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.

I suppose when I started playing guitar, it was the means to an end. I never thought of myself as a fully fledged guitar instrumentalist. And my early excursions on the electric guitar were curtailed when Eric Clapton came on the scene, and I decided I was never going to be in the same arena as a Clapton or a Peter Green.

I kind of grew up a guitar nerd and I tried to figure out how to shred on an acoustic guitar as a kid, while listening to jazz or whatever. So that is kind of a different thing and my church background, growing up with worship kind of the ground that I learned how to play music from. Those are all odd ways of growing up, compared to most people, so I think the music has plenty of uniqueness in that.

I enjoy listening to Olla Bell. There is also this young guitar player, John Duke Lippincott, he sometimes goes by Johnny Duke. He is the most brilliant guitar player from right here in Wilmington, DE.

I was a very bad musician. I was the world's worst guitar player, so when I was performing solo with a guitar, I had to keep things very simple.

I've played guitar for years, and wanted to play guitar, but we got halfway through the last one and realized we hadn't used any.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

We weren't listening to guitar bands, we were thoroughly ashamed of being a guitar band. So we bought loads of keyboards and learned how to use them, and when we got bored we went back to guitars.

I looked at myself, and I just said, well, you know, I can sing but I'm not the greatest singer in the world. I can play guitar very well, but I'm not the greatest guitar player in the world... And so I said, well, if I'm going to project an individuality, it's going to have to be in my writing.

Well, harpsichord is kind of a big guitar, isn't it? I mean, it is plucked, after all.

I don't separate writing songs from poetry and short fiction. In the area where I work in my house, there's a word processor and a guitar.

There's so much to be said for making your guitar sound like a synthesizer and try to make your drummer sound like a drum machine.

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

So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top.

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

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

As a musician myself, it annoys the hell out of me to watch an actor trying to play a guitar out of time with the music.

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.

"The Hallmark Sessions" is an extraordinary release. Breau plays beautiful chords (sounding a little like Johnny Smith in spots) and inventive single-note lines. It is remarkable that this music was not released until 2003, but a happy event that it was finally put out. This is a must for Breau fans and an important release for all jazz guitar lovers.

I always wanted a guitar. I always wanted to be a cowboy singer because I also listened to Hank Williams, and he would always sing these neat romantic songs.

It's how I learned to play guitar - sitting with Led Zeppelin and Cheap Trick records, backing the needle up and learning how to play along. When the band started, by doing something that was very obvious to us and sort of traditional, it set us apart at the time from what was happening musically.

I never practice my guitar. From time to time I just open the case & throw in a piece of raw meat.

But we go out as a band because we enjoy each others company, first of all. And its the payoff for me, to go out and play my art and still play guitar, which is my life.

There was this big skiffle craze happening for a while in England.... Everybody was in a skiffle group..All you needed was an acoustic Guitar, a washboard with thimbles for percussion, and a tea-chest- you know, the ones they used to ship tea from India- and you just put a broom handle on it and a bit of string, and you had a bass..you only needed two chords; Jing-jinga-jing jing-jinga-jing jing-jinga-jing jing-jinga-jing. And I think that's basically where i've always been at. I'm just a skiffler, you know. Now I do posh skiffle, that's all it is.

I was just a punk kid, trying to get a sound out of a guitar that I couldn't get off the rack, so I built one myself ... I wanted a Gibson type of sound but with a Strat vibrato .. I went to town painting it and I put three pickups back in, but they don't work - only the rear one works

I can't remember the first song I learned to play on bass, but the first song I learned to play on guitar was 'For Your Love' by the Yardbirds. That kind of was the beginning for me. I thought it was a great song and I loved the open chord progression at the beginning of that song.

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.

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.

I am the Great White Buffalo and I play an American-made Gibson guitar that can blow your head clean off at 100 paces.

When it is possible that people don't understand my English, I take my guitar and speak with my music!

I've got holes in my guitar.

I pestered the hell out of everybody I ran into until I could play the guitar well enough to write and sing with it.

Most of the time I sit down with my guitar or at the piano, and I play for awhile until I get a new riff or groove that I like a lot. Then I'll concentrate on building around that line of thought by adding words and textures. At first I'm only trying to please myself, and hopefully what I like will appeal to others.

I started playing guitar when I was 12 and probably from that age knew that I wanted to make music and make my own music. Playing with other bands like the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens was more like an apprenticeship for me than anything.

I never bothered with cars. I was probably one of the few kids in school who didn't run around with hot-rod magazines. As I would be at home fiddling with my guitar, they would be fiddling with a car engine.

Nothing is more beautiful than a guitar, except, possibly two.

At some point I decided I didn't want to learn any more guitar technique. I was at that level where the next mountain there was to climb was Van Halen and I didn't really like Van Halen.

Not that I play guitar anywhere near as well as she sings, but I think I have always had a tendency to play solos the same way, in emotional relation to the structure of the song. I choose simple lines, and only play what seems emotionally relevant, and often express that emotion in time, that is in play or resistance to the set time of the song.

My original interests and intentions in guitar playing were primarily created on quality of tone, for instance, the way the instrument could be made to echo or simulate the human voice.

Yeah. I'm amateurish. I can play enough to write a song, or strum on a little guitar to write out a song. But, I don't play well at all. I wouldn't even attempt for a second to play in public.

I didn't know that people compared Bill Hicks and I but certainly I'm flattered if they do. I knew Bill a bit. We had dinner a couple of times and played guitar together once. I really tried to keep my distance from him professionally.

There were drinks and food in full force, and some Moroi guy had a guitar out and was trying to impress girls with his musical skills—which were nonexistent. In fact, his music was so awful that he might have discovered a new way to kill Strigoi.

If You're going to sweep the floor, sweep it better than anybody in town. And if You're going to play the guitar, really, really, really get in it, and don't be jivin'.