Studio Quotes by Don Bluth, Rose, Bella Thorne, Gene Tierney, Dean Ween, Neve Campbell and many others.
You’ve got to be able to make animation for much less… Less is not the studio’s way.
Personal songs take a little more to record, definitely. We had to bring our souls into the recording studio. It was us being very vulnerable. We heard that our fans can kind of feel that.
I’m in the studio for hours in that tiny little box, and really, the performing part is what I’m most excited about.
For years it never occurred to me to question the judgment of those in charge at the studio.
I want to make 20, 30, 50 studio records.
There’s something really nice about not sitting separate from the crew in some massive trailer away from the studio. To actually be there with them, it’s more of a creative process.
They studio were flabbergasted when they discovered how interested everybody was in ‘those old people.’ And now many upcoming projects feature older people; it’s become a trend.
Recording at home enables one to eliminate the demo stage, and the presentation stage in the studio, too.
Some very famous directors have started in the mail room, which is just getting inside the studio, getting to know people, getting to know the routine.
Having a studio tell you when to jump and how high eight months of the year for six years is not a relationship I want to get into again.
I’d do a demo recording by myself, layering instruments on top of one another, and while that’s fun, it doesn’t have the same impact as getting some great players together in a great studio with a great engineer and producer, then waiting for the magic.
I wake up every morning and I feel like I’m juggling glass balls. I live in Los Angeles, my business is run out of London, and most evenings I’m cuddled up in front of Skype, in my dressing gown, speaking with my studio in London. I travel a lot, my team travel a lot, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The Walt Disney Animation studio is the studio that Walt Disney started himself in 1923, and it’s never stopped and never closed its doors and never stopped making animation, and it keeps going as kind of the heart and soul of the company.
I’ve become a workaholic. When the shows slow down and there’s no press and I can get my time to myself in the studio with my music, I get into this zone, man. I enter this incredible space where I’m just making music. And I feel like I can work with anybody – with Elton John, with Hanson – and I can make something incredible.
I’ve made three studio albums and one live one with my brother. It’s melodic singer-songwriter acoustic-rock music.
I’m the type of person that doesn’t like to wait for people to do things for me, and I never want to feel stuck. Why sit around and be like, ‘I wish my label would book me some studio time,’ if I can just buy my own studio equipment and figure out how to run Pro Tools and record it myself?
Many rock musicians are excellent cooks, I’ve found, and those that are prefer to eat their own cooking in the studio. I encourage this behavior as I also enjoy the benefits of fresh food.
I have my dream job! As a young person training as an actor, walking on the WB studio lot is a dream in itself.
I have never had a studio, and I do not understand shutting oneself up in a room. To draw, yes; to paint, no.
Once you work with a studio on a film, the studio is sort of like this enormous clam that just opens, takes everything and then closes, and no one enters again. They own it all.
I go to the studio every day, but I don’t paint every day. I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things.
I hate going out for lunch during a workday because it slows down my pace and ruins my rhythm. I prefer to eat at my desk. Actually, I wander around the design studio with a plate in my hand as I dine on, for example, salmon sashimi and a salad of tomatoes and mozzarella. I often have a bit of dark chocolate after lunch.
I thought I was attractive when I shot ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding.’ Studio executives and movie reviewers let me know I had a confidence in my looks that was not shared by them. In other words, they labeled me with words like overweight, unattractive, unappealing.
We bled writing these songs, we bled in the studio, and now we’re out bleeding getting them right live.
Music as background to me becomes like a mosquito, an insect. In the studio we have big speakers, and to me that’s the way music should be listened to. When I listen to music, I want to just listen to music.
In the studio the director controls the actor’s every move, every inflection, every expression.
Yeah, anybody can go in with two turntables and a microphone or a home studio sampler and a little cassette deck or whatever and make records in their bedrooms.
Women were real box office stars in the ’40s, more so than men. People loved to see women’s films. I think it was better then, except for the studio system.
Often, I find it really hard to see what I’m doing when I’m in the thick of things. I can get too precious and have to force myself to put my paintings aside. There’s a wall in my studio where I hang paintings that I think are done or nearly done. Over time, I’ll realise which ones are working and which aren’t.
If you start out trying to achieve a specific thing – like doing stadium shows or going into the studio and doing an album – the end result is what counts.
Walt Disney had always tried to get more dimension in his animation and when I saw these tapes, I thought, This is it! This is what Walt was waiting for! But when I looked around, nobody at the studio at the time was even halfway interested in it.
As soon as I can afford a studio space, I’ll paint again.
I mean there are tons of reasons. Well first of all. I write my own record. I don’t take other people’s materials. And I have a job which is being Willa Ford on top of getting back in the studio and writing and recording.
If I could, I would not do anything else. I’d just be in the studio for my whole life. I would never go to parties, events, and red carpets. I would rather just be in the studio for the whole time. I don’t even care. Nobody has to know what I look like. I just want to make music.
Often, equipment can as easily function as a security blanket for musicians unwilling or unable to risk anything personal in the studio. Whether one catches the feeling on a record is a subjective matter. How can you be sure? The machinery can hold out the promise of at least mechanical perfection.
But after this last year and dealing with the studio, the rest of us are closer than we’ve ever been.
Let me tell you something about Tunechi – about that boy. That boy comes to the studio every day and grind as if he doesn’t have a dollar in his pocket.
I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.
I finished my studies in England, I opened my studio in London, and the first one-man exhibit I had on Bond Street, which was opened by the Austrian ambassador.
People tend to think that because I need all this time on my own in the studio, that I need time on my own, period. And that’s not really true.
Well, especially now I come to realize – and then – I would do my schooling which was three hours with a tutor and right after that I would go to the recording studio and record, and I’d record for hours and hours until it’s time to go to sleep.
If a star or studio chief or any other great movie personages find themselves sitting among a lot of nobodies, they get frightened – as if somebody was trying to demote them.
When you go into the studio or get up on the stage with people who have more experience or knowledge, you learn.
Which is why I felt I was truly blessed this year, with leads in two nice films, and also the luxury of being able to do a studio film and an independent afterwards was fantastic.
Often I think changes within my work have been seen as sudden changes or sharp changes, but for me they’re not that sudden. They have been there in the studio, but not so much in public.
I love being in the studio, and I am a huge fan of live music. Without writing good stuff in the studio, you have nothing to play live.
Every Vacation movie didn’t just make the studio money. They each made the studio a lot of money.
I’m hyperactive, and I went in the studio and I would just start making records, for no reason.
At the end of the day, if you don’t have a record contract, a studio or a guitar, you can still write songs. You’re still an artist. That’s something no one can take away.
I danced a little as a kid here in Canada: in Ottawa at the Elite Dance Studio and at the Top Hat Dance School in Cornwall where I grew up. So I had some experience of having to learn routines.
I’m not a guy to go in the studio and spend months, let alone years, like some people do. I cannot even be in the studio for a month, it will drive me nuts.
A lot of movies are made, but because they come to film festivals and your movie doesn’t get bought by a studio or a distributor, your movie doesn’t get seen.
I find I’m not one of these composers that are, you know, walking along a beach or walking on the mountainside in County Donegal that’s, you know, ‘Oh, a melody.’ It’s more a matter of eventually taking that moment with me to the studio, and it begins to evolve.
I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it’s a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.
The studio that we mix in is still in Chicago.
More live recording. I have missed the boat over my career by not doing every second or third CD live because things happen onstage that don’t happen in the studio.
I still like to keep tapes of the few minutes before the final take, things that happen before the session. Maybe it’s superstitious, but I believe if I had done things differently – if I had walked around the studio or gone out – it wouldn’t have turned out that way.
I want to build a studio in my backyard. The interest rates are low now, so who knows.
The reality is that there are so few roles out there for women and for women of color, and I’m a character actor, this I know. And I’m getting to see more of the roles that are out there, but there aren’t many. And zilch have been studio movies. Zilch.
As a member of the often maligned fourth estate, it is so refreshing to have a conversation instead of a buttoned up interview in a stifling studio.
I feel like when I’m on stage, when I’m writing songs, singing songs, I’m in the studio, I’m shooting videos, I kind of get to become this character, and I can make that whatever I want to make that.
Around the age of 14, 15, I was in the studio, serious about it.
The studio is not the place to write. You need to be 75% ready when you go into the studio, and then the music can develop to the next stage.
The crew members for ‘The Price Is Right’ at night are the same guys who work ‘Y&R’ during the day. It’s even in the same studio. I’ve been in the place for 15 years. So all the faces at ‘The Price Is Right’ are familiar.
I have a more personal insight into the importance of core strength because my wife Louise runs a Pilates studio in London. I have enjoyed getting into Pilates. I am not the most supple but I enjoy Pilates more than yoga.
But at the same time, never having final cut before, I really learned an interesting thing for any studio executive who is reading this: that if a director has final cut, it’s actually easier and more interesting to listen to notes.
When I usually go to my studio to work, I start with something that is going to take two minutes just to put some idea down and the next thing I know, ten hours have gone by and my family is screaming at me because they want me to come up to have dinner with them.
In the studio you can auto tune vocals, and with drums, you can put them on a grid and make them perfect. I hate that sound. When someone hands me a record and the drums are perfectly gridded and the vocals are perfectly auto tuned, I throw it out the window. I have no interest in rock music being like that.
The real test of a musician is live performance. It’s one thing to spend a long time learning how to play well in the studio, but to do it in front of people is what keeps me coming back to touring.
I do feel most at home playing live, but the feeling of getting into the studio to see the new songs take shape was really incredible.
You don’t just go to the studio and say, ‘I’m going to write a hit.’ It becomes a hit when people like your compositions.
The studio is just a labor. Getting on stage is the reward.
Lately I’ve been a workaholic. I’m in the studio all the time and I’ve helped to produce a couple of artists.
I started writing plays in around 1967, and at a certain point, I thought, ‘I’m writing plays, I should learn about acting and what it is.’ So I went to the HB Studio in New York, and I was there for about nine months.
Now on the other hand, if someone is selling a product, opening a dance studio, or has some other aim to help themselves, then I tend to look askance at some of these strange stories from outer space.
I’m never tired of going to the studio. I enjoy recording and documenting everything and trying new things.
With songwriting I spend a lot of time living life, accruing all these experiences, journaling, and then by the time I get to the studio I’m teeming with the drive to write.
I’ve been in the studio when you go through a track and you run down a track and you know even before the singer starts singing, you know the track is swinging… you know you have a multimillion-seller hit – and what you’re working on suddenly has magic.
I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren’t paying me for my acting, for God’s sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.
In America there’s no rights for the artist, so whatever films I’ve made kind of belong to the studio.
It’s big production. It’s huge. It’s using studio technology to your benefit. You don’t go in and play live and then just take the tapes and get them mastered. You have to create.
In overseeing both Disney and Pixar Animation, each studio has a unique culture.
I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.
Living and working for four decades in a Bologna apartment and studio he shared with his unwed sisters, Morandi painted little but bottles, boxes, jars, and vases. Yet like that of Chardin and the underappreciated William Nicholson, Morandi’s work seems to slow down time and show you things you’ve never seen before.
I’ve been in a recording studio enough times to know that it is not the best place to multitask. Doing a couple of takes of a song and running out to check your email to talk to someone about video production really is not good.
One of the things I like enormously about Bob Weinstein is that that he’s the only studio head I have ever known who will change his mind and say he was wrong.
I am a laptop boy. People say: ‘Where’s your studio?’ I say: ‘It’s in my laptop, in my rucksack.’
I came from a dance background, so that’s what I did my whole teenage years. I was at the dance studio a lot. It just becomes your social scene and part of your life.
I used to work in Macon, Georgia and Spartanburg, South Carolina where the studio was about half the size of your living room.
One gets the impression that Elvis Presley does what his business advisors think will be most profitable. My advice to them: Put Elvis Presley in the studio with a bunch of good, contemporary rockers, lock the studio up, and tell him he can’t come out until he’s done made an album that rocks from beginning to end.
I’m someone who has always been quite clear about what I like. In the studio, I’m not a control freak but I know what I want.
Nothing’s more exciting than a day in a studio with a string section – or more ruinously expensive. So it’s good to feed that habit away from the band, especially if it means more experience for the next Radiohead string day.
I’ve been in the studio experimenting on making a CD of my own. I’m trying out different producers, styles, sounds. With music, as opposed to acting, you are not playing a character. You are showing people who you are. I really want to have my spirit in it.
Wintertime for me is a time when I do a lot of my writing in the studio. It’s a time I enjoy. And it’s very reflective and a very calming time of the year. Throughout the year I gather a lot of musical inspirations, and this is where I bring them to the studio and see what will evolve musically.
We happened to be in the studio next door and I think Noel Redding came around and said, ‘Do you fancy having a sing on this?’ We just went and did it and it was great.
It’s hard to know exactly what it sounds like to me. I’m in the studio and I write it. and that’s it.
A great dream of mine would be to run a design studio full of scientists who think about science as creatively as if they were doing art.
I lived a fairly average, anonymous small-town life till I got the idea to do Nine Inch Nails. Then I locked myself in a studio for a year, and then got off the tour bus two years after that, and I didn’t know who I’d turned into.
I’ve always loved the recording studio.
On Eye of the Zombie, I had so-called studio musicians.
I had to go into a studio and compose and write and press up 12 songs in 14 hours. When you’re recording a song from scratch it takes you 14 hours to do just one song.
The ‘All My Children’ studio was near Lincoln Center, and I used to see all the ballerinas and the dancers, and I thought, I don’t want to bulk up; I want to have long, lean, toned muscles. And I found out that through Pilates, you can achieve those strong, lean dancer muscles.
Atlantic has been great to me. They didn’t flinch when I told them I was self-producing, and nobody was popping their head in the studio.
I work very hard on getting the songs as direct and examined as I can before I go in the studio.
Let me create great music, go in the studio, and possibly become a memory and a time stamp in people’s lives – and just give the best performances, because I know that’s all that really matters.
I love good film, whether it’s an independent or studio film. The independent films, I think the good ones aren’t necessarily eccentric ones but they’re the more specific ones.
I write by myself and then deliver the song. Everybody knows, ‘Leave Ester alone when she’s in her zone.’ Give me a studio and the tracks, and I’ll call you when the doctor is done.
Obviously I don’t have a stylist for everyday stuff, but for a premiere or something usually the studio will hire someone.
I think I’m wealthy. I make a good living for what I do. Well, it depends. If I’m doing an independent film I’m making no money – probably losing money. But if I’m doing a studio film, I’ll make a decent wage. I can live for a year without working.
I regret the passing of the studio system. I was very appreciative of it because I had no talent.
I used to empty the studio out and throw stuff away. I now don’t. There will be a whole series of dead ends that a year or two down the line I’ll come back to.
There was no studio involved when we made ‘Stargate.’ It was financed through Le Studio Canal+ in France and, after the film was finished, it was sold to MGM. When the film was a success, MGM decided to do a television series based on the movie.
Well, Hollywood isn’t made up of individual studio heads anymore. It’s made of corporations. And corporations are looking for the bottom line. They don’t want to take chances. They want the money back for stockholders.
I made many studio albums and I think the danger of studio recording is that if you do not watch out, you come out with a perfectly sterile performance.
For me it was perfect, because it wasn’t a very competitive environment, and it was a studio program. They basically send you off, and say, bring us some work, and we’ll help you improve it. It really rewarded self-discipline.
When I’m outside the studio, there’s some paranoia.
I’ve built an 8-track studio in my house that’s virtually identical to what they used at Abbey Road, and I also own the 16-track set-up that Led Zeppelin used to record ‘Houses of the Holy.’ I’m interested in producing, but I’m mostly recording my own stuff.
The best advice he gave me was to carry on. It would have been difficult to set foot back inside a TV studio if I hadn’t carried on – I don’t know if I would have ever gone back in.
What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.
Disney was a family film studio. I was supposed to be their young, leading man. After they found out I was involved with someone, that was the end of Disney.
My studio is designed for atmosphere. I have a really cozy, comfortable room that has a great, huge glass door that views my backyard.
I went from a guy, kind of a working actor, a supporting player, to magazine covers and being offered the studio pictures really quickly. Nobody was comfortable with it. I wasn’t really comfortable with it.
Black Sabbath was written on bass: I just walked into the studio and went, bah, bah, bah, and everybody joined in and we just did it.
One of the reasons I wanted to do a show about Nashville in Nashville was because when I lived here, the hardest thing to go out and hear was country music. Country was taking place inside the studio and it was an export.
On record dates like that I never felt too nervous because everything was really overdubbed. When we did that album, we were in the studio for probably a week, so you had a lot of opportunity to fix things.
It doesn’t matter if you’re doing a studio movie or you’re doing an independent movie. When you get to set and you’re doing a scene, it’s always going to be the same job. I really don’t think about my career, in terms of planning it out and what this does for me.
With an independent film, you have a little more freedom, and you also have less money, so you’re sort of struggling to get it done, to get something that works. With a big studio, everything is there for you, and it’s easier.
If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers.
At any one time, I’ll have 30 to 40 pieces going on in the studio, so this is not economically driven at all.
I have mugs of hot water every morning because the studio is cold, and also because it makes my throat sound clearer.
I think the line is where you’re in the studio, you’re creating. That belongs to you as an artist. Nothing should taint that. I shouldn’t be thinking about what the fans want, I shouldn’t be thinking about what the radio wants, what the label wants, what your manager wants, a song for the chicks, a song for the street.
We used to go to Studio 54 – an amazing place.
When I left Van Halen, I went in the studio and made a CD called Marching to Mars with all studio musicians. I did it immediately. With the disappointment riding on my shoulders of the breakup of the band.
You go into any recording studio in the world, and you see candles, lights, and that Apple light from a Mac.
That’s the trouble with anything which essentially has a lot of bits that are physically impossible: You’re left, stuck, in the studio. And that’s a shame. You’re making a movie. You don’t want it to stay put, you want it to be a movie – to move.
I was at the end of the studio system so when I walked into movies, I had a magnificent suite in which I had a living room and a kitchen and a complete makeup room. I had everything just for me. With the independents, you’re kind of roughing it, literally.
Hollywood wouldn’t suit me. In L.A. it’s all about work – studio people have their five minutes with you and they go, ‘Oh mah Gahd, I love your movie.’ You just feel very self-conscious there.
I always gravitate towards the independent side of things, just because those are the stories I always fall in love with, but you don’t really get paid, and living in Los Angeles is expensive, and I have a mortgage to pay. So it’s good to jump onto a studio film and then in all my other time do small passion projects.
Amy Rapp, my producing partner, and I are drawn to character-driven material. We’re developing and producing movies and TV, fiction and non-fiction, studio and independent, broadcast and cable, theatre, and web so our slate is really diverse.
‘Chronicle 2’ has become this question of, ‘How do we all make a movie that we all respect?’ And that’s true to what ‘Chronicle’ is. There’s no one at the studio who wants to make a bad movie. They all want to make a good movie just as much as I do.
It’s nice because success has allowed me to have a blast on stage, to be in the studio with amazing people, but I find it all a bit bizarre.
The moment I got a very big studio, everything took off.
Some people say I appeared on the Phil Donahue show to tell ‘my’ sex change story but I’ve never appeared on his show for any reason… not even as a member of the studio audience.
All studio movies are the middle of the Bell curve. The only way to do something is to do it yourself. And the only way to do that is to not take any money from anyone or take as little money as possible from anyone and that’s it.
I wrote two novels about a yoga studio in Los Angeles published by Penguin under the pen name Rain Mitchell.
I love music and hopefully I’ll be able to do something with it – I just have to find time to get into the studio and record a few songs.
I’m a portrait photographer that’s used to shooting celebrities, and I usually need time and all kinds of lights and a studio to set up my shots.
I’m never happier than when I’m not working. The strip is a job – that’s why I take money for it. It’s a job I’m passionate about, but it’s a job I totally leave in the studio when I walk out of here, unless I’m late and I have to work at home. I never think of the strip unless I’m compelled to.
Most days, we don’t get to the ‘SNL’ studio until noon. On Monday, we pitch the host, and that’s our shortest, lightest day. Tuesday is our longest day – some people don’t leave until Wednesday night. It’s just a long, long day.
I think the studio gave me that series on purpose, because they knew perfectly well that Robert Riskin was ill and that I needed to go to work. They gave me that series to do.
‘Flying Down to Rio’ established RKO as a leader in musical film production throughout the 1930s. The film helped to rescue the studio from its financial straits and it gave a real boost to my movie career.
I don’t want to make music alone in a dark studio and make me feel awful and depressed. I want to make music and feel happy and get to share it with people.
I don’t watch the movies I make, so I haven’t seen ‘Footloose’ since it came out. You see this young, hungry actor, it’s pretty fun. I was the only one they screen tested. It was an attempt by the director and producer to talk the head of the studio into hiring me because they didn’t want me.
I watch my contemporaries, and they love to live in the studio and I don’t. I have a life. I treat it as a 9-to-5. I try to create something new every day, and then I get on with my life.
In L.A., unless you’ve just won an Oscar or you’re Mr. Studio Head, no one talks to you. Even at parties.
I built a studio in L.A. for me and my brother to just write every single day. And it’s been great, man.
If Miles Davis hadn’t died it would have been interesting to do an album with him, but there wasn’t much else that would have got me into the studio… although Herbie Hancock has just been in touch about doing something and that would be an interesting combination.
In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called ‘White Feathers.’ It was produced in the studio theatre at the students’ union in early 1999, when I was 21. It’s 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War.
I write in the studio.
The problem with doing a schlocky or big budget studio film is that it wouldn’t actually be fun for me. It wouldn’t be exciting.
There’s nothing more exciting to me than using real instruments in the studio.
To walk into a studio, for me, is just like walking onto a beach or something.
I walk by studio heads and they actually look and put their hand out now, like maybe I should be on their radar.
I have spent probably years of time waiting in studio lounges – waiting on a mix, waiting on my time to sing, waiting on, waiting on, waiting on. That’s just the nature of life.
I suspect that a lot of studio executives still think of me as ‘what’s-his-name’.
If the interview was done in the studio, Frank McGee would automatically do it. But if I went out and got it, then the interview was mine. So I was considered a pushy cookie, because I would get the interview.
I don’t think that a company should own a studio and the network, and program for their own network. It hurts the creativity – it is not a level playing field.
At HBO, you’ve just basically got a studio full of artistically driven smart guys and women who really care about the quality first and foremost.
I love doing third albums. A group makes its first album, and then the record company rushes them into the studio to make their second album. After that, they go, ‘Whoa, wait a second.’ They get a little more confident. They step back and say, ‘Okay, now we’re gonna do it.’
I’ve never done a big studio film, I’ve only ever done little ones.
There was a recording studio in my school, and I knew this kid who had a key, so I’d write lyrics in school while I was in class, and then, in a 10-minute break, I recorded the song ‘Hurt’ in one go at the school studio.
I would make tea for Joni Mitchell or clean her car, anything to be in the studio and watch her work.
We’ve been working with the very best in the business. The studio really just let us alone to make the films.
I am one day going to be working openly in the motion picture industry. When that day comes, I swear to you that I will never sign a term contract with any major studio.
In a lot of movies, especially big studio ones, they’re not constructed in any other way than to get people to like them and then tell their friends. It’s a product.
Almost every morning when I go to the studio to work, I discover a fresh rose in the bud vase on my dressing table… one living and vital thing in a dusty arena of powder and tissue and matches and greasepaint.
I thank my mum, dad, and home for keeping me in touch with my own country and my own land. I can be in the studio with Snoop Dogg or singing for Oprah, but I’m still me.
I’ve never gotten money from most of those records. And I made those records: In the studio, they’d just give me a bunch of words, I’d make up a song! The rhythm and everything. ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’! And I didn’t get a dime for it.
I hate formal stuff. I love looking like a doll and all that stuff and playing dress up, but when I’m home, sweat pants, t-shirt. When I’m in the studio, sweat pants, t-shirt.
My favorite is still the one that I started off with, which is a Les Paul Standard. I’ve played that at every gig I’ve ever had. And that’s my starting point in the studio.
I looked at films as a career from necessity but all I have really wanted is my home and children. The two things just do not work out together when one has to leave home at 5.30 am in the morning to go to the studio.
You see a Clint Eastwood movie, and you might not know if it’s from Universal or Warner Bros. or another studio. He has affiliations with so many studios now, but there was a time when you’d just look at a movie and think, ‘Oh, that’s a Warner Bros. film.’
We seem to do better in the studio than we do in a live environment.
I never saw myself so much as an actor. I wanted to be a cartoonist like Charles M. Schulz and create my own world and be able to have a studio at home and not commute and be able to be with my family.
Good soul music should make you feel something in your heart, in your body, and in your spirit. That’s what I try to do both in the studio and on stage.
Plus, we spend most of our time writing music. Most of the time is spent in the studio in my house.
I look at my paintings for a very long time before letting them out of my studio. I like to get on the treadmill and look around at all of my paintings while I exercise. I try to stare them down to make them reveal their weaknesses. If they reveal weaknesses, they get repainted.
My influences change all the time; they have to remain current, because they’re the things that capture your imagination and make you want to go into the studio.
I danced a little as a kid here in Canada: in Ottawa at the Elite Dance Studio and at the Top Hat Dance School in Cornwall where I grew up. So I had some experience of having to learn routines.
Whenever I’ve been in the studio with Little Mix I’ve had the best time ever.
I don’t want to spend a month and a half in a studio with music I don’t like, and fortunately I don’t have to.
There’s something really nice about writing something on Wednesday and watching it being performed live for a studio audience on Tuesday. You never really get that with novels.
We’ll see if we ever do another Ministry gig again or not. I’m not saying yes or no yet. All I’m saying is I know there’s no new Ministry studio CDs coming ever again. I promise.
Somehow, magically, I’ve become an electronic musician, and I have a recording studio that looks like the bridge of the Enterprise.
I just like to do covers, every once in a while. If someone pays me to go into the studio, I’ll do it.
Warner Bros. is just this amazing historic studio that does great movies.
I’m on this eternal quest to get the best guitar sound in the world, but my vision of what is ‘the best’ changes every time I go into the studio. Sometimes my goal is to make my guitar jump out, and sometimes I want it to lay back.
But it’s like the horror of being in a studio with a blank canvas. I used to always run out of ideas because there are so many possibilities and I would just think, well what am I going to do now!
When I’m in the studio, there are no boundaries.
I would love to do a big studio movie, just because they’re going to put the money into distributing it. A lot of times you do these little movies, you love them and they never get seen by anyone.
I was showing up at the studio all the time with no bag, being like, ‘I don’t want to have a backpack. I’ve had backpacks my whole life, and I’m a grown man now. I should have something better.’
Dore Schary was then head of the studio and he wanted to change my name.
Of course, it gave the studio an enormous power, because I don’t know any other place who had that skill with images to communicate with. And the need of these kinds of images are even greater now than they ever were because we are losing our life symbols.
Studio 54 made Halloween in Hollywood look like a PTA meeting.
Honestly, most of the stuff I made for ‘TV on the Radio,’ I write in the studio.
Despite the fact the studio looks out of five windows onto a picture perfect view of sky, hills and wide open spaces, I work with my blinds firmly drawn, daylight filtered through their white canvas, a painterly northern light falling through two big skylights above my table, and nothing visible outside to distract me.
I love working with different musicians in the studio, that’s a real joy working with someone for the first time.
You can tell the difference between songs that were created in a garage and songs that were created in the studio.
I try to find the right director who won’t compromise his or anyone else’s integrity, and yet be political enough to give the studio what they want, yet put up a fight to maintain that integrity.
You’re in front of an audience, but you’re playing for a camera. There’s this huge adrenaline rush, because you know that besides the audience in the studio, there are millions of people watching at home.
I just want people to hear the music the way it’s suppose to sound, the way we meant for them to hear it. You sit in the studio all this time and make the music, tweak it, try to get it perfect. They should be able to hear it that way.
I’m just looking for the best story being told by the best people and the best part that I can find. If those things add up, I want to be a part of it whether it’s a studio film or, more likely in that instance, an independent film.
Later on, when I signed with Sony, we wanted to re-release ‘Fade’ as ‘Faded’ with a brand new mix and with vocals by Iselin Solheim. I think Iselin was the first person who sung demo vocals for ‘Faded.’ And it worked out great! The way I got in touch with Iselin was through a guy that I work with in the studio.
I’ve been messing around in the studio the last couple of years. But I don’t want to worry about being taken seriously as a singer. It just really feels good to do it.
One of the amazing things about the Internet is that the content creators are the gatekeepers. We can think of an idea and execute it quickly, and we didn’t have to pitch the idea to a major network or convince a studio head to sign-off on the concept.
My old man was a musician – that’s what he did for a living. And like most fathers, occasionally he’d let me visit where he worked. So I started going to his recording studio, and I really dug it.
I write a lot of music in my time off and I compose most of the songs on guitar. I’ve actually gone into the studio and recorded a few things, but it’s tough trying to sell a song. It’s all about finding that hook, that melody.
There wasn’t an episode of ‘Will & Grace’ that didn’t begin with my voice saying, ‘Will & Grace’ is taped before a live studio audience.
Being in a recording studio is a very different feel from performing onstage. I mean, obviously, you can’t just go in and do what you would do onstage. It reads differently.
It’s easy to gain weight when you’re in the studio.
When you do a movie in the studio system, there’s a committee. A committee of six or seven people you answer to. There’s two or three producers, a studio executive and one or two people above that studio executive.
The difficulty of getting a movie made through a major studio is so extreme that when a movie comes out, everyone should give it four stars because it was accomplished.
I like rock music because it’s always sonically fascinating. There’s never a method to what it needs to sound like. It’s just however that instrument comes out that day, whatever the humidity level was in the air, what studio you were at. All that makes that tone that you can’t re-create, so each song is like a person.
It’s a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That’s where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.
Carefully execute every instruction given to you by the director, producer, and studio. But that would be a life not worth living.
Normally, you go into the recording studio, make a record and then take it on the road and you think… wow… I could have done THIS to it, or something.
When we finish this tour we are going to begin writing and go into the studio to hopefully have a brand new Foreigner album out in early spring next year. This will be the first Foreigner album out in about ten years.
Success is created in studio apartments and garages, at kitchen tables, and in classrooms across the nation, not in government conference rooms in Washington.
For me, living and making music, they’re one thing. It’s not like a job that I go to a studio to do, or a chore that I have to get myself in the mood to do, or something. It’s the thing that I need to do every day.
If the night’s right and the people are right, of course I want to be out, I want to be socializing. I don’t want to be in my studio 24 hours a day for the whole rest of my life.
I would like to see more Bollywood films! The more stylized musicals are a new trend in the U.S. We are beginning to make musicals again after a long break, practically since the days of the studio structure, so perhaps we can learn a few things from Bollywood about this fun style of film-making.
A lot of actors said they hated the studio system, but I loved it. It was like a college; it was a great place to learn.
I’ve never really had a problem with the imagination level of an audience. They’re always smarter and savvier than any studio exec will give them credit for.
I realised that the only time I really enjoyed music was when I was in the studio writing. So even though it was a six album deal, they saw quite early on that I wasn’t enjoying it as I should be. I didn’t feel there was anything behind it.
I’m still shocked when people say, ‘You haven’t done a studio record in 20 years.’ I try to make excuses for it, but the truth is I just wasn’t with it.
The mini-Moog was conceived originally as a session musician’s axe, something a guy could carry to the studio, do a gig and walk out.
The studio system reminds me of the stock market.
I learned so much about playing and touring being on the road and in the studio with Jeff, but I’d always played a lot of gigs in Seattle even prior to joining the Fusion.
Being in the studio is like painting, you know, you can really take your time, and try different things, and kind of go deep into it.
A lot of big studio films, which are fun and great, tend to have a formula, and you’ve seen it before, and it’s a new version of it.
Success is created in studio apartments and garages, at kitchen tables, and in classrooms across the nation, not in government conference rooms in Washington.
The studio have always claimed that the ship is the star of the show, especially when they’re renegotiating contracts.
My studio cube is an experiment in solar heating and design. The south wall is covered with glass planks that collect and distribute heat naturally to my work studio on the second level.
I always wanted to be a full-time musician. Every television job I had was a means to buy a grand piano, or to put in a recording studio, or something like that.
In 1995, I had been chosen to make a short presentation about the state of the TV business at a company retreat in Santa Barbara. At the time, I felt we were not real competitors in network television. The studio wasn’t prolific; we didn’t have much of a brand.
I guess in the independent market, I’d be getting offers, but in terms of big studio films, I still have to audition. I don’t think my name is that well-known, I don’t have much of a following to guarantee box office success yet.
I had this instinct and I just knew it. It was a very strange thing and as soon as I finished recording it, we were all in the studio saying we have something really special here.
I tour more than I need to, more than is good for you. But it’s my favorite part of music. I much prefer it to studio work.
I’m so hard on myself that when I’m in the studio, I’ll write 10 songs and only use one. So those nine songs that are left over, I always think, ‘Where could these go? Who could they be for?’
When people ask me if I have a hobby, a lot of times my answer is that I like to surf in warm water. I like to ski, if I have the opportunity. But really, I like to go to my studio and write music that I want to write, where there’s no pressure to come up with a hit single.
While I was making my solo films, RKO was busily trying to get me and Fred Astaire back together. The studio wanted to capitalize on the success of ‘Flying Down to Rio’ and realized that the pairing of Rogers and Astaire had moneymaking potential.
I like being in a recording studio. I like watching a song go from the simplicity of the original music.
No, if it was up to me every record would be brand new studio material but Atlantic records asked me to put out a full live record because my tour really did do well last year.
I definitely want to study film. I’d like to have my own studio one day and just make a lot of movies.
I create women characters by watching the female staff at my studio. Half the staff are women.
So it helped me to just let go of all my tensions and feelings about that world and say ‘OK, this is for my fans in Japan. They’ll be nice and get into it and have fun.’ And it was the first record I made at my home studio.
That’s when we decided to stop in ’66. Everyone thought we toured for years, you know, but we didn’t. I joined in ’62, and we’d finished touring in ’66 to go into the studio where we could hear each other… and create any fantasy that came out of anybody’s brain.
Once I got a record contract, and I took my songs which weren’t quite finished, or maybe they were a good idea, maybe they weren’t. I took them into the studio and developed them. They came to life and they evolved… and they’re great.
If I’m in the studio, I’m completely on music. I try to go to that place and that’s the toughest thing for me to do. When I’m with other musicians, sometimes I go back to, almost like, childhood, because that’s what I always wanted to be.
I’m not interested in making a $60-million studio film with a bunch of 24-year-olds telling me what to do.
When I’m in the studio, I’m strictly thinking about the beats, the rhymes and the song. The decision I make once the songs are created, and there’s a barcode put on the package, and I’m out there in the street selling it, those decisions as a businessman are different than the creative decisions you make.
Most of the contract people at MGM stayed and stayed and stayed. Why? Because the studio looked after them. Warner Brothers wouldn’t – they were always spanking somebody or selling them down the river.
There have been times – and not just on ‘The Newsroom,’ but on ‘The West Wing,’ ‘Sports Night,’ ‘Studio 60’… – where it was hard to look the cast and crew in the eye, when I put a script on the table that I knew just wasn’t good enough.
What is generally referred to as American-style films are, in fact, studio productions.
I loved to dance and went to Studio 54 at least twice a week. But I always felt nervous around the people there. I was in awe of that whole Halston-Liza Minnelli crowd. To me, they were the real celebrities, and I was just a girl from Idaho.
I always think I don’t have any songs, I don’t have anything I’m working on, and I get in the studio and realize there are 20 things I’m thinking about. It’s just kind of second nature.
Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who’s connected with it, the studio’s gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that’s left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.
Up until the time Turner Broadcasting bought Hanna-Barbera, it was essentially an independent studio whose planning cycle had to be nine months. You got a pickup in January, and you put it on the air in September. That’s been the cycle.
There’s no room for being a visionary in the studio system. It literally cannot exist.
I am always locked in my design studio.
I guess, you make a big studio film, you spend a lot of money on it and you hope people go see it. It’s really risky.
I can make everything I do come from my laptop. Even when I go to a big studio, all I do is to plug in my laptops. That’s they way I do it.
The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion.
I can’t get that live and I don’t have the time to take the tape, after I’ve finished recording it, into a little studio somewhere else where I can get a different kind of percussion sound.
I met will.i.am in the studio and played him a couple of songs and he liked them. We’re similar but there’s nobody in my lane doing what I’m doing.
I’m very lucky to work in so many different arenas of the entertainment industry and I do enjoy them all, but making music – original music – in the studio or live onstage is definitely my favorite thing to do.
I was showing up at the studio all the time with no bag, being like, ‘I don’t want to have a backpack. I’ve had backpacks my whole life, and I’m a grown man now. I should have something better.’
Even though the museums guarding their precious property fence everything off, in my own studio, I made them so you and I could walk in and around, and among these sculptures.
Terry said he had this new kid and his wife didn’t want to live in England. He wanted to tour. He hated being in the studio. Terry liked seeing various bars the world over and getting smashed out of his brain. He was a sort of latent Keith Moon.
I’m portable. I carry a laptop and a little recording studio on my back.
If you do a film with a studio, agents step in, they start saying, ‘My actor has to get this amount of money’, and it becomes about deals.
I love to study the many things that grow below the corn stalks and bring them back to the studio to study the color. If one could only catch that true color of nature – the very thought of it drives me mad.
It was exactly what was released two months later with the exception of a couple of reaction shots which we went back in to get. I liked the movie very much and asked him what the studio’s problem was. I felt that he was at a point where they might have worn him down.
You should learn to be happy with what you have. Besides, the fact that I’m not a huge star has allowed me to pick and choose the roles I want to do, not the ones some person sitting in a studio office thinks I should do.
I was about 11 when my mother brought me this karaoke machine and I was really into it back then, but about 4 or 5 years ago is when I started printing up my own music, going to the studio and doing my own thing.
I can’t leave the studio until everything is as it should be. And I can’t put a record out unless I am completely happy with it. I never want to be at a signing and hear my album playing and think, ‘Oh no, I could have done that top note better.’
All my life, I have loved and been inspired by French cinema, and as a studio head it has been my pride and joy to have the ability to bring movies to audiences around the world.
I was never a part of the Actor’s Studio, because two friends of mine started it in 1947 and by that time I’d gone to California.
The studio is just a labor. Getting on stage is the reward.
I was the first wrestler ever in the history of wrestling to star in a major motion studio picture that became #1 box office of the weekend, and that gave the itch to I don’t know how many wrestlers.
‘Carrie’ was a pretty big-budget movie at a real studio, with a director that had already done a bunch of things and had some notoriety, and Stephen King was the writer.
I work out in a studio. Every day, regardless where I am, at least two hours. I need it. I can’t cease it.
I lived with them in my studio in New York. And of course if I were doing that book today or even ten years, fifteen years later, I would have gone to where the wild ducks were and where I could study them – I would have gone to the country somewhere.
Everything about it worked, and I don’t mean just the movie, but in our experience, we realized there’s also a component of luck involved in this business. We had absolutely the most competent people in the studio working on the release and ad campaign.
I find I’m not one of these composers that are, you know, walking along a beach or walking on the mountainside in County Donegal that’s, you know, ‘Oh, a melody.’ It’s more a matter of eventually taking that moment with me to the studio, and it begins to evolve.
We still have that same burn, to get that same kind of laughs. So whether the studio wants us to or not, we’re going to do it. The money is just a byproduct of coming out with good stuff. Our whole thing is building that rapport with the audience.
More and more, I’ve started to understand that no show is dead unless somebody decrees it’s dead at a studio.
I’ve had the luxury of owning my own studio, 24 analogue, 48 digital, endless effects, endless hardcore gear, that I don’t have to rent, I don’t get stuck with the bills, it’s all mine.
I am always locked in my design studio.
Writing ‘We Are Never Getting Back Together’ was one of the most hilarious experiences I have ever had in the studio because it just happened so naturally.
There is some sampling on my records and a lot of what I call replays, where I’d have musicians come in the studio and replay the sample from the original record. But mainly, we’d come up with our own music.
I sometimes look around that studio in the middle of commercials and think, ‘Really?’
I pay two full-time assistants in my studio, plus consultants who are architects, engineers, and landscape architects, as well as lighting designers.
To be able to get up and be in my studio and work all day is a great joy.
Let me tell you something about Tunechi – about that boy. That boy comes to the studio every day and grind as if he doesn’t have a dollar in his pocket.
I was not getting work, even after auditioning for films. So I started working in a studio as a photographer; I assisted a cinematographer for two ads. I was thinking that I will get into photography or cinematography or assist someone. But then the ‘Dangal’ offer came, and I was busy with the auditions.
My studio was on 9th Street between University and Broadway.
I always admired Walt’s optimism. He seemed to know the direction he was going to. When I was at the studio, I remember he kept driving all of us back down to a more fundamental level all the time.
It was always difficult for me to listen to my singing voice for the first 20 years or so. I mean, I really enjoyed singing, and I enjoyed doing live shows, but being in a recording studio and having to hear my voice played back to me would really drive me up the wall.
I was scared to do anything in the studio because it felt so claustrophobic. I wanted to be somewhere where things could happen and the subject wasn’t just looking back at you.
I used to record songs, like, play the beat from one phone and have another phone recording me and just rap. Moving from that to a studio was like, ‘Damn, I never knew I could sound like this.’ It was just magic.
As you know, in America there’s no rights for the artist, so whatever films I’ve made kind of belong to the studio, so if they want to remake it they can.
A studio is like a meditation room where music is created. And a live performance is the place where the creation of the studio is taken ahead. I love both.
I’ll audition for something and then the feedback has been, ‘The director wants you, the creative people want you, but the studio is saying no.’ It’s depressing, but I understand. People are investing a lot of money and they want somewhat of a guarantee; they want someone who’s been on the cover of magazines.
The early years of Hanna-Barbera were more fun than the later ones. I was working more in the creative areas of timing and direction then. But as the studio grew, I became more involved in administration and got away from the creative aspects.
I have only one loyalty – to my writing. I never wanted to be the head of a studio or a producer.
I was never that into the movies. Never. Even as a youngster. I became interested in movie music only because of the studio orchestras in Hollywood.
I look forward to the future – and going into the studio to make new music.
When you worked in a studio it was the studio system that you kind of missed because it was a big, big family. I mean MGM had 5,000 people working a day there. You miss it.
I hate going out for lunch during a workday because it slows down my pace and ruins my rhythm. I prefer to eat at my desk. Actually, I wander around the design studio with a plate in my hand as I dine on, for example, salmon sashimi and a salad of tomatoes and mozzarella. I often have a bit of dark chocolate after lunch.
Maybe I should have taken a few chances. That’s not to say I want to go make ‘Star Wars’, but I need to shift my career into the studio world. That’s where my head was at when I thought of the original plot.
When you record an album and it goes platinum… yeah, you’re in the studio and you work hard for months, but it’s not like your whole body hurts. Maybe you get a little hoarse and tired. But on ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ everything hurts.
A studio recording is perfection, but emotion and passion come only when you turn on the machine and go for the groove. If you do that with no mistakes, it sounds beautiful.
I prefer playing in the studio because you have much more control over things.
When I was starting out, young actresses had the studio system to protect them. Now you have a host of sharks, from your agent to your publicist to your lawyer.
I think it was probably down to the fact that we weren’t together personally as a band. We weren’t pulling in the same direction. I always feel if you’re having a good time in the studio it actually comes across on the tape and that was a bit of a miserable album for us.
I learn stuff from making music every time I go in the studio. I’m continuing to try to find new ways to play in a song or be in a song and have a positive impact on a song.
There was absolutely no intention of splitting up. We had so many great ideas to use on the new album. John Paul Jones was incredible, coming to the studio each day with new instruments to play.
Studios were just run differently. There really was a head of a studio. There were people who loved their studios. Who worked for their studios and were loaned out to other people and everybody sort of got a piece. Well now there’s a handful now.
I consider the recording studio where I was born.
I produce some of my music videos on a $200 budget. But I produce most of my videos on zero budget. I have a studio in my apartment – which is actually just a green screen I have tacked on my wall and some lamps to light everything.
There really is a certain magic that happens when you’re in the studio. And it’s important in life to feel that magic: to feel that there is something greater moving all this along.
I enjoy some nights in the studio. I’m not the greatest person in an enclosed space; I’m a live player by birth – like a gypsy folk player, I just sit in the corner and play.
I live in a very small town and now that I’ve closed down my studio, I’m working at home.
I love being in the studio. If I’m at home, I will go to the studio pretty much every day anyway. It’s just something that I like to do.
I always say that candy is the perfect studio food – it keeps your energy going.
I’m a serious student of music, a perfectionist in the studio, and I take the arrangement and production of it very seriously, down to the mixing and mastering even. But at the same time I’m having so much fun with it. I try not to take myself so seriously.
It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.
I’m working on a snow scene right now, and it’s summer. It’s hot, and I will get chilly. I’ll have to turn on the heat. My wife walks in, and it’s 95 degrees in the studio. I know it’s nutty, but it’s a projection you have where you step into the painting.
My studio is a laptop. Everybody I work with is the same. We make computer music, we’re the laptop generation.
I like to explore a lot of textural, arrangement aspects in the studio.
I don’t like getting up in the morning, getting in a car, driving on a freeway, and stopping at a gate where two guards are standing there, then walk into a studio that looks like a bunch of airplane hangars.
The first time I went to Abbey Road and put those headphones on, I discovered I had two voices. I no longer had to shout in the studio, but I can’t knock the Cavern or the other clubs because they gave me my strong voice.
In my studio, it is unkempt and unattractive. Once I’m in my work, I don’t notice where I am.
When I go into the studio, I completely detach. I let my emotions come out.
You can alter movie singing so much because you go into the recording studio and, just technology for recording has gotten so good, you can hold out a note and they can combine a note from take 2 and a note from take 8.
I’m a big believer of daylight in the studio.
You never hear of a live-action studio that has been making so-so films looking over at a studio that’s making great movies and going, ‘Oh, we see the difference – we’re using a different camera.’
In the studio, I’m always throwing people on different instruments.
A studio is like a meditation room where music is created. And a live performance is the place where the creation of the studio is taken ahead. I love both.
Money’s never an issue. I can go and work for a small studio theatre somewhere if it’s a play I really care about, or do TV or a big commercial West End show.
But I think the credit has to go to Geddy… he spent a lot of time in the studio with Paul, I think he needed that kind of focus to be in there to be a part of the whole thing, and for the most part he made all the major decisions.
Music itself is a great source of relaxation. Parts of it anyway. Working in the studio, that’s not relaxing, but playing an instrument that I don’t know how to play is unbelievably relaxing, because I don’t have any pressure on me.
Johnny was great in the studio; he was there to make the music that he wanted to make. We lived right beside each other and had a rehearsal studio that was just ours, with nobody else using it, it was part of Johnny’s house, so we could rehearse every day.
I also have a recording studio that I use to produce bands.
In my off-time, I do record. Once in a while, I’ll just go into the studio if there’s a really good song that I have in my head and want to do. I think, as artists, you’re constantly in creative motion. If I stopped writing songs, then that’s a part of me that would stop in my life, and I need constant motion.
The Stones were always exemplary of one of the best of all rock qualities: tightness. They have always been economical, the opposite of ornamental. Having a very clear idea of what they wanted to say they could go into a studio and make it all up on a three minute cut.
I was in a movie with Marlon Brando. Now, I didn’t have any scenes with Marlon Brando, but I had scenes with Martin Sheen and was around Dennis Hopper, who was a child actor in the studio system and was enamored of James Dean, as was Martin, and they were all sort of disciples of Brando.
I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.
It was rehearsing in the studio, at which point they were setting up the sound, and once we’d got the thing together they’d actually record it, without us knowing sometimes!
You go to a studio with a guitar, people are like, ‘Oh this girl’s going to write this song on a guitar.’ Or wants to, or whatever. You go with a ukulele, people are just like ‘Eh, well, whatever.’ They don’t really care. It’s a very non-threatening kind of instrument.
I keep waiting for a paradigm shift to happen that will let network and studio execs see that sci-fi is the same as any other genre in terms of how you approach it – logically, character-based, with challenging ideas and forward thinking – but I worry that it might never happen in my lifetime.
My job of being a musician in a recording studio has nothing to do with being a musician being on tour performing.
I love getting into a studio with a bunch of friends. When the day’s done, we’ve made something. We recognize that we’re from different walks of the music industry, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t be collaborating. That’s what I’m trying to create with thenewno2 – a sense of community.
Working on ‘Nightmare Before Christmas,’ I had endless arguments, like the studio saying, ‘You can’t have a main character that’s got no eyeballs!’ ‘How is anybody going to feel for somebody with just eyesockets?’ You know? So, it’s those kind of things that really wear you down.
The Shins is, in a way, a recording project that turned into a live band. So I don’t really keep myself beholden to any rules when I’m in the studio for Shins. I just gotta get it done as best I can.
In 1977, I had Paul Rivera hotrod six Fender Deluxes for me. At that time, a lot of studio guys in L.A. were using those – not so much live guys but studio guys. They had terrific tone and great technique, and I was like, ‘Well, I like having terrific tone even though I don’t have any technique.’
Sometimes I hear a drum groove in my head and I rush down to my studio.
I would also like to act, once in a while, but not get up every morning at 5:30 or six o’clock and pound into the studio and get home at 7:30 or eight o’clock at night, or act over and over and over every night on Broadway, either.
Most films I work on, the people making the film are constantly second-guessing the executives of the studio, the producer, and the audience. It is very hard to accomplish anything in that situation.
I’m always working. If I’m not in my studio I become quite nervous.
Most people when they rap usually have their homies in the studio who rap with ’em, but they homies don’t usually be producers.
Actually, with ‘Truth of Touch’ I wasn’t even intending on making an album. I was just having fun. I had about a six-month period of down time, and I’m not very good at sitting around. So I kind of started going into the studio and having fun with new core mendin sounds.
If you’re a studio writer, the funny better be on the page.
We were telling everybody we weren’t getting back together when we were in the studio actually recording. We wanted to try it on, to see how it would fit.
Persistence is half the battle. That’s what I love about independent movies. They don’t have to be made. There’s no studio with an agenda to set up a franchise like ‘Batman’ or to make a vehicle for a celebrity actor. My films are made because I love the process.
Ke$ha is her art; there is no curtain you peel back to find the real person. And with Ke$ha, you never know what to expect when you’re in the studio.
I was the kid who at 12 years old went to NBC studio tours, and I would just answer all these trivia questions on the tour that the pages would ask about ‘SNL’. I was that kid.
I think people are tired of fake music, man. And there’s a lot of it. Technology has reached the point where any boob can walk into a studio and with a little AutoTuning you can have a hit song. I think it’s pathetic.
Sometimes, I make 50 songs and pick out the best 10. I’ve been in the studio all day, all night, making the beat, writing the raps. You never know what’s gonna be a hit.
I never walked the streets of New York hoping to be a musical comedy star. For one thing, they would have thought I was too tall, because l was five feet eight and a half, and they were all little bitty things running around in the studio at that time.
Me and John Mayer met via a mutual connect, we were by the studio and he asked If I could play him my music. When he heard ‘Under The Influence,’ he asked if he could be a part of the track and of course, we made that happen.
Locations are all tough, all miserable. I never left the sound stage for 18 years at Warners. We never went outside the studio, not even for big scenes.
Even the shows or movies that we know are not going to change the world, I love this. I love ’em. I’m a movie fan. I’m a nerd of any kind. I love a big studio comedy as much as I love the teeniest tiniest of indie. I’m not a snob in that way. I really do like a big, big studio comedy.
We did some jumping at the start of the show. We went out without telling anyone – and the studio liked to kill us. They were threatened with cancellation of their production insurance.
Whenever I have time, I try to get in the studio and write, whether it’s for me or other artists or my catalog of music. It’s definitely one of my favorite parts of the music industry.
As an audience member, those studio films are fun. I like an adventure tale, and I also like to go see something that has more of a social pulse. I like to keep learning and trying new things. And if the scripts are good, it doesn’t really matter.
It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time.
When I was 15, 16, I started going to a studio and my biggest inspiration were women, like Lola Flores from Spain or Janis Joplin or Patti Smith.
I wouldn’t go into the studio if I didn’t have a band who’s ready, willing, and able.
I find it quite difficult on studio films because there are so many different executives and things like that that you have to go through, so very often getting that definitive opinion is actually quite difficult.
We allow no geniuses around our Studio.
For the most part, studio movies have huge budgets. They don’t do anything under 30 to 40 million. When you have that much money at stake, you have so many people breathing down your neck.
New York had a big influence on me growing up, and I was really part of the club scene – the Mudd Club and Studio 54. When you’re living in New York, you are just bombarded with style, trying to figure out how to be cool and how to feel relaxed at the same time.
I’ve been involved with some huge studio projects that have been bloody awesome. It all starts with a great script, doesn’t it?
The role of a modern studio chief is much different to how the old studio chiefs used to operate. It’s not so much a position of power anymore, but a position of influence.
An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos are ways of adding more dimensions to the words and music. I like to be involved in all of it because it’s all of a piece.
The Hadley Street Dream is a tribute to making a vision come to life. My father built a compound on a dessert city block, he saw something in that space we couldn’t see. It was years later the album was born right there on Hadley St. He built the studio I started recording the album at.
I was certainly a better actor after my five years in Hollywood. I had learned to be natural – never to exaggerate. I found I could act on the stage in just the same way as I had acted in a studio: using my ordinary voice, eliminating gestures, keeping everything extremely simple.
I suspect that a lot of studio executives still think of me as ‘what’s-his-name’.
Well, once I did ‘Grease,’ everyone was offering me studio pictures in a similar vein – you know, popcorn movie.
I’ve always said I’m not the kind of designer who likes to lock himself away in a studio and let the rest of the company deal with it. I work very closely with everyone on the team.
Every morning, I go off to a small studio behind my house to write. I try to ignore all email and phone calls until lunchtime. Then I launch into the sometimes frantic busy-ness of a tightly scheduled day.
I get so fed up with the making of an album taking over my life – it’s all I can think about or talk about. You find yourself in a rut and lacking inspiration and it’s hard to get out of that because I’m working alone in the studio.
Man, I wanna be there for everybody. I wanna make everybody happy, and I can’t… That’s why I stay in the studio.
I lived in a studio apartment until my mid-30s. I don’t have an extravagant lifestyle.
I’m proudest of the fact that I’ve been able to make a few movies in the studio system that are slightly unorthodox and personal. But it’s never quite as easy as you dream that it could be.
When we were in the design studio I always was pretending like I was in a closet asking my friend before I step out into the world what do I look like? And everybody wants that honest friend before they go and go to dinner or go to an event.
My son and I run a string company, and he has a studio there, and I go down sometimes and we’ll record.
I look for a sense of reality with everything I did. I didn’t work in a studio, I didn’t light anything. I found a way of working which pleased me because I didn’t have to frighten people with heavy equipment. It was that little black box and me and ВЈ5 worth of film in my pocket or maybe it was only ВЈ2 in those days.
I stay in the studio. I’m a studio junkie.
I started a recording studio. I started producing people and doing remixes.
That’s usually what happens with AC/DC: you make an album, and then you’re on the road flat out. And the only time you ever get near a studio is generally after you’ve done a year of touring.
Andy Warhol was a good friend of mine. We used to go to the Studio 54 nightclub together with the likes of Liza Minnelli, and we’d dance through the night.
I thank my mum, dad, and home for keeping me in touch with my own country and my own land. I can be in the studio with Snoop Dogg or singing for Oprah, but I’m still me.
My dad heard of a studio on the radio, and it was advertised as a place for kids to meet kids, and it was actually a studio, and that’s where I met my manager and agent.
I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.
So when it was my turn to start developing projects, I knew the writers I wanted to work with, and I had met every head of studio, every executive and a lot of producers. I started finding things, little crumbs off other people’s tables that I would make my own.
I wrote ‘Actor’ all on the computer. I didn’t touch any instruments until I was in the studio. So while I had all these ornate arrangements, I didn’t have any songs.
The only thing I’d ever done with news was to read copy sitting at the microphone in the studio.
So that studio served its purpose, and still is working very well for other people right now.
If a studio sees that a female can bring in audiences, then they’re going to make movies with that person.
I like to come and go as I please which means I’m not anxious to dash back from the studio to fix dinner for a man.
Well, the Empire State was about 40′ high in the studio. King Kong was a little model about 2′ high, and the scenery that he worked in was in proportion to his size.
I’m a studio rat. I like going in there as producer.
As opposed to touring for three years and then going into the studio and writing an album, I think this record is representative of a lot of everyday people.
My first show sold within the first 3 minutes, and I came back to the studio and spent the next two and a half years making almost nothing.
When I’m working in the studio, I like to be on my own because I don’t know where I’m going; I want to be completely free to spend lots of time on songs.
Democracy in the studio is overrated. What you wind up getting is compromise on everybody’s part, which means that nobody has their way, and that means nobody wins, including the fans.
I started on ‘Saturday Night Live’ the same time Conan started on Late Night. We just had a relationship because I would be upstairs in the studio and whenever he couldn’t get a guest – which was often back then since he was just starting out – he would just call me down to be a guest.
Every time I get in the studio, I feel like I wanna have some fun. My fun is not doing the easy work. My fun is doing what’s me.
I’m a big micro manager; I’m a stickler about organisation; everything needs a place, a purpose, and micro managing myself even when I’m in the studio.
I would have been content to just do studio work, making it on my own never really entered my mind.
There’s too much insecurity on studio sets, with all the people standing around, whispering.
My dad, Bob Blum, used to dash across Grand Central’s main terminal catwalk several times daily as a young CBS correspondent, running copy from newsroom to studio and back – because CBS’ first broadcasts were from Grand Central Terminal. The pictures on people’s television sets used to shake when the trains came in!
You earn very little money on independent films and I’m the provider for my home, so I do have to think of taking one for the accountant time and again and that means studio pictures.
You could just do independent movies, but I like bigger kind of studio movies, at least some of them.
Now, you can just get a laptop, get some software, put a microphone on it and make a record. You have to know how to do it. It does help if you’ve had 35 or 40 years of experience in the studio. But, it still levels the playing field so artists can record their own stuff.
I am such a gearhead. In my recording studio, I personally engineer and edit everything on computers.
If I am writing a movie and I am stuck, I can call the studio and tell them it’s delayed. You can’t do that with television – you have air dates to meet.
Sometimes there’s a sense of closing yourself off on a shoot, and I try not to do that. Sometimes you have to, like when you’re in a studio and you’re doing fashion shooting, but I don’t even do it then.
I like making black and white films in natural surroundings, but I much prefer shooting a color film inside a studio where the colors are easier to control.
I have nothing against these big CGI movies, but there are not enough of the other ones – the ones with stories about character that have a beginning, a middle and an end. I said that to a couple of studio heads and they said, ‘That’s novel.’
Just when I think I hate fashion, I hate clothes, I’m seized by this crazy thing that I have to do. I have this little studio now where I just draw. I can be in the room for three days and not even look up.
There was a time when my mum would sew costumes for the dance studio so we could keep doing our classes because we couldn’t afford them.
I played in front of every conceivable audience you could face: an all-black audience, all-white, firemen’s fairs, policemen’s balls, in front of supermarkets, bar mitzvahs, weddings, drive-in theaters. I’d seen it all before I ever walked into a recording studio.
To do a studio film, something with Disney. My father is thrilled.
I thought I was attractive when I shot ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding.’ Studio executives and movie reviewers let me know I had a confidence in my looks that was not shared by them.
In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.
Writing screenplays is not my business. I’ve written half a dozen, and maybe half of those were made. But it was never a satisfying experience. It was just work. You’re an employee. You would be told what to do. Studio execs would cross out my dialogue and put in their dialogue.
I’m right on the edge of getting another movie. It’s between me and a famous person. The studio said they’re thinking about going with somebody with a name. I said, ‘That’s great! Because I have one!’
But I don’t like working on lyrics publicly in the studio – I prefer to take them away and work on them in my bedroom.
You shouldn’t really have to use EQ in the studio if the instruments sound good. It should all be done with microphones and microphone placement.
You know, Tupac would go into the studio and make like six or seven songs in one day. That’s how he operated. He was real quick with his pen.
Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. ‘Odelay’ was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year.
I’ve got my own studio, and I’ve got four- to five-hundred unreleased tracks. I’ve got stuff that’s electronic, orchestral, jazz, I’ve got rock, I’ve got metal, you know, I don’t have polka.
It’s the formulaic studio movies the make money, and when they do, the actors in them are automatically movie stars.
Why are we talking about talking? Why negotiating about negotiating? It’s very simple. If you want to get to peace, put all your preconditions on the side, sit down opposite a table, not in a studio, by the way.
We shot on location in our very first weeks, in our very first shows. I would like to go on location again, Hawaii would be good!! But normally, we tape five days a week in the studio starting at about 8:00 a.m. and continuing until about 8:00 p.m.
And I like being able to go back and forth, and I don’t really care if it’s a small budget or big budget or studio or independent, as long as it’s got a story that’s compelling and there’s enough money to make the picture.
There’s this index that tallies up how much your movies have made, and if they haven’t grossed a certain amount, then you’re not bankable. I know I’m not Will Smith but, you know, my ranking’s pretty low. The only studio picture I’ve done is ‘Zodiac,’ and that didn’t perform that well.
I only made two studio movies, that was a long time ago and obviously I removed myself. I think some of that is geographical. I live in New York and I want to work there, it’s as simple as that.
Big studio comedies are such a headache.
I mean, even my dressing room at the studio has candles and cushions and cashmere rugs and things.
Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who’s connected with it, the studio’s gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that’s left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.
The plain truth is, ‘Fruitvale Station’ was made totally outside the Hollywood studio system, and every ounce of the picture feels authentic. The lives of the people involved in the movie will never be the same.
I had done another show called ‘United States of Cars,’ which was a pilot that didn’t get picked up. And they said, ‘You know, we’re doing ‘Top Gear,’ and would you like to meet the guys?’ It was the wild – most wild audition I ever had because I never went to a studio or a producer’s office.
In a way, I was spoon-fed, if you will, a career. It was fully manufactured by a studio that believed that they could put me on their posters and turn me into their bottle of Coca-Cola, their product.
There’s a lot of different parts to me, so it makes total sense to me that I would do a big TV show or studio movie and then do a free comedy show the next day. They both feel equally important to me.
We are just at the studio, me and my choreographers, we are spending like 30 nights and we are thinking, what is my next dance move? Because in Korea there are huge expectations about my dancing. So it was a lot of pressure.
Money’s not important to me. Movie star acknowledgement is not important to me. I don’t want to be a big studio actress. I don’t want to be in the limelight.
I did voice work for many years before I started having success as an actress. It was mostly radio and television voiceover work, but I know my way around the studio. I know how to use the cappuccino machines and the headphones.
Daffy, of course, wants to go on the journey with him but the studio decides they want Daffy back, so Bugs and a young studio executive heroine have to go out and try to bring him back.
I’ve certainly auditioned for big budget studio films. I don’t know if it’s because there’s so much money involved, but a lot of times the pressure overwhelms me and engulfs me. I end up falling apart in the audition.
I park two blocks away from Nickelodeon studios and I hop on my skateboard and I skateboard the rest of the way to the studio.
I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.
I never walk into the studio and say, I’m going to write a song called… ‘X’ or called ‘Slow Me Down.’ I write a ton of lyrics, often the title is somewhere in those 10 pages of… I call it brain vomit. It’s kind of like whatever comes out of my head and I’m unabashedly just writing it down.
I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I’ve had the same address and phone number since then.
I love the magic of the studio.
‘Black Hole Sun’ was written in a car when I was driving home from the studio one night. Pretty much everything that you hear was written in my head.
With studio work, I’m always the bottom man on the totem pole.
I phoned Joe Roth, who was head of the studio at the time, and told him how beautiful the film was, and that I was fully ready to support it, that Michael’s work was wonderful and I imagined that Daniel would feel the same. He listened quietly and read between the lines.
If I have a song that I feel is really one of my best songs, I like it to have a formal studio recording because I believe that something being officially released on a studio record gives it a certain authority that it doesn’t quite have if it comes out on a live album or is just a part of your show, you know.
The way we structure our deals is to work closely with the director. It is imperative to work with a studio because the way the film is marketed is crucial.
Randy Newman and I grew up together in Los Angeles. We are both products of the film studio era. Randy is one of the great songwriters of our time and one of the fun people to be with.
In the studio, if they need to come down to the floor, things are a bit pushy, although it is easier for them to say things directly rather than through about five people.
I worked three and then six hours a day in my studio with strict discipline and emotion. I obtained awards usually granted to other foreigners during the end-of-year admission tests.
The thing that’s characteristic of my performance is that I literally do drag the whole studio onto the stage.
I thought I wanted to go to drama school or university, and that would have been a completely different life. But what got me was the sound, and hearing it. Hearing everything so loud, I loved that back in the studio. I loved that from the very beginning.
I don’t think that a company should own a studio and the network, and program for their own network. It hurts the creativity – it is not a level playing field.
Even though I studied in New York and I know the American system, I come from France where I learned that with movies in France where the director is king. There’s no such thing as a studio edit. It’s the director’s cut, period.
After the war, there was no industry. We lost the war. We had our whole city destroyed. No money. No studio. No film. No camera. No equipment. We would shoot in the street. We had no actors. Nothing. But we wanted to do movies. And we did the best movies in the world.
A big budget studio film is slower, they’ve got so much to create around you. Everything is more complicated.
Getting used to the studio and everything was fun, we freaked about alot. I was working very hard then.
If you can sell that you’re the King of Scotland, or Henry V on a tiny stage in a studio theater somewhere, then you can probably sell that you’re a starship captain or a time traveler.
Your intention going in is to do the best you can. You go in and do your work, day to day, the best you can. But it’s entirely up to the director and the editor and the producers and the studio how it turns out.
Coming from my bedroom in San Antonio to this big world and going from singing covers off my laptop to making music in this nice studio, making professional-sounding music – it’s just weird.
If you want a studio to back you, you want to be doing something that’s been done to death!
And if I had a preference, it would be to be able to not be in the studio until 4 in the morning.
That’s what so great about making movies. It’s that you get to do stuff you never would be able to do in real life. You get to go to a recording studio, you get to go to Navy ships and fly all over the world for press. And it’s just a great job.
I didn’t go to school for illustration. I did larger pieces, mostly drawings and paintings, and minored in video, but when I moved to N.Y.C., I didn’t have a studio space anymore and downsized to my desk and started illustrating. I started a greeting card company and sold cards all over the city.
I think you get in trouble if you make experimental big studio films.
When we came into the studio I became more and more me, making the tracks and choosing the musicians, partly because a great deal of the time during Bridge, Artie wasn’t there.
My studio’s always in my house. I want to wake up and be like, ‘You know I’m gonna make music today in my underwear. You know what, I’m gonna be in my pajamas. You know what, I’m actually just gonna stay inside for the next three days so I can make music.’
I created a successful outdoor youth festival – the Liverd festival – against all good advice. It was a great way to explore and investigate social sculptures. Having that as my kind of studio, outside of a museum or precious white-cube gallery, that was a kind of education.
I’ve turned my guest house into this little studio, and we have actors come over and do readings.
I have no philosophy, my favourite thing is sitting in the studio.
The ‘All My Children’ studio was near Lincoln Center, and I used to see all the ballerinas and the dancers, and I thought, I don’t want to bulk up; I want to have long, lean, toned muscles. And I found out that through Pilates, you can achieve those strong, lean dancer muscles.
There’s two facets to writing a song. There’s you sitting in your room writing the sentiments of the song; the lyrics, the melody and the changes, and then there’s the part where you go into the studio and you put clothing on it.
I believe a great performer is someone who sounds just as great live as they do in the studio and vice versa. They should know how to work the stage.
When you’re playing in front of people, everything is external. It’s all going from you out to an audience. When you’re in a studio, it’s very internalised, it’s going from the air through you into this meticulously crafted, layered piece of work.
I’m excited that ‘The Good Guy’ is getting distribution because indie movies they’re not – people ran out of money and they’re not making these movies anymore. It’s all superhero movies or real obvious tent pole studio films.
I did a couple songs with this hip-hop guy named Tim Dark. He was working in the same studio I’ve been working in, he heard my music and he said, aw man, I’ve got to do something with you.
Once I actually get in the studio and I start working, I’m fine, but it’s just getting there and these hours of torment with myself and self doubt, thinking ‘I’m useless’ and ‘Who am I, conning myself into thinking I can do it again.’
Berry Gordy turned his house into a studio and discovered over 30 acts in the city. And we’re famous all over the world.
When you see people who are really good at game shows, the one common attribute is a cool head under pressure: an ability to perform as well in the studio, surrounded by lights and noise, as you do on your couch.
The first day was memorable for me. I walked into this studio with these giant eyes, slowly met everybody and got to see the story boards and sketches of our characters. I got the see the sets and was just amazed that all this was to be something we all were going to be part of for almost a year.
The main thing in measuring integrity is someone’s motive and intent, not how many records they sell. Our intent in Ministry was never to be big. We just wanted to make enough money to live and to buy a studio, which we have done in Austin.
I don’t believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky.
I spent two weeks prancing around a studio in Queens in my underwear with nine other guys. They were long days. But what the hell, it was Calvin Klein.
When you do a writing job for a studio, one of the things you want to do is satisfy the expectations of your employer. That’s a little bit different than when you sit down and write something to satisfy yourself, because then you’re the employer.
I’m old fashioned. I really think you should know how to draw before you start painting. I use charcoal and graphite; I put a skylight in. In my house, I turned the garage into an art studio. So I’m awash in art studios.
I’m not tied to budgets. I’m tied to the story that I want to tell, and how much it’s going to cost is up to whatever the economic situation of the studio is.
We’re told that independent film lovers… folks that are used to watching art house films, won’t come out and see a film with black people in it – I’ve been told that in rooms, big rooms, studio rooms, and I know that’s not true.
When I was a kid and I bought a record, I ripped that thing open, I wanted to know who was playing what, what studio it was cut at, who was the string arranger, who was the engineer.
Growing up, I was obsessed with Disney movies like ‘The Little Mermaid,’ ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Beauty And The Beast.’ I was always singing the songs from these movies, so to find myself in the studio with Alan Menken was an amazing experience. In fact, it was a dream come true.
I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.
It’s weird because when you initially write a song, you write it with no understanding that the world is maybe going to hear it one day. So when you go into the studio, you don’t see the hundreds of people at a gig or the viewers on TV, you just write a song without any inhibitions or boundaries.
I can never remember what I do even in the studio.
I’m in the studio 24 hours a day. It’s true that once you get a certain level of success, you become a target. Talk magazine should be ashamed of themselves.
When I come up with a melody in my head, it could be anywhere: in the shower, on the plane, in bed – often when I’m on the go. I’ll record it on my phone with my own voice, humming. When I get to the studio, I check which melodies work.
My taste changes radically all the time, and I listen to whatever feels good. Another thing is that I’m in the studio so much of the time, and I listen to so much loud, aggressive music for work, that for pleasure, I’ll listen to something else.
I used to paint landscapes without any people in them but now I paint people who happen to be in a particular place. They might be outside a pub, or on a beach or in a studio. They might have clothes on or they might not.
Growing up, I was obsessed with Disney movies like ‘The Little Mermaid,’ ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Beauty And The Beast.’ I was always singing the songs from these movies, so to find myself in the studio with Alan Menken was an amazing experience. In fact, it was a dream come true.
When I’m in the studio, I don’t finish the song and say, ‘That’s going to be a big ringtone.’
I create women characters by watching the female staff at my studio. Half the staff are women.
Viral don’t mean I’m outside wilding. I can go viral in the club or in the studio.
Social media is a double-edged sword. I’ve gotten in trouble for announcing, too soon, something that the network or the studio wanted to do, and it steals some of the thunder, so to speak.
I need boundaries. In the modern studio there are a bunch of instruments around me, and I can simulate anything I can’t play, so sometimes the palette feels too big.
We played all of the songs on the first Johnny Winter AND every day before we recorded them, so that when we got in the studio, it was totally easy, as we knew exactly what we wanted to do.
The more commercial work that is happening, the more people are operating cameras and are setting up studio lights, the greater the opportunity for drama production to happen.
I’m working on a screenplay right now for the BBC, but I hope to have the decks cleared soon so I can get into the studio with my pals and put down some more tracks, try to get a strong dance single together.
I’ve been to the studio several times, and it’s not that I’m not happy with what I’ve got, but each time I come away, I feel that I’ve learned something that I want to work on.
Sometimes I get ideas for lyrics in anyplace, but I work a lot in the studio. So I collect little bits of lyrics. I go through the box of lyrics I have and see if something fits.
In most of the stuff that I’ve done over the years as a sideman, I wasn’t really a session musician, because to me, a session musician is a guy who makes his living in the studio, and I never really did that.
When you are in the studio, you don’t have anybody to feed off of; meanwhile, when you are playing live, you interact with people and you feel the energy in the room. When the crowd is going crazy, that definitely impacts your vocal performance. I prefer to sing live.
Then, as now, the Disney studio buzzed with activity. You had a strong impression of being at the center of something very exciting.
I usually just do, like, studio jobs, re-writes and stuff.
I feel like I’m stepping into a place of spiritual contemplation every time I enter a studio; it’s always had a certain magic to me that has never worn off with familiarity.
I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.
I think that songwriting changed when groups started spending more time in the studio.
With indies, all they have is their script and it’s very important to them. The characters are better drawn, the stories more precise and the experience greater than with studio films where sometimes they fill in the script as they’re shooting.
Don’t forget, I’ve been fired by studios; I’m not the studio’s guy. I’m a guy who can work with studios, but if you ask any studio, I stand up to these people.
The studio part, to me, can be pretty laborious. You’re inside for hours on end and can be pretty frustrating to get the sound you hear in your head to come out of those speakers.
I moved to L.A. after my landlord in Brooklyn tripled my rent. I spent months looking for other places to move to in New York, then one day I was in California eating a grapefruit, and I was like, ‘This is what they taste like?’ So I decided to move to L.A. and build a studio in my house.
I love to study the many things that grow below the corn stalks and bring them back to the studio to study the color. If one could only catch that true color of nature – the very thought of it drives me mad.
I love being in the studio.
The studio is a place where I can experiment before I’m prepared for an idea to become a body of work, or a new way of working, or a way of working that can sustain me over a period of time.
And no again: My studio is not a first or any step toward becoming any type of businessman on my part.
What one does in the studio is to pose a series of problems to oneself. I’ve got to look for some deeper meaning, for some reason for this thing to be in the world. There’s enough stuff in the world.
‘The Dice Man’ is an anti-establishment cult novel, and you don’t normally make studio films from such dark comedy material.
I really just like making music. People call that ‘work.’ Like, ‘Oh, you’re going to the studio to work?’ No, that’s even what I do in my off day. I love recording.
Even in China. Children there, next to the Great Wall, who had never seen Mickey Mouse responded. So the studio did have that skill to communicate with images.
Today, it’s very tempting to create songs by cutting and pasting in the studio.
Studio films are really fun. You have months and months to shoot. With the smaller films you get to be on a much more intimate set and have to get things done quickly.
Generalised anger and frustration is something that gets you in the studio, and gets you to work – though it’s not necessarily evident in anything that’s finished.
There’s a whole system in Hollywood where the director never speaks to the studio, but I like to engage them in a discussion. I listen.
I guess I’ll just slip into the studio after the next time with the Muses, and then just keel over and die.
The fans are very, very loyal. They’re always saying, ‘When is the next album?’ They know when I finish in the studio it’s got to be a few years before the next album.
In my early teens, I knew I wanted to do television production. I loved cameras, editing and producing, anything that had to do with television production. My friend had a production studio across town, and we’d go over there at night and shoot and edit. I produced my father’s televised service for 17 years.
I tend to write at the piano, but usually the melody and lyrics come first. Like, I’ll be in the shower, and I’ll start singing, and the melody and the lyric will just come out. Then I’ll quickly try to finish the shower, try to remember it, record it on my phone and save it for the studio.
I now have a home recording studio, which I can operate entirely on my own, as well as a portable version of the same which allows me to record anywhere I like and simply swap out the hard drives for use in the home studio.
But I feel that I have a responsibility to help the film and I have relations with the studio and with those who put up the money so that I can tell a story that I believe in.
I’m glowing in the dark with my studio tan. I’ve been in a cave of music for months and months and months.
A Hank Cochran song in the studio is spiritual. It’s like singing a hymn in a church.
The studio should not have released this film.
When I was 15, 16, I studied with Stella Adler at the Conservatory of Acting, then I stopped again and went to the Actors Studio when I was 18.
My father was one of the first Tae Kwon Do Masters to come to the states in the ’60s. He had one of the first all-African-American fighting teams, and I was basically raised in a karate studio since I was 3. It’s part of my blood, competing, and all that stuff was responsible for a lot of me just growing up.
I’m never gonna go into a studio and work for a whole year non-stop. Just every day on my own in the studio working, it’s just too damn hard.
Some people are the greatest people on Earth with good hearts and will get in the studio and make the most negative music in the world for the sake of success. That’s what the music business does to you. That’s what capitalism does to you.
We met Ferg at one of our shows in L.A. She gave us her number. For the song ‘Shut Up’ on Elephunk, we needed a vocalist. Someone said ‘yo, remember that white girl – we should get her in the studio.’ Since then, we’ve become friends. She’s one of the guys now, she isn’t just a girl.
I played in front of every conceivable audience you could face: an all-black audience, all-white, firemen’s fairs, policemen’s balls, in front of supermarkets, bar mitzvahs, weddings, drive-in theaters. I’d seen it all before I ever walked into a recording studio.
My studio was lo-fi by necessity; I was fourteen with no reliable income.
And I remember going to the record studio and there was a park across the street and I’d see all the children playing and I would cry because it would make me sad that I would have to work instead.
I don’t have a formal home recording studio, but I can record tracks on my computer upstairs in my office.
I really just like making music. People call that ‘work.’ Like, ‘Oh, you’re going to the studio to work?’ No, that’s even what I do in my off day. I love recording.
When I was 15, 16, I studied with Stella Adler at the Conservatory of Acting, then I stopped again and went to the Actors Studio when I was 18.
Coke Studio is a big platform for music in Pakistan and I really feel honored to be a part of it.
That’s a different side of the brain going into the studio, as opposed to doing a live show, obviously.
Exploitation films were famous for taking an issue an exploiting it because they could move much faster than a studio could. If there was any hot topic, they would run out and make a quick movie and make a buck on it, by changing it around and using it, in some way, to give some relevance.
That’s when we decided to stop in ’66. Everyone thought we toured for years, you know, but we didn’t. I joined in ’62, and we’d finished touring in ’66 to go into the studio where we could hear each other… and create any fantasy that came out of anybody’s brain.
There’s the famous thing that the A&R man from the record company is supposed to do: He’s supposed to come into the studio and listen to the songs you’ve been recording and then say, ‘Guys, I don’t hear any singles.’ And then everybody falls into a terrible depression because you have to write one.
The magic can happen in a studio. Special things can happen in a recording studio, even though it may seem like a clinical environment from the outside looking in.
I started off as a studio pianist in Hollywood.
No matter how many modern parts I do, people still refer to me as Mrs. Costume Drama. Fight Club is a studio pic, and I’ve done very few of those. I’ve got a feeling it’s going to change things for me.
I don’t think the idea of working in Hollywood really exists anymore. I think you work in films, and where the film is shot is where it’s shot. The studio system doesn’t really exist.
We still spend more time chasing funds than we do in the studio in creative work.
Singing is something that I’m always happy to do it and going in the studio I never felt any pressure. I just feel like I get to sing, you know. It’s fun.
It’s good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that’s better than you’d imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.
A powerful studio boss doesn’t want to be bested by a woman, even in chess. And a successful agent steps on a lot of toes. You lose actors jobs so you can get them for your own clients.
The studio rented a house for my wife in Los Angeles under a phony name to keep reporters away. Whenever I wanted to visit her and my children, I would have to sneak in the back door after dark.
When I write in the studio, I tend to gravitate toward the ability to play really loud, aggressive, post-punk stuff, with big, heavy guitars and a big rock drum sound.
I don’t believe that an animation studio should be an executive-driven studio.
I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.
Eventually, when I sell enough units, as they say in the record business, I will stop touring. I’ll concentrate on what I like to do… stay in the studio.
I was 23 years old. It was a wild time. I was covering everything that blew up – blackouts, Studio 54, son of Sam killer, and all of that stuff.
The studio does projects all over the world, and in each place, we focus on trying to make a project specific to that place. We take a different perspective everywhere we work – our passion is public projects, wherever they are.
I spend six to seven days a week in the studio making records. I don’t have time to go do a lot of things that you have to play the political game to get recognition with the Grammy crew.
I’m not prejudiced about what type of movies I’m in, what form they take or whether they’re studio or independent. I just want to make films that are going to be good.
The big studio era is from the coming of sound until 1950, until I came in… I came in at a crux in film, which was the end of the studio era and the rise of filmmaking.
Yes, the first job I had at the studio was Snow White. I don’t like the term particularly, but I got stuck with the human characters. They just didn’t have that many people who could draw humans.
Actually, because of new technologies, my full studio is on my laptop. And I have a little keyboard in my bag. I can make everything I do come from my laptop. Even when I go to a big studio, all I do is to plug in my laptops. That’s they way I do it.
I was the first black director on ‘Dallas.’ I drove my car into the studio lot and the guard asked me who I was delivering to.
My favorite hobby is writing and recording songs at my studio. I like to surf, but I don’t get a chance to do that as much as I’d like. I don’t live close to the beach. I also like to ski, but I don’t get to do that much, either.
I couldn’t stand it. It was what I thought I always wanted. I was there every day in the trenches, and I hated everything about that job. But what I loved – and what I got from ‘The Tooth Fairy’ – was to see how studio movies were released.
