Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed.

By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum.

Buy groceries and feed yourself, even on the road.

It betrays hubris on the part of the artist to think his medium is limiting him, and I think we all recognize this.

We have no general conceptual thrust for the band, other than trying to make music that keeps our interest. When things are novel, they are probably things we have discovered by accident or investigation rather than by design.

For less than the cost of a Big Mac, fries and a Coke, you can buy a loaf of fresh bread and some good cheese or roast beef, which you will enjoy much more.

In 1980, I moved to Chicago, and I recorded demo tapes for my friends' bands, and in 1981, the first Big Black record - the first thing I did that was an actual record.

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.

There is a lot of use of ProTools in professional studios, but this is mostly for the special effects it allows, not for sound quality. These special effects soon fall out of fashion, and I don't think this trend will define studios permanently.

Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed.

If the label presents them with a contract that the band don't want to sign, all the label has to do is wait. There are a hundred other bands willing to sign the exact same contract, so the label is in a position of strength.

I moved to Chicago in 1980 to go to college.

The woman I am currently crazy about was a vegetarian for a year until I started dating her. As is the case with most vegetarians, she had never eaten properly prepared meat, only commercially packaged or otherwise abused flesh.

I'm busy doing my job, and being a loudmouth doesn't appeal to me as much as when I was younger and had the youthful delusion that I was smarter than everybody else.

Know what you're trying to do before you do it. Turning knobs at random isn't enlightening any more than throwing paint at a wall blindfolded will let you paint a nice picture.

A more important reason is that the bands will intuitively trust someone they think is a peer, and who speaks fondly of the same formative rock and roll experiences.

Find people who think like you and stick with them. Make only music you are passionate about. Work only with people you like and trust. Don't sign anything.

Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.

The band cannot sign to another label or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens.

I don't think anyone has exhausted the range of sound possible in a conventional rock band, but people do become slaves to their own easiest techniques.

As a recording engineer - someone who is deeply embroiled in the process of making records every day - you see trends and fads run through the social organization of the population of musicians in the same way that they would run through a high school.

Cranking the Auto-Tune is so easy to do that there's almost no systemic resistance to trying it. So when someone's stuck for an idea, that's what they do. I mean, to the extent that it's been embraced by an entire idiom of club music and culture.

Harmonics are vibrations a fraction of the length of the vibrating string, which add higher-pitched and more complex content to the notes. With a dull instrument, the harmonics die out, but with a sustaining instrument, the harmonics continue to sound along with the fundamental note.

If I'm working as an engineer for another band, the responsibility for brilliance pretty much rests on their shoulders. I think I'm pretty good, but I'm not good enough to turn a trout into a sausage, or the other way around.

In heaven, after antipasti, the first course will be pasta.

In the late '80s and early '90s, there was a slightly retro drum sound that was popular in hip-hop music called the 808 bass drum sound. It was the bass drum sound on the 808 drum machine, and it's very deep and very resonant, and was used as the backbone as a lot of classic hip-hop tracks.

You see something happen to a population whereby everyone adopts something that's just preposterous in a way that makes it normal instantly. If any one person prior to the rash of puka shells, for example, was seen wearing puka shells, he would look like an idiot. But when everyone is wearing them, it instantly makes them normal.

Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it's a mistake to make a habit out of it.

It's pretty simple, pretty obvious: that people's first impressions of people are really a big mistake.

They all went into the bar business. Which was a mistake, because they began to sip at the merchandise and it set them back, set us all back. Well, them more than I.

The choice is between which mistake is easier to correct: underdoing it or overdoing it.

I've got to keep breathing. It'll be my worst business mistake if I don't.

They think something's gone wrong, but in Don't Look Now, for instance, one scene was made by a mistake. It's the scene where Donald Sutherland goes to look for the policeman who's investigating the two women.

It's a mistake to assume that Islamists always come from the slums. Indeed, many come from affluent families but for some reason just couldn't manage to integrate into Western society, even though they had good opportunities for advancement.

I find that the best way to do things is to constantly move forward and to never doubt anything and keep moving forward, if you make a mistake say you made a mistake.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.

The secularists in Turkey haven't underestimated religion, they just made the mistake of believing they could control it with the power of the army alone.

In traditional schools, you're penalized for making a mistake. But that won't work in the new information culture, in the digital world we live in today.

You are just as capable of making a mistake as anyone else. By insisting too eagerly upon a small right, you may turn it into a wrong against yourself and also against your neighbor.

Last Friday night, I Twitted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as a direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle. Once I realized I posted to Twitter I panicked, I took it down and said that I had been hacked. I then continued with that story, to stick to that story which was a hugely regrettable mistake.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

To help yourself, you must be yourself. Be the best that you can be. When you make a mistake, learn from it, pick yourself up and move on.

Make no mistake about it. These are not 'kookie' birds. Right now the greatest player, the big tent on the political scene in America, is called the Tea Party movement.

I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don't make that mistake yourself. Life's too damn short.

The results would have stayed on the watch face until the batteries died. But trying to make time stand still this way would have been a mistake. It is just as important to erase times eventually as to save them at first.

I don't like to be labeled, to be anything. I've made the mistake before myself of labeling my music, but it's counter-productive.

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.

Take all that is given whether wealth, love or language, nothing comes by mistake and with good digestion all can be turned to health.