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 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.

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.

There was a show in Germany called Beat Club, and they had a lot of bands playing live. And I had this master plan, at 11 years old, I wanted to play electric guitar, but I knew... We lived in a small apartment, there was no way that was going to happen. I told my parents I wanted a classical guitar and I wanted to start studying classical guitar. So then a few years later, I think around 16 or so, I started playing electric. But that was my, my plan as an 11 year old. I thought I was so crafty.

Yeah. I started using them [SDD-3000s] shortly after first working with Edge on The Unforgettable Fire. Basically, I stole his sound. It wasn't a complicated rig: just a guitar he liked through a Korg SDD-3000 digital delay into a Vox. Three components, mono - that's it. The great thing about the Korgs is its three-position level switch, which lets you hit the amp with about 10 extra dB. It's more overdriven than if you just plugged the guitar straight into the amp, even when it's on bypass. But a lot of the guitar sounds on Achtung Baby were recorded through a Korg A3 effects processor.

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.

Instead of buying a guitar for $2,000 or $2,500 - I'm not sure how much these are going for - but it's maybe $300 or something like that. It's more for beginners and stuff like that. Obviously it's not hitting the pros. And you can't get the Piezo pickup and the color-changing paint and the inlays and all the fancy things that my signature guitars offer, but you can get the general feel of the guitar - and the body style. It's cool.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Its just something Ive always done. In South Texas, the first guitar you get is a Mexican guitar. And the first one I got, the first thing I did was take it apart.

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

I could care less about sitting around and practicing the guitar for hours a day and trying to be the best guitar player on the planet.

Once I got a guitar that was relatively user-friendly, but not super-duper easy, I really came on as a guitarist, at that point. It helped. It was a super-expensive guitar either, but something needs to steer you a bit, if you're playing an instrument that is really hard.

At certain point, you realize it's easy to play music for the rest of your life: just don't sell your guitar. Maybe you get a day job, but as long as you have a guitar, you can play.

I grew up not really listening to guitar players. Especially when I was studying music, I was just interested in piano players and arrangers and composers; I came to playing in a band from the perspective of someone who never expected to play guitar in a band.

Being a professional wrestler was never one of my goals in life. I always wanted to be some kind of entertainer. I used to want to be a rock singer or a guitar player but I can't sing and I can't play the guitar.

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.

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.

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".

My ex-wife was trying to be nice once, so she took me to a concert in Los Angeles. I went with her to Symphony Hall, and the orchestra was playing. When the show started, the spotlight was sharp on this one man (Andres Segovia) and he had sombrero on and his guitar propped up like this and, oh man ... he was a master ! - I really heard it. That one guitar sounded like a whole orchestra to me.

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.

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

When "Here Comes the Sun" started, what happened? No, the sun didn't come out, but Mom opened up like the sun breaking through the clouds. You know how in the first few notes of that song, there's something about George's guitar that's just so hopeful? It was like when Mom sang, she was full of hope, too. She even got the irregular clapping right during the guitar solo. When the song was over, she paused. "Oh Bee," she said. "This song reminds me of you." She had tears in her eyes.

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.

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.

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.

Except for a few guitar chords, everything I've learned in my life that is of any value I've learned from women.

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've refined it since [ was living in Beaumont, Texas], but I was just obsessed with the guitar. I remember one day sitting in class and it just came to me how the neck worked. I was enlightened to the scales, and the runs. I just saw it and thought; now I understand it!

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

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.

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

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

In a time when everything can be next day and ordered and put on credit and paid for, music to me is promise, all promise, very little realization. It's the promise of walking into a room with a guitar and not being sure you will leave with an idea that will take, not being sure it won't slip away from you.

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

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

You can be a singer, and you can be a guitar player, but putting them together is another animal.

That it's a lot harder to make a keyboard sound not-cheesy than a guitar.

At that time there was, but they didn't have the guitar I wanted. There are only about 2000 people there and the next town was Dodge City 40 or 50 miles away and I didn't have a car. So it was easier to order it through the mail - which you shouldn't do. But it turned out okay. It was one of those Ovations - there's not much danger in ordering one of those.

My guitar, I sing of thee 'Tis with thee that I decoy And ensnare enchantingly the ladies I enjoy.

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 did pick up a guitar once, but the strings hurt my fingers so I put it down again.