Teddy Riley talks about what he learned from Michael in a ne

[soulmum]

"You mentioned Michael Jackson… in a Billboard interview, you said that when you were around him it felt like going to college because you were learning so much. What was the most important lesson you learned from Michael Jackson?

Well the most important thing that I have learned is how to write to piano more-or-less than a drum machine and synthesizers and all of that stuff. So the traditional way of writing is you get to a piano or you get a band in the room and you just come up with ideas and you tell the guitar player or the bass player to play this, let’s go this way or the singer will sing a few lines and the guitar player or the keyboard player would come up with something that will accompany the lines and the idea and that’s the traditional way of writing. Most times, people, have it already done and they start writing to it. That’s not traditional, it’s not organic. It’s still writing but it’s not as organic as how the traditional folks did it back in the day with just a piano or just writing it to frets and I’ve seen and I’ve witnessed all of that. I’ve witnessed having a session with forty to sixty to a hundred piece orchestra.
I’ve been there when they did “Heal The World,” and they had the whole full orchestra and when I saw that I said man, “I want that too Michael. Which song can we do that for?” And we wound up doing that for the song that we did called “Someone Put Your Hand Out.” And it was just amazing having the composer, Jeremy Lubbock, just write the string parts and the whole orchestra parts for that song. We also did it again on the Invincible album, song “Don’t Let Go Of My Hands” and there’s another one, “Don’t Walk Away.” These songs, you know, that’s college, working with an orchestra. You can’t get no better, you can’t get more organic than that."

Here's a link to the entire interview.
http://theboombox.com/teddy-riley-ta...son-interview/