Quotes About Guitar

I was doing someones hair the day I first saw my guitar ... a guy was walking down the street with it, and knew that guitar was mine (a 1953 weathered Fender Telecaster) .. I said I'll get you the most beautiful guitar you've ever seen and I'll trade you straight across ... I found him a purple Telecaster and said here's your guitar ... that was it, it was like he knew that guitar belonged to me.

My dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player. One of my earliest memories is him kind of forcing a guitar on all my brothers and me. You know, "You have to practice three hours a day!" I hated guitar at the time. I kind of picked up trumpet to spite him.

I actually bought a travel guitar, and that guitar is really cool. You can actually fold the guitar, and you can plug headphones into it, but it's acoustic, or semi-acoustic.

I was bought an electric guitar when I was 12, but my guitar teacher beat me up. I didn't like guitar lessons... My teacher was obviously bored giving me lessons, and one day I offered him a liquorice toffee, but he didn't answer. So I threw it at him, it hit him in the face, and he sort of beat me up.

I have a lot of guitar heroes I guess, some of them are female and some of them are male. Robert Fripp is one of them, and Marc Ribot, that's another guitar hero.

I've never really been schooled in music theory. I'm a guitar player, and I attack the guitar in a certain way that it not fully unique to me, but it's more unique that some other people.

Pushing myself against my own will really, because some of this stuff is hard. I don't consider myself to be a great guitar player, so pushing myself as a guitar player or pushing myself as a singer, as a performer, and just riding that fine line between being so hard on yourself that it's counter-productive and being so hard on yourself that nothing is ever good enough is what drives me.

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.

Every July, August and part of September I escape of the guitar, I escape of Paco de Lucia and I go to Mexico to the Carrabian. I have a little house there where I spend two months listening to music, no playing because I don't bring the guitar with me, fishing and cooking my fish and charging the batteries for new concerts.

My dad has always been very proud of me but I think I have exceeded his expectations. When I told him I wanted to be an actor and moved to New York City, I think he assumed I would be playing the guitar on the subway and collecting spare change in my guitar case. The fact that I'm not doing that means that I'm a huge success.

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.

... Andres Segovia literally created the genre of classical guitar, which hadn't existed before around 1910. There was flamenco, which he borrowed from, but he actually arranged the works of Mozart and other classical composers for guitar, something that had never been done before ... Segovias' style is not slick or contrived, but it's still very clean and his timing is impeccable ... it's got a feeling of casual elegance, as if he's sitting around the house in Spain with a jug of wine, just playing from the heart.

I still only play by ear. I don't have any training. But the piano actually makes more sense to me than guitar, even though I play more guitar now. And then, it wasn't till later that I started really writing songs. Writing songs was an outlet that I needed, so I became obsessed with it. It allowed me to express a bunch of stuff that had been piling up.

My dad, who plays guitar and piano and was in cover bands, along with my older brother, Matt, taught me guitar and stuff. I started writing acoustic songs and playing by myself in 7th grade.

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.

You shouldn't hear the guitar by itself. It should be part of the drums... You only notice the guitar when it's not there.

I got my first guitar when I was 16. I'd play for my family and friends, but taking that guitar out there into the wide, wide world wasn't something I ever thought about.

I approach playing acoustic guitar more of as a percussive instrument. It's fragile. I don't have a lot of finesse when it comes to my guitar playing.

One time I said: maybe I should burn a guitar tonight. You know smash a guitar or something like that. And they said: yeah, yeah! I said: you really think I should? They said: yeah, that'd be cool. I said: well, ok.

I wanted to come back to the guitar after three albums and almost 10 years. I started to miss this instrument and I wanted to come back to the guitar.

It's one thing having a great song, but I think for me if you take it to the next level... say you had a guitar and a vocal, and the song was amazing but the vocalist wasn't that great and it just was a guitar and vocal acoustic track, switching that to something like an amazing voice singing the exact same song with the instrumentation being really nice and lush or unique in some way and interesting and diverse... I think it's all about the instrumentation and textures in the sound.

To be honest, I'm one of the least-technical guitar players around. I just want a guitar to feel good and sound good. That's it, period.

I'm really very embarrassed about my guitar playing, in one way, because it's very poor. I can never move but I can make a guitar speak.

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.

I usually start with a guitar riff or some little pattern of chords, and then I kind of go from there. Usually my lyrics are the last thing to go onto a song. For years and years I only ever did instrumental, so I'm still trying to get confidant with my lyrics and find the right balance. I'll generally get inspired from the music. I'll have a guitar line, and then I'll have a melody line, and I hook the lyrics up to fit that rhythm. So, my lyrics to tend be very rhythmic as well. They work with the music rather than the music works around them.

Sam [Phillips] wanted I Walk The Line up - you know, up-tempo. And I put paper in the strings of my guitar to get that (vocalizing) sound, and with the bass and the lead guitar, there it was. Bare and stark, that song was when it was released. And I heard it on the radio and I really didn't like it, and I called Sam Phillips and asked him please not to send out any more records of that song.

All 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.

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.

There'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.

To me, the hook of the riff is what makes a great guitar recording. It's the backbone of the whole song. When you have a strong riff, it's the rocket fuel for the track.

I know artists whose medium is life itself, and who express the inexpressible without brush, pencil, chisel or guitar. They neither paint nor dance. Their medium is Being. Whatever their hand touches has increased life.... They are the artists of being alive.

I invented rock & roll. Jimi Hendrix was my guitar player. James Brown was my vocalist.

I used to play guitar for myself and write lyrics and listen to different styles of music.

It's just me and my guitar, and the rhythm's from there, and the poetry of life.

A guitar has moonlight in it.

I play drums and guitar. My best instrument is definitely drums, so I'm featured a lot on the album drumming. It's pretty futuristic as well.

I grew up with all kinds of music, but my heart was particularly drawn to Country Music because of the guitar playing, the lyrics and of artists like Steve Warner and Vince Gill.

I was immediately taken with Geoff Muldaur's rich soulful voice, masterful phrasing and guitar playing when I first heard him.

Once I picked up an electric guitar, I lost interest in piano, and I just wanted to rock. I studied piano for so long, I got burned out on it.

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

When it's a funky uptempo song, you're basically having the same kind of release you would have when you have sex, only it lasts longer. Whether you're playing it on the guitar or on the dance floor, you're in that moment.

I play guitar and I love the Beatles and melodic music.

You know, once you've had that guitar up so loud on the stage, where you can lean back and volume will stop you from falling backward, that's a hard drug to kick.

I get to play a scorching lead guitar, and there's not much that's more fun than that.

I was made to go to church and I heard the gospel songs, and every now then somebody would come through with a guitar and that was a thrill!

Going to high school in rural Florida, we always partied down in the woods. Somebody - one of the rednecks - would leave class and mow a path out to a field, and we'd drive out there. Dude, every party I went to was lit by a bonfire. Acoustic guitar.

I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.