Andrew Sega Quotes

A song is not just a collection of melodic riffs, it is an emotional statement.

Ideally, a song should contain both elements of high melodic tension, and low melodic tension. No listener wants to sit through a totally high-energy 180 BPM non-stop 6-minute ride through synth mania unless they are already busy grooving madly on some dance floor in a smoky club somewhere. Also, unless your listener is on heavy sedation, he or she will not enjoy your sparse 18-minute ambient tune which consists of the same languid piano riff repeated over and over again.

I'm starting to realize that touring really involves a lot of waiting around doing nothing.

Well anyone can make a 'weird' [chord] progression by randomly picking triads.

I think as a musician you really have to have a wide variety of tastes, or else you will unconsciously get into a rut.

The problem these days is again just the sheer amount of music available, and that music isn't as important an experience in people's lives in the 21st century as it was previously.

Certainly there are songs out there that are massively popular, and you can use some reverse analysis to see how they're put together, but it's difficult to reliably engineer a "hit". Add to this the constantly swirling winds of cultural taste, and you can see that the music industry is more akin to playing the lottery than anything else. Having some talent or taste can give you a bit of an edge, but it's still a huge roulette wheel..

I love philosophy. It's fascinating to try to discover how perception, or experience, or memory works. I've always been a diehard relativist at heart, and I find it very interesting to read other people's philosophical ideas and how they see the world through their particular lens.

I think that the public judges a song on the overall feel, not individual samples. If a sample contributes too heavily to the song, and the sample is recognized, the opinion of the piece goes down.

I'm much more into 'electronica' (yeah, I know it's cliche these days).

A human is a complicated organic/electrical system, which is immersed in a culture. Try raising a monkey like a human, it won't work, you need the human's certain brain characteristics (including self-reflection) in order to create a truly intelligent creature. The brain processes inputs and perception in very particular ways, and I think until we understand the underlying processes better, there is no way to really simulate it in software. Computers will continue to be good at simplistic analysis, and raw processing power, but the subtlety of emotions is something intrinsic to the human organism and culture.

I'm not a big fan of asynchronicity just for its own sake - a lot of people push rhythmic variation so far that the basic pulse of the music gets lost (and the listener is confused).

If anything I probably gravitate to things with great melodies/harmonies, and interesting/syncopated beats.

Usually musicians have egos and personality quirks which makes it difficult to form collaborative efforts (for long periods of time, anyways).

I think much of the conflict in the world is directly the result of people's varying interpretations of reality, or perhaps you could term it the "distortions" in their lenses. The best one can do is to try to consume as much knowledge as possible, both from your experiences, and from the words of others, in order to try to form a complete picture of the world.