I played piano, I learned a lot about music.
Well I like everything but my first love has always been piano because when I started out there was a piano in my house and it was there so I just started tinkling on it really so it's always been my first love.
It is my aim, my destination in life to make the cello as beloved an instrument as the violin and piano.
For ten years, I went to piano lessons. I don't think I'm a very musical person, and the theory quite defeated me, but I had a freak aptitude for Debussy and Ravel.
It's different for every song. But for 'Say Something,' I think it was Chad who had an idea on guitar, and I had an idea on piano for different songs, and we just married them together. We bounce things off each other constantly and kind of massage all these ideas into a three and a half minute pop song.
When I was recording from '70 to '82, I always played piano and laid the tracks down. But I used to talk to the other musicians while the track was playing.
In junior high, I sang in madrigals, men's' and women's' choir. I played piano too, but then I got out of it.
My hands look terrible but I can do anything I want to do, so, you know, I just think I'm playing all around with more good taste and not dashing up and down the piano.
My goal was to play drums, but my father made me take piano lessons. He told me I needed to learn to read music first, so I took lessons for six years. I thank God that he made me take those lessons, because it taught me a tremendous amount.
Those edges and turns teach control and discipline, just like finger exercises on the piano.
If I stopped writing and being at my piano, I wouldn't know how to live. It's your best friend.
I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.
Some people get on the whole touring circuit for years and years and years on one record. What interests me is sitting down at a piano, writing songs, getting into a studio and exploring new sounds to come up with something I'm really proud of.
Without a piano I don't know how to stand, don't know what to do with my hands.
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.
The public is like a piano. You just have to know what keys to poke.
My mother was the influence on me - my father was absent. He was a diamond dealer; he was doing wonderful things in the background, and women were left at home. So my mother really was in charge of everything: the ballet, dance lessons, piano lessons, and latkes.
We decided to do some of Merle's things with modern instrumentation. We used a flute, a bass clarinet, a trumpet, a clarinet, drums, a guitar, vibes and a piano.
If you can't play it on an acoustic guitar or a grand piano then it's not a song.
I played piano as a kid; I still play a little bit.
Yes, my mother was a singer, and my father played piano and keyboards. They were in a band together, though they also had regular jobs because they had kids and stuff like that.
We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.
I grew up at the piano, and I longed to write musicals.
I prepared five songs, I sang them, and he hired me. I started working about a month later at the piano bar.
What made me pick up a guitar? It weighed a lot less than a piano.
In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music - an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible.
I actually write film music because I'm classically trained on the piano so as well as songwriting I also write actual film music that could be used for movies like war movies and love movies.
When I was young, I wanted to be a writer or painter. I was always writing stories, and I excelled at drawing. My teachers encouraged my art work. When I was 9 or 10, I began learning piano and started writing music.
I tend to be freer on the piano. I never took guitar lessons, so my reach exceeds my grasp - what I hear in my head I don't always know how to play. But I love to play over something else. I'm not a self-starter. I get kind of bored with the same three folk chords that I know.
I used to love 'Jeeves And Wooster.' That theme tune was great. I remember writing to them when I was little to get the music so I could learn it on the piano, and they sent me the sheet music.
To me, the piano in itself is an orchestra.
Guitar is great for a certain thing, but a piano is so much more expansive.
Every day I lugged my backpack through the halls, waiting for the final bell. Then I'd race home and hole up in my room, playing the drums and the piano, composing music.
I don't know any other lifestyle. I get up in the morning and I really do feel that the world is my oyster, and I start that way, the same as I would if I were preparing to write a song: put a blank piece of paper up on the piano and you go for it.
However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.
The history of the music industry is inevitably also the story of the development of technology. From the player piano to the vinyl disc, from reel-to-reel tape to the cassette, from the CD to the digital download, these formats and devices changed not only the way music was consumed, but the very way artists created it.
