Top 155 Keyboard Quotes

When I’m not at the keyboard, I’m generally reading, practicing tai chi or middle eastern dance, or cooking.

I never had any plans to become a producer when I was a kid. I wanted to be a DJ, like most other kids at the time. Then my mum bought me a Casio keyboard and I started to sample sounds that I liked.

My brother Carl taught me how to play bass. I’m a self-taught keyboard player, though – I figured out our harmonies at the piano.

I don’t write directly on to the computer because I don’t think well facing forward with fingers on a keyboard. I think better looking down holding a pen. And the concentration quotient of pen and paper is higher than when I’m moving words around on screen.

I think I was told numerous times in the industry that nobody wants to watch a guy on a keyboard.

I’m like soft Ray Manzarek. I think of the keyboard as almost like a bass or a lead.

I find myself working ten steps ahead of where I actually am on my laptop or keyboard, but I know what the ten steps are. I just haven‘t got to them yet.

Social media is a weird thing. People have their keyboard and no face… they can say whatever they want.

Beyond the hype, style, and speculation, the truth is that the iPad is really just another tablet device. A really big PDA, where a touchscreen does what a laptop’s keyboard used to do.

I love playing. The keyboard is my journal.

My only real hobby is playing music. I write a lot of music on guitar and keyboards and hope one day to make a record or maybe even write the score for a film.

Even though The Cure helped pioneer the jangly, dance-oriented guitar and keyboard style it continues to embrace, there are other bands that now employ the post-punk style with greater flair. This leaves The Cure’s live presentation seeming a bit anonymous.

Write. Write. Write. Learn how to revise. No story is perfect straight from the keyboard.

By the time Guns n’ Roses spent 28 months from 1991 to 1993 touring the ‘Use Your Illusion‘ albums, the tour staff sometimes approached 100 people. We were carrying not only backup girl singers, a horn section, and an extra keyboard player, but also chiropractors, masseuses, a singing coach, and a tattoo artist.

I always wrote everything – I wrote all the lyrics, I wrote all the melodies, everything; it’s just somebody else sung it. And to me, the singer is nothing else than a different… like a bass player or a keyboard player – they’re not more important than any other musician.

I am all for cracking down on inappropriate digital behaviour. Too often the connected world is an excuse for some coward hiding behind a keyboard to bully someone else.

But I find that the keyboard is the complete instrument you know?

When I’m online, I’m alone in a room, tapping on a keyboard, staring at a cathode-ray tube.

I had piano lessons when I was five or six years old, so my mom got me this little keyboard in my room. And then it progressed from that to classical guitar and drums and oboe.

We are all capable of so much more than the narrow confines of our regular behavior and our personality. So it’s interesting to play different notes on your keyboard.

I think that texting and driving is a 100 percent no-go. I think it should be banned everywhere because you cannot be focused on looking ahead, in the mirrors, being aware of what’s around you, and to type on a small keyboard and a small screen.

I’m a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I’m at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.

Twitter brings out the best in the keyboard bullies.

Android phones are sold by dozens of hardware makers, the biggest being Samsung, Motorola, and HTC. There are lots of different form factors. Slider phones. Phones with keyboards. Big screens, small screens, midsize screens.

I think people forget even though we were labelled a synth band because of ‘The Hurting,’ but keyboards are not our native instruments. Roland’s a guitar player and I’m a bass player.

Because I write the music, I write the lyrics, I write the vocal melody lines – I write everything. Just because I let somebody sing something doesn’t mean they’re more important than the bass player or the keyboard player or the drummer.

When I was younger, I was a rave kid trapped inside a singer/songwriter‘s body. But I kind of figured my way out because I started making these really terrible beats on this Yamaha keyboard that my parents got me for my 10th birthday.

I am amused when somebody tries to illustrate the first email using a modern keyboard and a finger reaching for the ‘2’ key. Wrong key! The @ was on the ‘P’ key.

I’m not a natural story-teller. Put a keyboard in front of me and I’m fine, but stand me up in front of an audience and I’m actually quite shy and reserved.

Andy Chase and I were keyboard players originally, and we became guitarists later. But it’s fun for us to focus more on the keyboard stuff sometimes.

In the back of my mind was the constant hankering, almost yearning, to write but something always stopped me in my tracks. Or if I did find my way to put a pen to paper or finger on a keyboard I’d give up after a few minutes. I’d find other things to do: Anything but writing.

How about keyboards in your mouth? How fast can you type with your tongue? People will think you’re just masticating, when you’re really talking to your girlfriend.

On an iPhone, you touch on the digital keyboard and you know how the letter pops up and shows up bigger so you’re making sure you’re touching the correct letter? That’s Nokia innovation.

Software-industry battles are fought by highly paid and out-of-shape nerds furiously pounding computer keyboards while they guzzle diet Coke. The stakes aren’t very dramatic. Life? Liberty? The pursuit of happiness? Nope, it’s about stock options.

After moving to England I did some recording and eventually formed an English band, this was together for quite a few years with only a keyboard replacement. The band had no name, just my name.

I think… part of life skills is also socialising… I think many people make the mistake of not going out… You can spend a little bit too much time with your nose in your book or with your fingers on a keyboard, and you miss out.

The Geezer album, Black Science, had a lot of keyboards and it did not work.

So I’ll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I’ll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top.

It’s great if you can afford to carry a string section on the road with you, but most people are used to the idea of just a keyboard player creating those string sounds.

I’m starting to play all the melodies with kind of keyboard sound but playing it from the bass guitar.

I got this cheap guitar, and then I fell in love with it and basically put down the keyboard.

My writing partner and I usually write separately, because if we write together we are liable to go a little nuts. The person not at the keyboard can start to feel disenfranchised to the point that they sometimes make a lunge for that accoutrement of computer power, the mouse.

That it’s a lot harder to make a keyboard sound not-cheesy than a guitar.

I may be taking a different approach, being a guy leading a band with a trombone, but if you take that out of it and put in a guitar or keyboard, it would be considered funk-rock music.

I’m not someone who can just be paid to play keyboards on songs. I tried to do it – I needed the money, but it made me really unhappy and ill to be doing it.

I like Stevie Wonder as my favorite non-pianist pianist. I mean, I shouldn’t call him a non-pianist, because he’s really a great pianist, but he doesn’t feature it that much – he uses his keyboards and his piano technique to support his great songs and so forth, but he can really blow.

I joined Elton John‘s band in ’75. He not only allowed me to play the electronic keyboard on his albums, he also let me do the orchestrations. Then I left the band and started producing records. I was not really a popular kind of hit music guy. I was attracted to more esoteric things.

And I think it’s a real challenge to be up there sometimes with only a keyboard if they don’t have a grand piano… and to try to win people over that way. It’s really hard.

I’ve been writing music since I was a teenager. I play keyboards. I’m not much of a player, but I can write. That will come along. I’d like to do a musical.

We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.

When I was at the height of my fame I got my first what you could loosely describe as a mansion! I didn’t even find it myself, my keyboard player was leafing through a homes magazine at the dentist‘s and said, ‘You’d like this.’ It was art deco and I loved art deco, I lived there for about 14 years.

Every so often, I’ll get an idea from a dream, but most of the time, ideas come to me while I’m toiling away at the keyboard just like every other writer.

My desk is an antique with bookshelves built into the side. I’ve turned the drawer over to hold a keyboard. We live in a 100-year-old house, and I work in an apartment above the carriage house.

Even though there are some great keyboard players on the album, there are a number of songs with no keyboard on them and the backing is all guitar oriented. This is first time I’ve ever done this actually.

What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.

If you look at somebody like Bach, he didn’t need collaborators to write for keyboards, cello, violin or anything else. I feel the same way about my music. The times that I have worked with other people, I’ve been very unhappy with the results.

At the beginning of this album I discovered the computer and had great fun playing with the thing. And I realized that, not being a good keyboard player, I could write things in very small sections, give them a certain feel and mess about with bends on the keyboard.

My sister sings, and my brother plays the keyboard.

I can play just about any keyboard but I can’t read or write a note.

One of my earliest memories is of bashing the keyboard with my hands, my chubby little baby hands, and I remember the sound hitting my face. It became my toy.

I think it’s pretty pointless, my children learning to use a keyboard – we will just talk to our computers. Why would we not?

When Maurice touched a keyboard, it was like something from a movie, magical. He would always give you something from a movie, and you’d go, what did you just play… immediately inspirational writings, amazing. That’s what we’re going to miss.

I had this weird fetish for making the guitar sound like it wasn’t a guitar to try and trick people into actually thinking it was a keyboard. I don’t know why that was such an obsession, why I didn’t just get a keyboard. I guess it was because I had no money.

I’m writing new songs for a Broadway version of Tarzan, which is very interesting. I think what I learned from the Brother Bear score side of things, I’ve brought into the new Tarzan songs. Thinking outside just guitar, bass, drums and keyboards.

From time to time, I’ve experimented with sculpture or metal design. It’s a good break from just sitting behind the keyboard.

It was always the singer that was the front man, but Mike stood there and played piano and keyboards. He had a great voice and he was the Sixties‘ Rod Stewart, and he contributed a tremendous amount to the Dave Clark Five.

I’ve always been into guitars… we want to put keyboards on, but keyboard players don’t look cool onstage, they just keep their heads down. There has never been a cool keyboard player, apart from Elton John.

I took a few piano lessons as a kid, but it didn’t last; I just learned piano from doing it over and over on my own, because I didn’t have many friends, and there was always a keyboard in the house.

Life is too sweet and too short to express our affection with just our thumbs. Touch is meant for more than a keyboard.

It’s been very hard for the guitar as a serious synthesizer to compete with keyboards.

We spend a lot of time with MIDI keyboards and various processors, and we just figure it out. And all those things you hear in our songs work as submelodies and countermelodies, and everything has to fit.

I have a church background. I’ve been playing piano and keyboard and organ all my life in church.

I used to just sit in the living room and make up songs on the keyboard.

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

If I can sit down at my keyboard and have a melody that says something that I can’t with words, that’s a really beautiful thing.

Music has always been in my family, but it was mainly keyboards. I learned to play classical piano, but when I first heard the amazing bass guitar of James Jamerson, who played on all the big Motown hits of the ’60s and ’70s, I knew bass guitar was my instrument.

I owe a lot to Rosshan, who literally plucked me from obscurity as a keyboard performer and handed me the background score of ‘Notebook.’

I don’t focus on one thing. I play guitar and bass and keyboards and drums, but I never stay on anything long enough to become a specialist at it.

At least half my writing time is spent researching. So for every hour I’m actually clicking on the keyboard, I’m spending another hour trying to figure out some tiny detail I need answered.

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.

It is very unfair, and on social media you have all these keyboard warriors who just type something, and they never say it to my face. That’s very weak I find.

We got rid of parallel ports, the serial bus, floppy drives, physical keyboards on phones – do you miss the physical keyboards on your phone?

But with carefully chosen keyboard macros to activate it, Mass Copy is quick, convenient, and powerful. Most users who have mastered it depend heavily on it. That certainly includes me.

My sister and I – she‘s a musician – we jam all the time. We always play around for giggles with stuff that seem unconventional or stuff that seems funny. A lot of the stuff sometimes is just a response from jam sessions in her room, so she’ll be on the guitar or the keyboard, and we’ll just start singing and doing stuff.

I used to play the piano in the band, and so there’s some horrendous scenes of me playing the keyboards.

My initial training was on the keyboard – mainly the great American songbook. In junior high, during the day, I was a classical clarinetist, but after school, I played New Orleans jazz and big-band music.

Horns really make a good band. They always create excitement when it’s needed. They give the music a broader spread. It doesn’t have to be all guitars and keyboards all the time.

I was never chasing to make a career out of it, but every day after school, I’d go to my keyboard and play for four hours and make up songs. It was a constant part of my life.

If I’m uncomfortable on stage, everybody can see it. I’m not very good at hiding it. I like long, loose jacket dresses – anything that I can literally have room to move in – not that I’m a very big dancer, but because sometimes I’m sitting down at the keyboard, and then sometimes I’m standing. It just has to feel good.

Mike is a genius guitar player and keyboard player. I realized that, with this group, I just joined Mike Keneally’s band!

The only time that I really go on Twitter is to promote, because what sucks is there’s some weird trolling going around. Even if you are well-intentioned, there’s some mean people behind a keyboard.

I was the Specials’ founder, main songwriter and keyboard player.

All my writing, I always do it in the studio, ’cause everything sounds good. The piano’s there, the keyboards; if you want to put strings on something… And everything sounds good when it’s in the cans; it sounds killer.

There was a time not long ago when stories about Internet crimes were a tough sell for TV newsmagazines. Executive producers were wary because images of people typing on keyboards and video of computer monitors did not make especially compelling TV, even when combined with emotional interviews with victims.

The keyboard is my whole life. My life is centered around either sitting at my keyboard or driving my car. Those are the two most important things, more than anything else. Being at my keyboard, it’s the happiest time for me.

If there is no music, I will perish. While I have not learnt music, I can play the tune that comes into my head on the keyboard.

I play the keyboard, but I am fond of all wind instruments, the oboe in particular.

Somewhere around the fifth, sixth album, we got this little formula together where we knew how to record Too $hort songs. You need the bassline, a good drum pattern, call in the keyboard, the guitars – it’s just a way we mixed it all together.

Behind the keyboard, it doesn’t matter that physically my body doesn’t work properly.

The keyboard is my journal.

I use Logic or Reason and a midi keyboard for beats. If it’s gonna have all live instruments in it, I’ll probably use Pro Tools and have the band lay stuff down.

I can play songs that I hear from a movie and just play it a few times on the keyboard. I will hit all the notes on the keyboard until I find the right key, and then I will play the rest of the song.

I don’t write listening to music, and in a way it seems silly that any writer should have to explain why not, as it’s possibly no different from saying you don’t eat gourmet dinners or play tennis while you’re at the keyboard.

I hitchhiked to L.A. with $100 and a keyboard.

I would like to play with electronic keyboards again.

Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them.

I guess that I’m primarily thought of as a rocker, largely because of ‘Frankenstein‘ being such a heavy song – you know, it was really hard rock, almost a precursor of heavy metal and just the image of the synthesizer. I happened to be the first guy to get the idea of putting a strap on the keyboard.

When I was about 14, I got a tacky keyboard for 250 pounds and put on a drum machine and found I could write a song.

I’m basically a keyboard player, so if it’s got a keyboard on it, I’ll give it a shot. I played a lot of organ in the early days. I can make a few chords on guitar, but that’s about it.

I play keyboards and have played on many a Toto record.

To see a hacker actually hacking is not the most interesting thing visually, and it’s pretty boring as an actor: a hacker taps on her keyboard. There’s really not much more than that.

I’ve always loved music since I was 11. I used to play keyboard, and I would write music. So since 11, I’ve been falling in love with music.

I have been playing a lot of keyboards, especially in the last five or six years. I suppose it gives you more scope than the guitar, although it does tend to make you write a different way.

I love writing and I just sit at my keyboard and write.

I sang and played keyboard, so I was virtually a statue at the back of the stage. I’m not complaining about that; I enjoyed that role.

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

I’m basically a cocktail jazz kind of pianist. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a very good keyboard player. People think I think I’m good. I think I’m a very poor piano player.

The idea to do the album only on keyboards kind of happened by accident. I was quite happy with the sound and felt it really didn’t need more instruments, so I didn’t use them.

Time made me change. I gradually woke up to the realization that this is who I am, an author, a public figure, and I couldn’t just hide in my study, tapping away at the keyboard and pretend that I didn’t have a role to play beyond stringing words together.

I’ve just always been interested in moving past the keyboard and mouse.

Where I thrive is with my hands on the keyboard or my pen on the paper. One of the things I get to do is I get to rewrite. I rewrite, and I work hard on my scripts. You can rewrite until you’re ‘perfect,’ and that’s something that’s safe for me.

I have to make beats every day. Wherever I go, I got a keyboard waiting for me.

I think that cakes should have touches of candy bar in order for it really to hit all those childhood notes on the keyboard.

On any given day, I’m likely to be working at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences – or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles.

I used to do all my programming on a BBC computer. It was limited to 16 tracks, and you used the keyboard, not a mouse, to input, but I was using it so long, I got quite fast at it.

I was getting a little bit bullied by guys who thought I was taking their customers, and it got to the point where I was anxious every time I set up my keyboard.

We stuck the record head so it kept on recording over and over on top of itself and played keyboard notes into it to create this ghost repetition melody.

I can’t even tolerate my own playing on electric keyboards. It’s not about the musical ideas – the sound itself is toxic. It’s like eating plastic broccoli.

I play trumpet. And I took all the music courses in college, so I can also play the string instruments, keyboard, the brass and woodwinds – but only well enough to teach them. If you put a violin in front of me, you wouldn’t say, ‘My God, that guy can play.’ It’d probably sound more like Jack Benny.

What I really enjoy and what I do in the studio is play keyboard.

I spent ten years playing classical piano, and that was what led to keyboards and eventually to production and to Linkin Park.

When I first started, all I had was the laptop and some cheap headphones. I ain’t have no speakers. You know, no Rocket speakers or no MPC. No keyboard, none of that. It just was the laptop and the headphones. Going from there, it just teaches you a lot.

In my home office, I have two large, 30-inch computer monitors – a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard, so I can type or copy and paste between them. I’ll typically do Web stuff on the Mac and e-mail and chat stuff on the PC.

If you look at iPod, iPod wasn’t viewed as a success, but today it’s viewed as an overnight success. The iPhone was the same way. People were writing about there’s no physical keyboard. Obviously nobody would want it.

I wish we hadn’t used all the keys on the keyboard.

It’s disgusting eating over a keyboard.

People can say some extraordinary things when they’re hiding behind a keyboard.

IM is interesting because you look at your buddy list and, at a glance, see what your friends are listening to, what they’re working on, what they’re doing. The problem was that you were bound to the computer keyboard.

I play keyboards and sing. I’ve written a couple of songs too.

People say I seem very negative about new music – well, if somebody asks me what I think of Keane, I’ll tell ’em. I don’t like ’em. I’ll obviously take it a step too far and grossly insult the keyboard player’s mam or summat, but I’m afraid that’s just me.

I always have a rough outline, but I’m shocked at how little I actually follow it. Those characters keep doing things that I never expected. I think if I crept up to my keyboard and peeked, they’d be talking about things behind my back. Okay, that’s a little paranoid and delusional… but just a little.

The problem is that once I start on a song and get a rough idea of where I might go with an arrangement, I try dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different things on a song. The bass, the backing guitars, the lead guitars, the keyboards. It’s a long process. It’s like 100 steps forward and 99 steps back.

For me, the most difficult thing is that I am learning melodies on guitar from some songs whose melodies were not meant to be played on guitar. Ever. They were intended mostly for keyboards or melodic percussion.

Sometimes I just hit the keyboard in a way I’d like the rhythm of the tracks to sound.

There’s a clip where he had someone miming me running around from keyboard to keyboard. Oh dear, I am sure a lot of people didn’t know what he was going on about.

I love my Fender Rhodes. It’s been a part of my family since that keyboard came out, and I’ve had it reworked so that it’s in the best condition it’s actually ever been in. That is my baby.

You look at keyboard warriors who just want to get on and talk bad about the people in the sport, and the problem is that everyone who’s talking bad, they wouldn’t even be able to fill a stadium with three thousand people.

Over the years, the critics have said, ‘They never change.’ Maybe the little guy’s got a new color of school uniform. I always thought, ‘Well, what were we going to change into?’ A jazz band? A keyboard band?

I already have it, but a good keyboard is invaluable when you spend a lot of time typing. My favorite one is the ancient IBM Model M I have at home.

At the keyboard, unrelenting anguish about hurting other people’s feelings inhibits spontaneity and constipates creativity.

I can play every instrument there is, every horn, I’ve played all the saxes and trumpets and everything and keyboards.

One summer, when I was elementary-school age, my neighbors and I built guitars and keyboards out of scrap wood, painted them in bright colors, and formed the cover band Lil’ ‘D’ Duran Duran. We didn’t make our own noise or even pretend to play our fake instruments.

I’ve got four or five records in my head at a time that I try to work on and I would like to do a guitar trio record next – since The Police I’ve mostly made records with keyboards.

I’ve learned you can’t write on a computer on a bus. It jiggles too much, especially an Apple. The keyboard jiggles around too much, and there are too many typos.

My writing regimen is not very regimented. I tend to be a binge writer, working sometimes in the morning and sometimes all night. When I get going I like to hunch over the keyboard until I feel totally played out.