and then laid out across a keyboard, enabling a musician to play anything from barking dogs to nuclear explosions.

Clara was a pianist, which isn’t to say that she couldn’t play the organ. After all, it had keys and they were black and white, too. True, there were four times as many and your feet had to play them as well and there were dozens of stops you had to pull, which each individually made the organ sound like a banshee. It was similar to handing a pianist an accordion, believing they could play it because it had a keyboard on the side. But Clara did know the organ; a little. Sweat prickled on her forehead as she fumbled, her right hand above her left on the swell and great keys. Her booted feet fumbled with the bass keys, sometimes hitting two notes at once, other times the wrong notes, sending sour notes rumbling inside the chapel. The organ groaned and cried like it was in pain. Clara gritted her teeth and continued sight reading the Illumination Sonatina in front of her. It went badly. The unfamiliarity of the piece and the instrument. Clara felt the nuns behind her wincing. The last chord screamed like a broken firework. Nothing magical at all had happened.

IT IS NOT HARD to understand how it came that the first successful attempt to construct a keyboard instrument “col piano e forte” should have occurred in Italy. Though not untouched by the rationalism of seventeenth-century thought, the Italians in general could not, like many North Germans, find full musical satisfaction in the segregation of phrases, voices, or sections into rigid, monotonous dynamic levels. For a hundred years before Cristofori, “expression” had been one of the chief concerns of Italian musicians and their hearers.

It was the Italians who, late in the sixteenth century, had created the opera, with its preoccupation with solo singing and the surges and droops natural to it. Indeed, opera was practically an Italian proprietary recipe, exported as such over the rest of Europe. The Italians were also interested in making instruments “sing.” The bowed string-instruments were the most likely subjects for that endeavor, and we see that same seventeenth century in Italy witnessing a matchless development in the making of violins of all sizes. Let us recall that Cristofori’s early pianofortes coincided with Stradivari’s “golden period.” It was a near-lying idea, then, for an Italian to wish to build a capacity for “expression” even into a keyboard instrument.

Give Me A Keyboard, I'll Give You Revolution (The Sonnet) I just want to write - that's all I ever want - to write, write and write! The day the words stop coming, will be my last corporeal night. Either I shall die by an assassin's bullet, or I shall die on my keyboard, but I refuse to die of old-age and disease. Death scares those who are scared of life, I have already lived my life in service. I live on keyboard, I'll die on keyboard, Keyboard is my instrument of illumination. Nothing short could satisfy my palate - Give me a keyboard, I'll give you revolution. With my keyboard I've defended the meek, With my keyboard I've castrated the pricks. With my keyboard I've brought down dictators, With my keyboard I've schooled bigoted pigs. With my keyboard I've raised Gods by hundreds, With my keyboard I've delivered world-builders. With my keyboard I've produced hatebusters, With my keyboard I've raised bulldozers. Death is but a myth - body dies, not bulldozer; Body is merely a vessel for the mission. If you want your ideas to live forever, You gotta sacrifice your life for a vision. I never lived as body, but only as a dream - My life is testament to the dream of united earth. I don't have a message, for I am the message - Sacrifice is beacon, that illuminates the universe.

The good mom of a bad child is like a musician without an instrument. My Mimi was like a pianist, up nights, mindlessly tapping her fingers on an invisible keyboard, desperately trying to save a lost melody.

Unfortunately love is always a practical exam, never theoretical, and all the thinking in the world is ultimately pointless. It’s like learning to play the piano by reading a manual. You might think you know what to do, but until you’re sat at the keyboard and discover how immensely, overwhelmingly complex it is, how much effort and concentration is required, you know nothing.

I'd been told that Catholic masses were stable and cold with dull organ music so I was surprised when the choir broke into song. They sang in Shona, with African drums and rattles, ngoma ne bosho. The women;s voices merged with men's bass producing an effect that was confusing but beautiful. At Forward with Faith Ministries we only used guitars, western drums and a keyboard, because Pastor Mavumba preached against using African Traditional instruments. He said that before the missionaries came, our people engaged in devil worship, so the instruments they used were the devil's instruments. We sang in English and he preached in English too, when he was not speaking in tongues. I was a bit confused; maybe the Catholic Church was the devil's church after all, but I couldn't stop my foot from tapping along to the music. [88]