Quotes About Guitar

What interested me about Chuck Berry was the way he could step out of the rhythm part with such ease, throwing in a nice, simple riff, and then drop straight into the feel of it again. We used to play a lot more rhythm stuff. We'd do away with the differences between lead and rhythm guitar. You can't go into a shop and ask for a "lead guitar". You're a guitar player, and you play a guitar.

Most of my music theory knowledge is based on piano. But I write on guitar a lot, too. I'm not a great guitar player by any means. I'm not a great instrumentalist. I play piano on stage. I don't play guitar on stage, but I use it to write quite a lot.

Lenny Breau is one of the true geniuses of the guitar. I suppose he is a musician's musician. His knowledge of the instrument and the music is so vast, and I think that's what knocks people out about him. But he's such a tasty player too. I think if Chopin had played guitar, he would have sounded like Lenny Breau.

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.

I didn't go to guitar school and I don't know how to play chords, but I can do it in my own way and I think sometimes that will piss off some guitar players who sit around playing their stuff all day long and then there are people who like that.

Chance 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.

I was sixteen, I became a working guitar player gigging in LA, mostly in top 40 bands, then touring. I learned to take songs apart, down to their bones. Songwriters would hire me to produce their demos, which lead me to become a songwriter. The relationship and power music has to TV and film attracted me to composing [and] I learned to write for instruments other than guitar.

Sometimes you want to give up the guitar, you'll hate the guitar. But if you stick with it, you're gonna be rewarded.

People ask me to describe how I play, and the most obvious answer is that I'm a jazz influenced guitar player. But I'm not a jazz guitar player. Wes Montgomery was a jazz guitarist, Joe Pass was a jazz guitarist (laughs).

I'm a guitar player. Actually, I think of myself as a songwriter/rhythm-guitar player.

To 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.

I wanted to be an actor, an astrologer, an astronaut; a lot of different things were going through my mind. But I also wanted to play guitar. I mentioned to my parents that I wanted an electric guitar for Christmas. They got me one! I sat there all Christmas morning making a lot of loud horrible noise.

Grab a guitar, put some kind of strings on it, a banjo string, then a violin string, then a guitar string, tune it any way you want, and make some noise, and see what you get. And work on it until you get something that you think is interesting. That's all there is to art for me.

The guitar, by its very nature, the nature of its sound, by the soft nuance of its powerful and ancient voice, by the magic of the tone, goes directly to the part of oneself where love is felt. When I hear the sound of the guitar, it goes to some part inside of me that opens the door that holds feelings of love and everything that is beautiful which lives inside of me.

I am, by nature, a guitar player... I learned all of these other instruments around that, and around the theory that I built learning the guitar.

If a guitar is too easy for me to play, it makes me too laid back. I like to battle with my guitar.

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.

Around middle school I studied jazz guitar and ended up playing in a jazz band for a bit. But, after high school, I haven't even touched a guitar.

I wanted to get a guitar [when I was 13] so I could play punk songs because kid taught me power chords at summer camp. He was like, "You could play all punk songs if you just learn this chord and just move it around on the guitar".

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

I didn't want to take the guitar solos down note-for-note, but more or less use them as a map, and keep all the hooks from the guitar playing, and let myself come through.

I play guitar because I like to make loud noises. And the guitar is the coolest way to make a loud noise.

I've always thought that the act of playing the guitar was the act of trying to make a point of playing the guitar.

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.

When it came time to hire a guitar player ... I didn't even have to think about it ... Mike Bloomfield was the best guitar player I'd ever heard.

[Chamber of Reflection off of Salad Days]I think it's probably that one. There's no guitar on that song, I've never recorded a song with absolutely no guitar, which is interesting. The idea behind it, well it's a Free Mason reference because before they become Free Mason's they had to go into this room called the Chamber of Reflection where they think about the life they brought with them, the life they've lived up until this point and all their wrong and right doings. And that's basically what I did with this album.

There were some initial instruments I had when I was young and made some trade-offs. Maybe a guitar I bought in a flea market. They weren't the greatest guitar but they would be cool to still have them. Other than that, not as a professional.

I noticed a lot of guitar players neglected the rhythm part of rhythm guitar and decided I would try to focus in that.

The first guitar I ever had was a gut-string Spanish guitar, and I couldn't really get the hang of it. I was only 13, and I talked my grandparents into buying it for me. I tried and tried and tried, but got nowhere with it.

I'm playing a D-28 Martin that I've had about 20 years or so. I've got a '51 Martin and I thought I shouldn't be taking this on the road. So I went down to Gruhn Guitars in Nashville and kind of traded around and ended up with this one. This guitar sounded pretty good as new guitar.

I don't even wanna say female guitar-players, just guitar-players, because music of all things doesn't need to be gendered and stratified, that's so boring.

I even played bass for a while. Besides playing electric guitar, I'd also get asked to play some acoustic stuff. But, since I didn't have an acoustic guitar at the time, I used to borrow one from a friend so I could play folk joints.

I fancy myself as being very good at Guitar Hero. I really don't play any other videogames. I kind of fell in love with Guitar Hero the first time I played it, and went out and bought a system for it.

Sometimes we woke up and feel like a Guitar Master, sometimes we woke up and feel like a complete fool. but that's the fun part of learning guitar

At some point, I had to make a decision: I could practice more and become a really great guitar player or I could work on writing better songs. There are only so many hours in the day, and I found writing songs more fulfilling than working on becoming this virtuoso guitar player.

In oddball places, the electric guitar has been taken as an almost alien object - this weird, six-stringed instrument that fell down to earth and was then played loud but with traditional grace and intelligence

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

Sometimes [people] seem to think I came out of the womb, you know, cursing, with an electric guitar.

As a kid I used to pretend I was John Denver, of all people, and play the guitar and sing Take Me Home, Country Roads.

I don't remember that I copied any guitar player note-for-note. But I remember copying Charlie Parker note for note.

I heard the Beatles and the Stones, and Mom bought me an electric guitar. I played lead for four years and then switched to bass. One day someone suggested that I should sing, so I sheepishly stepped up to the microphone and the rest is rock history.

I got my first guitar in October of 1968. I'm self-taught.

I suppose ultimately I'm interested in music. I'm a musician. I'm not a gunslinger. That's the difference between what I do and what a lot of guitar heroes do.

Doctor, if I put this here guitar down now I ain't never going to wake up.

My mom always told me I should have a Plan B. I said that if I'm not going to play guitar I'm going to play drums. And if I'm not going to play drums, I'm going to play bass. I always just wanted to play music. I was completely obsessed.

Trey Spruance didn't want to tour for ages. And Dean Menta has always been our guitar-roadie during Angel Dust, and I remember him playing fantastically during soundchecks. During each gig, he was watching from the side of the stage, seeing Big Jim play stuff that he could play better.

I'd like to do a song that I wrote today about our government's increasing infringement on our right to privacy, but the lyrics mysteriously disappeared from my guitar case.

Don't have much, but what I've got is yours, except of course my steel guitar.