Andy Summers Quotes

I spend a lot of time working as a painter and in my studio I go from upstairs where I paint to downstairs where I play and record, so I get this thing crossing over.

I'm just trying to avoid any sort of generic kind of music - I don't want to do generic jazz or fusion.

For me, a great show is when there's a great rapport with the band and the audience, and we're all really into it. The first trick is to bring the audience into the band, break the ice, have a life, and be one, so you can enjoy the next hour and a half together.

I think rock records tend to be very expensive.

It's hard to avoid the past but one goes forward.

As an artist, I move along in my life, into whatever things I'm doing, and I hear things where it's like, "Oh, that'd be a great [song] title! I'll use that!" So I keep a running list of titles on my computer. I've got these words and phrases that just sustained my interest. So I'm a step ahead, really, with the titling!

What you aim for, in the first place, is to be as good as you can possibly be.

This is what I do, and I'm going to try to be the best in the world.

In The Police, in a trio situation - which I've come back to now - it's just so wide open that it does actually provide this arena where you can play with a certain freedom.

Commercial record has never interested me.

It's amazing I was in a band like The Police that had such phenomenal commercial success. Part of what made The Police what it was was that we didn't all come in with obvious mainstream musical tastes. We were a rock band and somehow we had to make rock music, but it was informed by a lot of things outside of the mainstream for sure.

I like to play with someone who can cover a lot of ground and someone with whom you can discuss the language at a reasonable level; otherwise it gets a bit frustrating.

There was a period when I'd just come out of college where I'd been playing classical guitar and I suddenly realised that it wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

There is always the working out of things, and you have to have sort of a gut response to it. And an intellectual response. And an aesthetic response. All that comes from having done this for a long time. Instead of saying, "That's a really good rock track, and that will do," I'm looking for something that is more original and fresh. There are a lot of elements to get into it: a level or sophistication, passion and excitement.

Sometimes, literally within a few minutes, you'd be off this amazing roaring scene and back at your hotel room, staring at the patten of the wallpaper. It's very surreal. You're back in your room, and it's dead quiet and really weird.

I don't have a great nostalgia for the past.

The most obvious thing you can't do with a guitar synthesizer is to really sound like a guitar.

More recently, I used guitar synthesizer extensively on the two albums I did with Robert Fripp.

I'm better for it and I prefer to keep things simple and see what sounds I can get out of my head and hands rather than relying on a sound that someone else created.

I don't go out much to see bands. I prefer to be on stage.

Of course the playing is important but writing and the establishing of what you are going for is prime too.

Start with the titles, and then build the music that goes with them.

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

It is not very practical in today's world when you tour all over the place having a big band.

To go see a band in a big venue is a difficult experience.

I don't really like that too much. I'm not a guy who puts on iTunes and goes, "Oh, what's hot!" I don't need to.

If you're 20 years old, you've grown up without buying albums.

You don't want to be so far off the planet that you come out with something that doesn't make sense to anybody.

Actually, I think my hands are in the best shape they've ever been in terms of what I can do.

The thing about photography is, some people surround themselves with extremely strong subject matter. And unless you're a moron, you're going to get a really strong photograph.

My favorite sounds are the high, spacey ones that are very ambient.

I was totally into jazz in my teens.

If I'm playing a violin thing, for instance, I tend to respond to that sound with the way I finger.

I always have a guitar with me. Actually, I've got several, I play every day. And I enjoy it. I'm never very far away from them. I swear I only ever get a couple days when I'm away from a guitar, and I never like it! There's always one close by, and I play every day. Or I'll be working on something in the studio and play around a bit. It's an extension of me, really.

I am pretty embroiled in moving on and moving forward with music.

I think we are coming to a new era where people will record much faster.

You come off of this screaming audience of many, many thousands of people.

I used to find it very weird. You have two choices. Either you can stay and pump flesh with hundreds of people after the show, which really gets old, or you can come off stage, get into the car, and go straight out the back and away, back to the hotel.

I actually think I play better now than I've ever played.

I don't like playing standards. I like to do my own cutting edge work.

If the guitar synthesizer is really going to stand as a synthesizer on its own, it needs to develop a more characteristic sound; I don' think it's gotten there yet.

It's exciting to see if you can create something that sounds, at least to your own ears, exciting.

If you're a guitarist, you should not be intimidated by using your instrument as a synthesizer, but you shouldn't feel that you have to own one, either.

You're on the stage and you've got all those people yelling at you, so you better be right in the moment, reacting to that. It's completely live and organic. Even 20 years later, it's the same thing. You may be even better on your instrument. Hopefully, you are.

It accumulates over the years and I've led so many bands of my own now and forced myself into new situations... You would hope that you play better and better - until you just get too feeble to do it anymore.

Ive also just come off a year and a half playing acoustic shows which is fantastic for the hands, and changes your head a little bit.

Usually, the best thing is when the band goes to the bar and gets the corner table, we sit there like kings, and then they bring people to us. It's just rock 'n' roll. It's stupid, really.

'Triboluminescence' is actually a scientific world meaning striking something and creating light from dark. I thought it was a great word and that is was a very apt metaphor for making music - or any creative act, really. We all start in the dark and have to create light.

I admire photographers who can take much more ordinarily subject matter and make it transcend that ordinariness, so that it becomes something else fresh and new. It opens this doorway. I really admire people who can do that with photography.

For me, the guitar synthesizer is a great writing instrument.

What I wanted to do was play the guitar but I don't like instrumental rock. I think it is tripe.

Coming from the era of vinyl you could argue that everything went wrong in the music business the moment we went digital. The day the first CD came out, it all went downhill in the music industry. Digital destroyed everything.

Aping what you've already done is just so dangerous and unrewarding.

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.