Studio Session Quotes

“Most songs I write are spur-of-the-moment-type things. I have to be spontaneous. If not, songwriting can bore me. There is no pre-design or idea of what I am going to do when I go into the studio. It's all like that for me. I could go in and write two or three songs in an eight-hour session. You can't over-think songs. You just can't.”

— Anthony Hamilton

“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.”

— Ray Davies

“My earliest professional musical experiences were really as a session player, and every day was an adventure. Three sessions a day, every day, and you never knew who you would be working with until you arrived at the studio.”

— Rick Wakeman

“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.”

— Robert Moog

“The first session I did with the Stones was an accident. I just happened to be wandering down the hallway of the same studio.”

— Bobby Keys

“There's a band of studio session - hot players - that play on my albums ... They're an eclectic bunch of misfits that I've worked with for years and years.”

— Toby Keith

“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.”

— David Sanborn

“New York is so serious about the creation of work. Everything is happening so fast, it feels like there's another studio, another session on every block, and I love that.”

— Diplo

“I was never pushed into the business. I wanted to play the guitar. When my dad found out I could play pretty good he took me into the studio one day. I did my first session for his label. We did quite a few sessions up there.”

— Shuggie Otis

“I like to go into the studio and let things happen. I like to just let the session take on. I don't want to have to clock in at nine and end at eight. That's just not me, that's not how my creativity flows.”

— Brooke Valentine

“We knew we did not want to record at Impulse Studios again, after the experience of recording in a 'real' studio in London for the Radio One session we did.”

— John Gallagher, Jr.

“It always offended me when I was in the studio and the engineer or the assumed producer for the session would start bossing the band around. That always seemed like a horrible insult to me.”

— Steve Albini

“A studio session ... provides the greatest chance for control. Even though there is total freedom, I still dislike studio photography and the contrived images that usually stem from this genre.”

— Eve Arnold

“I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them "Our exercise today is not to use 'undo' at all. So, there's no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take. There's no sort of drop in, change that little bit". The session broke down in, I'd say, 40 minutes. It was impossible for people to work in that restriction any longer.”

— Brian Eno