Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'd love to do music for films.
You don't know where you're going.
I'm not Stravinsky, I never will be.
I just want to make music on the drums.
I'm not Zappa, you know. I'm just Terry.
There's many possibilities for anything.
I'm pretty proud of everything I've done.
I always liked to make something creative.
If I practice I'll really alienate people.
I don't have to be a success. I can just try.
The way we teach is a very linear kind of way.
I do the same thing every night, but different.
You just chip away until the puzzle is complete.
I don't think I can play the game and sell myself.
Being a professional does not have a very high standard.
Money and fame are very inconvenient and very problematic.
All of your experience comes into play when you're composing.
My motives at a young age were, "I want to be rich and famous".
In America there are some places that are just gorgeous to play.
You stick your nose in the dirt until you find something that smells good.
You just write one word and that tells you what the next word is going to be.
In the liner notes, music is fine by itself. It doesn't need any explanation.
I don't think I really started to seriously compose until around that time when I was 40.
It's very difficult to make a living in music these days. All it takes is somebody paying.
I don't know where I'm going, and I don't care where I'm going. As long as I can just do it.
There's nothing that can prepare you for fame and for the music business at any point in history.
The best thing is to find something you really love to do and enjoy that process for the rest of your life.
Sometimes I feel like a one man crusade against the devaluation of music in America and culture in the arts.
I've composed all my life and kept things, and even developed things I've done in college into something now.
Of course the headspace for the young musician is whatever the guy who is paying you says, is right, but that's all.
I think my music is great for film, but I don't have the opportunity, or goesche to go and pitch myself to Hollywood.
I feel qualified and competent to try anything that's thrown my way because I don't have to be a success. I can just try.
I'm very grateful to be where I'm at and be able to play. That's really the bottom line for me. Survival and being able to play.
I'm not going to limit myself in ways to compose or how I should record. You just do what you can with what you've got at the moment.
If it's something that I just can't get anywhere with, even if I think this could be a hit, I just drop it and it doesn't get developed.
I think by the time I finished college I was calling myself a professional because I was, you know. I was making a living playing music.
We have a society that wants somebody to come out of college with a degree that will make them a slave for whatever discipline they're in.
In America we're in this awful situation, and you know, I hardly get any royalties anymore because music is just stolen from the internet.
You try to improvise in a compositional manner. You don't just do some stupid lick you've been practicing, scale form exercises or something.
From the time I started playing solo drums, doing clinics and stuff, you know I think one of the largest selling clinics I ever did was in Chicago.
I try to put what's evocative in the music to me, I try and put that out there in terms of titles and imagery, or implication towards the listener.
I have great samples of my drums and I try to program them pretty much how I want to play them, try and make it feel natural even though it's programmed.
The first time I ever went to Chicago was with Zappa and I had a fantastic experiences with him and every other band I've played with. It's a great music town.
I have tons of tunes, maybe 30 tunes that I still think are great, and only because some jerk at a record company didn't think it was great, it's not out there.
There are things I've kept over the years and then someday I might pull up a program of some tune that I've done and I go "Wow, I know what to do with this now".
People YouTube me and crap and then, they probably don't want to see me after seeing a friendly posted YouTube video, so I'm constantly having to take those down.
I'm happy doing what I do. That's ok. Some guy could appear tomorrow and do it much better than me, and so be it, but right now I'm just happy to be who I am doing what I do.
Japan and Europe seem to have a little more cultural education and so the crowds have been a little more big and enthusiastic, and the places I've played seem a little more classy.
I don't really have that much control over where I play. I put out parameters and I accept what I can. If it's really low, or I had a bad experience at a place then I usually don't play there again.
I'm not a haiku artist, but I wanted to use the phrase 5, 7, 5 in the melody that flows over time. So the string melody, the first one is five notes, the next one is seven, and then the third one is five.