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.

My D'Angelico is a jazz archtop guitar. That guitar was made for Glenn Miller's guitar player in 1939. It's a '39 D'Angelico New Yorker.

I started playing guitar when I was 12, and I started getting into more metal, like Maiden and Metallica... Of course, as I kind of got better and better in the guitar, I was listening to more guitar players, so then I got into, I guess, more of the prog side.

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.

Sitting around home I mostly play acoustic. I've got seven or eight guitars of various sorts, including a baritone. Sometimes at home, because a guitar is just lying around, that's the guitar I pick up rather than actually choosing something. I try to plan ahead for my laziness by leaving interesting things scattered about. If I leave a baritone guitar lying around, that's the one I'll pick up, and I'll start writing baritoney things.

I was very pleased when PRS presented me with my SE Angelus acoustic, a beautiful guitar of stunning quality. It was in response to the challenge of building a guitar that shared the integrity and attention to detail that the Alex Lifeson Private Stock Angelus possesses in a package more broadly accessible. The SE Alex Lifeson Thinline is that model. Carefully selected materials, expert craftsmanship and a smart approach to concept resulted in a guitar that is beautiful to look at and rewarding to play.

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.

In my own musical existence I don't feel that being a guitar player is like the best thing on earth to be. I would rather be a balanced musician. Playing in a group, I'm tending to think more about the music and less about the guitar. That's just me getting older. I'm not interested in being a virtuoso guitar player or anything like that.

The 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.

It's hilarious, because my guitar has what's known as a tremolo bar or a whammy bar. And the whammy bar is probably the most alien thing on my guitar that could possibly relate to a classical guitar.

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

You think back to Tele players, and James Burton was the one who started it all. He inspired Roy Nichols (guitar for Merle Haggard & the Strangers), Don Rich (guitar for Buck Owens & the Buckaroos), and guys like that to push the envelope and expand on that sound... I really identify with that kind of thinking ... those guys to me are the reason why any of us do this.

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'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.

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.

I don't play a lot of fancy guitar. I don't want to play it. The kind of guitar I want to play is mean, mean licks.

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 just loved the guitar when it came along. I loved it. The banjo was something I really liked, but when the guitar came along, to me that was my first love in music

There was nobody at the time who was playing slide guitar like Johnny, and nobody, or no white guys at least, that was playing country blues like that on the acoustic guitar. And it was at that point that I realized what Johnny had to offer.

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

I can play rhythm guitar. I know how to hold a guitar and strum it.

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.

And if the world does turn, and if London burns, I'll be standing on the beach with my guitar. I want to be in a band, when I get to Heaven. Anyone can play guitar, and they won't be a nothing anymore.

After watching a couple of live performances of bands like Nirvana, I was really excited and inspired by how raw and powerful it was. I wanted to at least aim in that direction with the guitar and do my own version of it. I know it doesn't really sound like that on the other end, but I wanted guitar, heavy rhythms, and singing to be the stamp of the whole thing.

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.

I think I always thought of the guitar as the vehicle to be able to make some musical idea up. The only appeal to learning more chords was having more chords to put into songs. I never got too wrapped up in becoming technically good. So writing songs happened pretty simultaneously with learning how to play the guitar.

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.

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.

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

I never wanted to play guitar when I was younger. I wanted to be a drummer because everybody plays guitar, and I didn't want to do what everybody else wanted to do.

A lot of guitar players get stuck on a person ... before they find out who they really are ... every guitar player should remember be yourself - just let it rip.

Randy [ Rhoads] had small hands. Boy, could he play guitar. He became an even better guitar player after he died.

From the classical guitar right through to the furthest electrical experiments and everything in-between, it's amazing what the guitar can actually do. I mean, when one thinks about sounds.

My kids don't really like when I sing for some reason...but they like when I play guitar. So I started writing songs just playing guitar for them.

Lately I haven't been able to write for the guitar - it'll usually start out with a melody on the bass, and I'll layer vocals. I just can't really physically hear the guitar anymore, so I'll just go into GarageBand and play around with the keys. I'll sit on a melody or some lyrics for a really long time and just play with it.

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.

I wanted to hear the songs in the way that I had written them, which was, in a way, very basic. So all I wanted to have was drums and another guitar pretty much playing what I wrote on guitar, and I was just going to sing.

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.

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

I write songs on guitar and that's about how good of a guitar player I am. I can write songs on it.

My wife bought me a vintage Gibson guitar that isn't just beautiful but has tremendous sentimental value. I have plenty of guitars for live gigs but this is one to treasure.

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.

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 get a feeling, on a guitar, and I sort of mess around until something resonates with me, and then I just find that what happens is that a melody comes, and with that, words.

Women are my hobby... every man needs something to keep his hands busy, and I don't have a guitar like Eddie and Michael, or some drums to bash like Alex, so I have to find some friends.

Nobody seems to play Yamaha electrics, but it's the best guitar I own.

It is dishonest the way that people suddenly think they've found guitars, and wear their guitar as a badge.

Catfish is not playing guitar no more, he's doing like a home-front thing. He had been in the business around ten years before I got in it, so I guess he's had enough of it.