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The thing about playing percussion is that you can create all these emotions that can be sometimes beautiful, sometimes really ugly, or sometimes sweet, sometimes as big as King Kong and so on. And so there can be a real riot out there, or it can be so refined.

Music is organized sound.

I approach everything as chamber music. Even with Beethoven symphonies, I lead from the violin and basically encourage the orchestra to think of it as a giant string quartet.

Describing certain sounds, there's a common language that guitar players have.

Percussion is the most adaptable family of instruments. The biggest challenge is to project percussion in a lyrical way.

The guitar is a small orchestra. It is polyphonic. Every string is a different color, a different voice.

If some of our works are symphonies, then wrapped walkways was chamber music.

I really just wanted to play the drum set and match that. I was never really into the percussion thing.

I wanted to explore the connections between different kinds of music.

I've been down there 6 times and there's nothing like Brazilian percussion.