"You go to a drum clinic and people watch you play. They come up to you and want to know how you did this and that. What they don't realize is that what you're doing is because of the context of the music, your imagination and your creativity, not because you're physically doing this or that."
Vinnie Colaiuta
"Some people want you to do [in studio] nothing but what is written. Some people want you to do everything on your own. And you'll get everything in between. The musicians who have had the experience, who have been fortunate enough to have gotten into it slowly and then got busy, busy, busy, where they have finally done everything, are the musicians the contractors call because they know they don't have to wait. They know you're reliable, you're going to be on time, you're going to be sober, and you are prepared for anything."
Hal Blaine
"I did a date with Jimmy Bowen, "Fever". I had never worked with Jim, but I had made the original record of "Fever", and it said on my part, "play like Shelly Manne". So I played it just like I played it originally. The guy came out and said I wasn't doing it right. When I told him I was Shelly Manne, he turned around and went back in the booth."
"It used to be that the engineers, the microphones and everything in the studio were there to serve the music and the musician. It's turned totally around now. The musician, especially the drummer, is supposed to be servicing the engineer, and that's bullshit. If you get a certain sound on your instrument, you get your own sound. They're trying to make you sound like somebody else who they particularly dig and who is particularly easy to record. You can't be concerned with that. They lock you in a closet. I heard some records the other day recorded years ago, and I'm not trying to say "Give me the good old days", because I like a lot of the music I hear now, but they used three mic's hanging up on the ceiling and the orchestra sounded great. In the orchestras nowadays, there are 12 mic's on the drums alone."
Shelly Manne
"You shouldn't get bugged with the engineers. You should just be happy that you were hired."
Steve Gadd