Quotes About Guitar

Who doesn't like to play Black Sabbath tunes!

I often use dropped D or C - I even go all the way down to A. What can be really cool is drop a guitar down there and have the rest of the band continue in standard tuning. It gives it a lot of power and texture.

Chromamatic' is actually about changing the strings on my guitar and tuning my guitar.

One of my favorites has always been 'Swap Meet.' One of the reasons why I like that is it's a song that's in a drop-D tuning, and of course, also being a guitar player, it's one of the songs that I really like the riff on it.

I didn't know that you were supposed to tune the guitar to an open chord, and I learned to play slide with a normal tuning. I think it's a little more melodic that way and doesn't sound so bluesy. Of course, if I could play like David Lindley or Ry Cooder, I'd be a happy man!

A lot of the time I use slide tuning for rhythm parts. I play a lot of slide in regular tuning as well as open tunings. I'm still mad about slide, there are so many ways of progressing on it.

I find that I get nervous before I play. Even sound checks can give me anxiety and screw with my mind. But as long as I can play a little acoustic guitar backstage if I'm feeling nervous, so I don't have to walk in there cold turkey, I'll be fine.

I like guitar. It just turned out that it's the instrument I learned to play. I have a lot of respect for it, and I'm learning more and more every day. For me, the classic band setup - guitars, drums, bass - will stay fresh forever. I don't know. I'm still into it.

The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one.

One of the things I really like about West African guitar playing is the way it makes harmony linear. They're really spelling things out and turning chords into melodies instead of just letting them be these hanging blocks of color.

It turns out kids today still learn that four-chord progression when they're just picking up the guitar.

The reason I wanted to play guitar was because I saw Buddy Holly and then our own homegrown Shadows on TV in 1957 or '58. I wanted to learn to play guitar so I could do what they did and be in a band.

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 wrote 'Despacito' with my guitar, but where you can tweak a lot is in the production.

My favorite guitar now is my Martin HD-7 because it's got everything. It's got the jingle-jangle thing from the twelve string, it's got the flexibility of the six string, and the bass notes where you can do bass runs and that sort of thing.

John Fahey, thought during his lifetime to be possibly more than a little crazy, was the author of some thirty albums of gnomically introverted droning guitar instrumentals, which I listened to heavily in my teens and twenties; I even produced an hour or so of banjo music in an imitative John Fahey style.

When I first started fingerpicking, the first thing I learned was 'Don't Think Twice It's Alright' from Bob Dylan.

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.

My mother was a very beautiful lady, I thought. She was very good to me. I guess - she died when I was nine and a half, but if she had lived, I probably wouldn't be trying to play guitar. She wanted me to be known, but as something else. Not a guitar player.

I tend to be freer on the piano. I never took guitar lessons, so my reach exceeds my grasp - what I hear in my head I don't always know how to play. But I love to play over something else. I'm not a self-starter. I get kind of bored with the same three folk chords that I know.

It keeps my feet on the ground just making sure that I'm always trying to learn something new or trying to be a real guitar player.

I got it into my head that I had somewhat neglected the guitar, and then I did a record called 'Arena,' and it was not a particularly bad record - it wasn't a bad record at all, but it was built around a certain concept, which is a guitar quartet, with a little bit of augmentation here and there.

I don't need to hear Bill to go through a song. I need to hear Keith to go through a song. I know Bill will be playing what I'm playing anyway. I need to hear Keith because it's all there: the time, the chord changes, and all the licks you have to follow.

Anyone who's got a guitar, you like to pick it up. I can play a couple of songs, some '50s rock and roll, a bit of Elvis. That's it, really - I'm not a musician, I'm not a singer.