Quotes from Dimebag Darrell

Towards the end with Pantera - although I was never unhappy with the music we were making - it became one-dimensional, and we wanted to open things back up.

Way before we got a record deal, we were playing clubs seven nights a week, three one-hour sets a night. Then we got the record deal, and we took off on the road and stayed out.

All syncopation means is accenting beats that you don't normally accent.

When I tried to play something and screwed up, I'd hear some other note that would come into play. Then I started trying different things to find the beauty in it.

Whenever I feel my chops are slacking, I'll play some wide-stretch trilling exercises and take them up and down the neck as well as across it.

Lessons didn't really work out for me, so I went to the old school, listening to records and learning what I wanted to learn.

Initially, I just used the guitar as a prop. I'd pose with it in front of a mirror in my Kiss makeup when I was skipping school. Then I figured out how to play the main riff to Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water' on just the E string. Next, my old man showed me how to play barre chords, and that's when things started getting really heavy.

The easiest place to get a natural harmonic on any string is at the 12th fret. All you do is lightly rest one of your left-hand fingers on a string directly above that fret and then pick it.

When I first started experimenting with harmonics, I'd sometimes hook up two distortion boxes just to get my strings 'frying,' which helped bring out the harmonics.

My heroes were Eddie Van Halen - especially after Van Halen I, II, III, and IV - Randy Rhoads, Ace Frehley and dudes like that. My brother played drums and we jammed in the garage and started writing our own stuff.

I was more influenced by players like Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen than by the guys in southern rock bands.

Van Halen was a huge influence on me, and 'Eruption' was the song that really leaped off that first Van Halen album.

I got food poisoning in Venezuela, and it sucked!

To me, blues is more of a feel and a vibe, rather than sitting there and saying, 'Well, I'm gonna play bluesy now.'