Quotes About Guitar

For me, the guitar was just a tool to make songs. I started when I was 10 - I learned what I had to learn to get my ideas across. I always felt I was a weak guitar player, but now I realize with the finger-picking stuff, I actually know how to do what I do with my songs, but I couldn't step in and be an overall guitar player. But my guitar playing has always been driven by the need to write songs.

Now, guitar was pretty cool. Everybody knew something on the guitar. So I wanted to play guitar, but I told my dad if he wanted me to keep studying something, Id like to study piano.

A gut-string classical Spanish guitar, a sweet, lovely little lady. The smell of it. Even now, to open a guitar case, when it's an old wooden guitar, I could crawl in and close the lid.

Psychology Today is probably one of my favorite magazines, Guitar, Guitar World. People.

I'm really getting better at guitar. I'm not trapped behind a piano. You can get out and move with a guitar and still direct the band.

I still play that guitar. It's a Martin D-18 with a clear pick guard. I've played that guitar on and off my TV shows for nearly 50 years.

There 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.

You don't need to be talented. You don't even have to play the guitar to be a guitar player in a punk-rock band. So I, in a very naïve and teenage way, said, "That's it. I'm going to be in a band."

And 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.

The time I burned my guitar it was like a sacrifice. You sacrifice the things you love. I love my guitar.

Guitar playing is not my strong suit. I cut my finger off, working in an oil field, and it don't work anymore, so I'm limited as to what I can do on the guitar.

Basically, I'm just a guitar player that figured out I wasn't ever gonna be able to buy dinner with my guitar playing so I got into songwriting, which is a little more profitable business.

I feel like I'm just learning how to play the guitar. I mean, really learning to play the guitar

The guitar is of no great importance to me. The people it brings to me are what matter. They are what I'm extremely grateful for, because they are alive. The guitar is just an apparatus.

I think there are quite a few new Instro/Surf groups that are really great. The Mermen are good and there doing something different. The Space Cossacks, Penetrators, The Fathoms, I really like The Falcons from Canada, Mike Beddoes is a really fine guitar player. I like Nokie Edwards of The Ventures, who gave me a guitar lesson once when we were playing opposite them in 1962 at The Rose Garden Ballroom in Pismo Beach. That's were The Impacts started and got signed to Del Fi in 1962.

A guitar is something you can hold and love and it's never going to bug you. But here's the secret about the guitar - it's defiant. It will never let you conquer it. The more you get involved with it, the more you realize how little you know.

One day you pick up the guitar and you feel like a great master, and the next day you feel like a fool. It’s because we’re different every day, but the guitar is always the same…beautiful.

Let 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.

A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable.

I'm always happiest trying new instruments - and honestly enjoy playing, say, the glockenspiel with Radiohead as much as I do the guitar. I think regular touring has forced me to play the guitar more than anything else, which is why I'm probably most confident playing that. And whist I'd be lost if I couldn't play it too, I dislike the totemic worship of the thing... magazines, collectors, and so on. I enjoy struggling with instruments I can't really play.

My chosen instrument is guitar and, fortunately, I'm able to muddle through that. I can play guitar to the point where I can express myself artistically.

I love playing rock music, man. You give me a guitar in my hands, and I go out there, and, for me, it's like...you know, some dudes like hunting, fishing, going out and playing ball in the backyard with their buddies on a rainy day. I like being out with my buddies playing rock guitar. That's what I love to do.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

Unless the guitar works as a color, then I don't use it, so I haven't been playing guitar too much lately.

It became a bit of a challenge to make an album that is essentially quite alternative sounding, and has a lot of sounds that could be guitar - for instance on "Overjoyed," there's what sounds like guitar but is actually a lot of keys.

I played guitar all my life, all the way through the Yardbirds, but I knew that for me this was going to be a guitar vehicle, because that's what I wanted it to be.

When Lonnie Mack came out with the guitar instrumental "Memphis" I thought, Oh God, finally somebody we guitar players can relate to !

When you go to bed at night, you get seven or eight hours of sleep. I've had enough sleep. I've rested, and it's as simple as that. I want to do it now. I didn't want to three years ago. I was waiting until it felt right. I wanted to get back to falling in love with my guitar again, and hanging out with my guitar like I would a friend.

I love 'Crazy Horse,' and Neil Young is one of my favorite guitar players.

Technically, I'm not a guitar player, all I play is truth and emotion.

There 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.

Seeing my children makes me come most alive. I come home and I see my kids' faces light up when they see me at the door with my guitar case. They run to me, we hug. I never go beyond a few weeks without being in their presence, so they have adjusted quite well.

I'm left handed, but my dad taught me to play guitar right-handed.

The 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

I was left with an urge to make the guitar sound like things it shouldn't be able to sound like.

I try to become a singer. The guitar has always been abused with distortion units and funny sorts of effects, but when you don't do that and just let the genuine sound come through, there's a whole magic there.

The Hamsters really kick ass - Slim is one of your greatest guitar players

When I pick up the guitar, it's a melody, and that's what drives the lyrics. It's bits and pieces of truth, but it is storytelling.

If I don't channel pain into a song, I play my guitar or play the piano or play my drums, or go swimming.

Sometimes, the best songs are the ones you write without any pen and paper or audio recording device or guitar in your hands. Because there's nothing between you and the melody; it's just a great lyric.

Yes, we three were so happy, my wife, my guitar and me!

To be a good artist / letterer / designer / guitar player it takes practice. A lot of it. More than you can even fathom when you're starting out.

That's why I love music so much. It completely saved me. There are so many feelings you can't explain, and you can hear one note on a guitar and somehow that sound explains what you can't put into words.

May was so great to work with, he even took me over to Japan for some dates. It blew me away when he let me play his guitar on stage with him.

It's a cocktail-party circuit in D.C., That guy who couldn't master the guitar and get in a band and get laid, he ends up there. Gary Condit make sense to me. He's away from his family, he's in D.C. - if he was a car dealer in the [San Fernando] Valley somewhere out there, he'd be the guy who was trying to get laid by offering you the free undercoating package.

So you do shorter versions of the hits, or you take out a long guitar solo or things like that to make time for the hits and new music as well. But I don't think any of us ever get to do as much new music as we would like to.

I never met a politician who didn't want to be a guitar player in a rock band. I've got the opportunity to say what I believe in.

I just couldn't take school seriously: I had this guitar neck with four frets which I kept hidden under the desk. It had strings on it so I would practice my chord shapes under the desk and that's about all I did at school.