This sounds like my autobiography, but I thought this would be a good time to sound off about myself, as I think that I have been silent too long about my views and opinions.
A lot of the stuff I've accumulated over the last few years of touring I thought was really interesting. Like sounds, sound bites, and beats even, but they weren't good dance beats they weren't ones anyone would want to rap over or anything.
We tune differently, and we use some tricks. There's just the two of us for much of a concert, so we want a big sound. We do use some guitar effects, distortion and delay. Playing cello with distortion sounds so good.
I do remember, though, when I discovered the third! I was about five years old - it was a very pleasing sound. I remembered that if I hit one note, then skipped one and played the next, I could get this really good sound.
The challenge is how strange and different my voice sounds, so I have tried to sound like other people and tried to be something I wasn't. I have tried to be a soul singer because someone else thought that a good idea. Not because I did.
It's funny, but to me, when you go to a concert hall and hear electronic pieces from the '60s, I think they sound really dated. But when an orchestra plays a piece from that period, and it's going to sound different every time, it feels more modern t...
The late sixties and early seventies were kind of a breeding ground for exciting new sounds because easy listening and folk were kind of taking over the airwaves. I think it was a natural next step to take that blissful, easy-going sound and strangle...
When I was a kid, I remember trying to emulate Stevie Wonder's sound, and Donny Hathaway's sound. It's just part of who I am - I'm just a soulful kind of dude.
Sound is your friend because sound is much cheaper than picture, but it has equal effect on the audience - in some ways, perhaps more effect because it does it in a very indirect way.
The Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like.
We incorporate various electronic devices - the echo plugs and things like that. Actually, all we're trying to do is make that sound musical. As opposed to just making sounds, we do musical things with them.
I hate the natural sound of the trumpet, but I think I'm naturally set up to be a trumpet player. I know that sounds weird. But pretty much anytime I play a note, I'm uncomfortable in a general sense.
It's hard to imagine the whole punk movement without The Velvet Underground. I toured with them when they did their reunion tour, and no one sounds like that; they are a very unique-sounding band.
For the most part, I've been influenced by black singers and singers I couldn't sound like. Whenever I tried to do a dark note or a bent note, I would just sound like Hootie And The Blowfish.
My uncle gave me a trumpet, but I loved the Louis Armstrong sound and the Harry James sound and I played by ear and I played always soulful or very direct from the gut.
When I started surfing, you'd hear this neat rumbling sound when you took off and go for the drop, and when the wave is lipping up over the top of you, it makes this hissing sound.
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth - and perhaps even in the womb - to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations of language sounds.
People who care about records are always giving me a hard time. I mean, I would destroy records in performances, and break them, and whatever I could do to them to create a sound that was something else than just the sound that was in the groove.
It's like having a conversation. Doing beatbox for me is as natural as talking is for someone else. Sending sound through a certain part of my throat, so that I am accurate every time. It's not like whatever happens happens, this is a focused sound.
I wanted to make the kind of records that I heard in the discos that I danced in at that time. Funky, electronic sounds, while the musicians in the band were more rock oriented. This I suppose created the sound we know as Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
