Popular quotes about Guitar! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 111
Many kids and parents ask me, 'What kind of guitar can I buy?' It's a great opportunity for those people to be able to buy a quality guitar that's not necessarily a little Fender or whatever. Ernie Ball signature model guitar is something that's more signature.
John PetrucciI play piano and guitar. Acoustic guitar. I tried studying classical guitar when I was 16 but it got really hard. I could never play a lead to save my life.
Kip WingerWell I was on the one hand, the more I played the guitar the more I began to really love the guitar and to love virtually any kind of music that anybody played well on guitar.
John FaheyAll gut strings. Thats just the first kind of guitar I played, it was a nylon string guitar. And to me, its the purest form of guitar making, and I just enjoy doing it.
Guy ClarkThe guitar is a means of expressing music, When you get into the emotional side of it, then it's not the guitar that matters so much as the music itself. But the guitar is the vehicle I use. It's how I express myself. As for the emotional side, music takes up where language leaves off. To try and verbalize what music says, emotionally and spiritually, is futile. Let me put it this way, Louis Armstrong once said if you've got to ask, you'll never know.
Charlie ByrdI like posing with a guitar better than I can play the guitar, so I think I found the right field. But I've spent enough time with rock stars to tell you that the best thing in life to be is a rock star.
Samuel BayerThere are guys in country music who are wizards on the guitar. If you're a country fan, you're used to it. But as a rock guitar player, you listen.
Joe PerryAnd at the time, for one of the few times in my life I didn't have a band, I just had myself and the guitar, so I was going to have to do something with just my voice, just the guitar and just my songs that was going to move someone enough to give me a shot. So I wrote songs that were very lyrically alive and lyrically dense. And they were unique, but it really came out of the motivation to - or I understood it was - I was going to have to make my mark that way.
Bruce SpringsteenChance in music doesn't have to involve the I Ching or rolling dice or throwing yarrow stalks. It can involve an out-of-tune guitar, or other impossible-to-replicate moments of awkwardness - even more so than an awkward, out-of-tune live performance, because there's something incredible about the way that an out-of-tune guitar becomes part of the song on a record. I won't be precious and say it's part of the composition - that's nonsensica l - but chance occurrences are so crucial to what's distinctive. It's the fingerprints all over so many of these recordings.
David GrubbsJimi Hendrix is the greatest guitar player in the world... a guy who mastered that instrument. It was talking when he played. And when he did a solo, he made the guitar cry - or made it sound like it was coming from the devil's amplifier.
Bruno MarsI'm really interested in trying to learn how to play the guitar since I've got two of them! I can kind of mess around on the piano, but I'm going to start learning how to play the guitar.
Danielle BradberyTo me, the guitar is a tool for songwriting, and it's fun, too. The day that it's not fun, that's when I'm not gonna play guitar anymore.
Scott IanThe Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one. A responsible designer might try to overcome this limitation - probably the engineers at Marshall tried, too. But that sound became the sound of, among others, Jimi Hendrix. That sound is called electric guitar.
Brian EnoI fool around with guitar and I can fool around on piano. I don't really play either instrument although I can play a couple of songs on guitar. You don't really need to be able to play to compose. There are many composers and arrangers who work out of their heads.
Frankie LaineSpeaking of stage freight. I was terrified! It was in NOLA at an all ages show. I was wearing Jeans, a Van Halen t-shirt, and a bandana on my neck. Once I gripped that microphone stand, I did not let go! I plugged my microphone into a guitar FX pedal. Then at the end of the a Black Sabbath song we were covering, I hit the guitar pedal. It was horrific!
Phil AnselmoLet me explain something about guitar playing. Everyone's got their own character, and that's the thing that's amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up. Everyone's approach to what can come out of six strings is different from another person, but it's all valid.
Jimmy PageIt seemed so wimpy at first when I started to play [guitar]. So I started playing loud with lots of effects just to try to mimic the dynamic [of the drums]. Drums seemed a lot more expressive. [I was] Trying to emulate the feeling of playing the drums on the guitar - I guess that's why I played it so loud.
J MascisMy dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player.
Zach CondonI think if you're a lady playing a guitar, other ladies need to see you playing the guitar, and they don't need to see men come out and fix your equipment for you. It just looks incredibly pussy. So I just do it all myself.
Neko CaseOn acoustic guitar I tend to stay in the key of D for some reason. On electric guitar I keep basic: C, G, D, and A. The key of D minor is also real good for me.
Tommy ShawI play guitar because I like to make loud noises. And the guitar is the coolest way to make a loud noise.
Kim ThayilFrom the age of 16 on, I brought my guitar everywhere. I just fell in love with learning the guitar, and I wanted to learn songs and chords, and that led to wanting to start a band, and to wanting to do our first show.
Donavon FrankenreiterWhen I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.
MobyInspiration and stealing are two completely different things. If somebody wants to make a song like "Stairway to Heaven" and writes a song on acoustic guitar, Led Zeppelin does not own every song that's on acoustic guitar for the rest of time.
Robin ThickeAll the time I was playing the flute, the lines, the solos, the riffs, the construction, were based on my guitar skills. I did not play the flute to exploit its natural faculties, but I used it as a surrogate guitar.
Ian AndersonA good example of a lyric that makes me laugh but might not hit anybody right away is, "Sit behind the guitar and play the chords," just because it's such a lame image. It's not rock'n'roll at all to be sitting behind a guitar.
Tim HeideckerI write songs on guitar and that's about how good of a guitar player I am. I can write songs on it.
Billy Bob ThorntonThere's two or three kids out there trying to make good music, and the rest of them sound like it's been strained through some kind of white toast or something. It all sounds just too neat and perfect, with no surprise to it at all. No story, no nothing. It's like building cars, like an assembly line. It doesn't sound like anything that came from a guitar.
Merle HaggardThere is no way I would play guitar like a tour de force like I did in Led Zeppelin. John Bonham, phenomenal drummer, young man with his technique, but do you think he would ever have the opportunity to play like that in another band? Of course he hadn't.
Jimmy PageIt's a guy thing, playing the guitar. Being a female and trying to go to the same auditions as the guys, it's pretty hard.
OrianthiThe only thing I ever really wanted was a Strat .. I started playing guitar after seeing Jimi Hendrix on TV the day he died...then I got Deep Purples' Fireball album which was also a big influence .. I have a collection of more than 200 of them that includes Strats from every year since March 1954 - the first month the Strat was made
Yngwie MalmsteenMy earliest musical memory was getting to watch my dad play drums in a local band. He's a banker by trade, but a drummer at heart. I remember seeing the guitar player do the solo from "Werewolves of London" with his teeth, and that was the moment that had me hooked.
Charlie WorshamAt that time there was, but they didn't have the guitar I wanted. There are only about 2000 people there and the next town was Dodge City 40 or 50 miles away and I didn't have a car. So it was easier to order it through the mail - which you shouldn't do. But it turned out okay. It was one of those Ovations - there's not much danger in ordering one of those.
Freedy JohnstonMy older brother was the guitar player in the neighborhood band. My parents were the cool ones that had the basement for rehearsal. Rather than hang with my peers after school, I wanted to just listen to the band. More than that, I wanted to play.
Jill SobuleMy main objective with a home studio - I could get into doing full band demos - but my first objective is to cut things like guitar tracks and solos at home.
John PetrucciEventually as a teenager, I was pulled up on stage by James Brown's saxophone player, Maceo Parker, during one of his concerts and scatted on his stage for 20 minutes. After I was done, Maceo's bass player got down on one knee as if he were proposing, took a string off of his bass guitar and coiled it up around my ring finger. He hushed the crowd and said into the microphone, "Wendy, from this day forward you are married to music. You have a gift from God. You must devote your life to using this gift or else you will deprive the world of something so special." I got the chills.
Wendy StarlandI'm hungry for purpose. I'm looking for still that reason that I bought a guitar and started a band, to fulfill a purpose, to manifest destiny as to who I am and why I am the way I am, and what I do. I think it's still about the music, the song and the story.
Billy Ray CyrusWhether I'm making my own record, or playing a guitar part, I want what I do to have an impact.
Vince GillAs a guitar player, it's harder for me to impress somebody than it is to write a song that they like.
Brad PaisleyIf you can't play guitar and sing in Nashville, you might as well just be a construction worker.
Patrick CarneyI played lead guitar in a band called The Federal Duck, which is the kind of name that was popular in the '60s as a result of controlled substances being in widespread use. Back then, there were no restrictions, in terms of talent, on who could make an album, so we made one, and it sounds like a group of people who have been given powerful but unfamiliar instruments as a therapy for a degenerative nerve disease.
Dave Barry