MusicThoughts.com
2009-01-24
Do you have some quotes that inspire you, as you make your own music?
I've always loved those little thoughts that would inspire me to dig deeper in my songwriting, try new sounds in the studio, or listen to music in a new way.
A few years ago, I collected these quotes into a simple website:
It's there for two reasons:
- inspire other musicians (you!)
- collect other thoughts about music
I think you'll love this new update: I hired professional translators to translate MusicThoughts into nine languages: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese.
Look again, and play with the language bar across the top: http://musicthoughts.com
If you are fluent in any of these languages, please notice that below every translated quote is a link that says, "Can you improve this translation?" Example, here: http://musicthoughts.com/t/546/pt
If you can't see the Asian fonts, this link will tell you how to fix that: http://tinyurl.com/2kzezd.
After browsing around the site for a while, if you've got a favorite quote that inspires your music-making, please add it to the site. I'm not trying to make this a big site of all thoughts about music - just a simple quiet place with a few of the most inspiring ones.
Feel free to bookmark or link to any you love. The URLs are permanent, so it'll always be there for you.
Enjoy!
Thanks for the opportunity of displaying my favorite artist quotes somewhere.
Kind regards,
Rob
You should get an automated Twitter feed built that would post a random quote from these every day. Perhaps for each language?
This is awesome.
Thank you!
-CD
Throwing this here, for the record, because I got an email from someone upset that it's only quotes from famous people, not unknown musicians. My reply to him is below:
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In a previous version of MusicThoughts, back in 2000, I just let anyone submit anything. Honestly it turned into a huge mess of blathering. Really hard to find truly profound powerful quotes among the noise. So I shut down the site.
I hand-pruned 3000 submitted quotes down to 430 that I felt were the most powerful ones. There are plenty of non-famous people in there.
But when I decided to make it multi-lingual, meaning that each new quote added will cost me $20 personally to translators, it finalized the decision that MusicThoughts will only be a few select quotes, which is why I made the #1 guideline that it has to be someone else's quote. A saying that was transformative enough that people remembered it and spread it to others.
There are quite a few in there where it's students quoting their teachers, and musicians quoting their friends. So no, it definitely doesn't have to come from a famous person. Just another person.
Hello, Derek! First of all, I'm not a musician, only a staff in some musician's management office. I'm trying to help improve the Japanese translations of "Music Thoughts" only because my native language is Japanese. I have not read all of the quotes, but found some translations are not correctly done. I do know Japanese language is quite a difficult and a different language as compared to English and other Western languages, but some of the mistaken translations are not unbearable for me as those were such simple errors, especially that of Janis Joplin and Yoko Ono. I don't think my translation is the best, but I hope you can change them as soon as possible and get back $20 each from the translators.