Andrew Sega: Song

“A lot of [my] songs have various strange oddities in them - usually this is the result of late-night dementia.”

“It's hard to quantify a 'top ten' list of songs for many reasons. I like many styles of music, and it's difficult to compare radically divergent types of music with each other.”

“Unfortunately Sting's jazz work isn't nearly as inventive as his rock songs.”

“One of the most common failings [when writing a drum track] is repetition. Nobody wants to hear that same stupid 16-line bass-snare pattern throughout the WHOLE song. Didn't your mother ever teach you that variety is the spice of life?”

“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.”

“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..”

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

“So, if you played a C major chord to pretty much any person on the planet, they'd say that it sounds "harmonious" (or pleasing, or happy, etc, etc). But now when you want to put chords and melodies in an ordering and make a larger piece called a "song", then that is a much more difficult process, and gets very subjective. At that point, it's not just the chords, it's the lyrics, rhythms, instrumentation, tempo, intensity, any number of other things that goes into a song… so many variables that it's almost impossible to predict how a song will affect a given person.”