Tony Visconti Quotes
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Finally, I would like to remind record companies that they have a cultural responsibility to give the buying public great music. Milking a trend to death is not contributing to culture and is ultimately not profitable.
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I am not a creature of habit.
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My father loved people, children and pets.
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I think the whole obsession with old gear is completely overblown. You don't need old-fashioned gear to make a great-sounding record. You don't even need [analog] tape.
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Towards the end of the seventies pop was gaining the momentum and respectability was very high with groups like Yes and Queen who were making "classical" rock records. They were also bringing in big bucks. So the eighties became the "bottom line" decade.
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No one else in our family was a professional musician so this took an enormous leap of faith on their part.
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We always started these albums as making demos, that went right on until Scary Monsters.
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It is easily overlooked that what is now called vintage was once brand new.
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My dad's sense of humor was direct and sometimes surreal - his quick wit is well known amongst our family and friends. He raised me on Spike Jones records and W.C. Fields movies, and his sense of humor fell somewhere in between.
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Some people do rely too much on technology. Look, technology is wonderful and I love it. When I was in the UK and I had hit records I would also have a high tax bill at the end of the year, and that would be the time to buy up all the technology - it was write offs.
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Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.
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Oh, it was so hard to leave Paris, just about my favorite city in the world.
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Originally a record producer more or less hired a bunch of professionals to participate in a recording session, the performers and the technicians, and a music director was put in charge. That directly related to a film producer's job.
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I make records with an open mind, I always have.
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Every time I meet the CEO of a record label I tell them how they did it in the seventies because they want to know. I tell them, "Sign a hundred people! Throw it against the wall and see which ones stick!" And they frown and say, "Oh, we can't do that!" and they start mumbling about demographics and this and that.
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Computers have virtually replaced tape recorders.
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The eighties turned the whole system upside down. They would sign three groups and give them five or ten million dollars each to make three records. Out of those three records maybe one would be a hit. The economy changed, and that's why the music changed.
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Since my teen years I was interested in martial arts.
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Despite a few really bad days we had quite a lot of fun making Low, especially when all the radical ideas were making sense and things were starting to click.
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Today a record producer is even more involved and is often the production's sole musician, one person playing all the instruments one-by-one.
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Marc Bolan had inspired so many people to pick up a guitar and join a band.
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The object is to make a great record and you have to do whatever it takes.
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My father had a brilliant scholastic record in high school and was awarded a college scholarship. Unfortunately he had to turn it down so that he could continue to support his family.
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You don't necessarily need expensive gear or giant budgets to reach an audience.
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I love Logic Audio and have been using it for years. All my track outputs used to come up on my old board in the same order as in the old Mac G4 - 1 through 32, came up as 1 through 32, for instance.
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When I was five my parents bought me a ukulele for Christmas. I quickly learned how to play it with my father's guidance. Thereafter, my father regularly taught me all the good old fashioned songs.
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But some great records are are being made with today's technology and there are still great artists among us. Likewise there are artists today who are so reliant on modern technology, they wouldn't have emerged when recording was more organic.
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I am flying back to New York as I write this. I will never forget these wonderful 35 days and I would go back to Copenhagen in a heartbeat to work there again.
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Fortunately I own a vintage brain, and I am alive and well in the 21st century, still making records, still working at an intense pace and most of all, still having fun doing it.
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I kind of liked the method of the seventies where they would throw a little bit of money at a hundred different groups - not millions of dollars per group, but, you know, a few thousand. Throw them in the studio, and if five of those groups came out with a hit record it would be money well spent.
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