Quotes About Guitar

Pete Townshend used to crash chords and let the guitar feed back. He's overrated.

Every guitar I own gets used and has its purpose.

I honestly believe that you have to be able to play the guitar hard if you want to be able to get the whole spectrum of tones out of it. Since I normally play so hard, when I start picking a bit softer my tone changes completely, and that's really useful sometimes for creating a more laid-back feel.

In most places that are rich in guitar culture, everyone uses their fingers, like in Spain or Africa. In Japan there are string instruments played that way. It is not until you get in the States that you find people using picks.

I think that open tunings are a trap really because it's really hard not to sound like an open tuning when your using one and that gets old as well as what you learn in one open tuning is going to stay there.

Using double coil pickups kills a lot of the guitar tone - you lose the acoustic mechanics. With my single-coils driven through the Marshalls and overdrive, it sounds massive.

Steve Morse is a very good guitar player, but he's American, and he's using humbucker pickups. If you ask me, those two are not good.

I don't understand why some people will only accept a guitar if it has an instantly recognizable guitar sound. Finding ways to use the same guitar people have been using for 50 years to make sounds that no one has heard before is truly what gets me off.

As soon as you pick up a guitar, you're up against the legends of rock. The same goes with stadium drum kits and electric bass. Essentially, you're already in a soundscape that's very familiar and has a lot of established legendary material recorded using those instruments.

In a way, I created Utopia as a platform for me to become more of a guitar player and less of the kind of balladeer that people were taking me for.

I do think there is a valid reason that Segovia commissioned the composers he did. He was very much a pioneer, and what he wanted was a very listenable repertory. But I'm interested in different aspects of the guitar, and of music.

I gave a Collings dreadnought to a young guitar player in the Valley where I live because he didn't have a good acoustic, and he's a terrific player.

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.

I'd put a lot of work into playing guitar and was thinking I was pretty damn good. But Hendrix came along and destroyed everyone.

The only planning I do is about a minute before I play. I desperately try to think of something that will be effective, but I never sit down and work it out note for note.

You can't get a guitar player like Dweezil without his commitment to the work that it takes A) to be the musician that he is and B) to the music itself.

May was so great to work with, he even took me over to Japan for some dates. It blew me away when he let me play his guitar on stage with him.

I've always considered myself a serious guitar player, but I haven't been really worried about whether the public thought I was. That never was part of my record sales strategy.

My first guitar was a Gretsch 6120, and I just loved listening to artists like Elvis, Chuck Berry and Stray Cats.

I like streaming music. I'll be in the car going, 'I want to hear Scotty Anderson.' He's a great guitar player not many people know about - maybe me and two other dudes know him. But I love him, and I can pull him up on Apple Music, and there it is, right there in my car.

So it's more the musician in me that makes me stretch out and try different things more than anything. But, like a lot of guitar players, I have one certain niche that's my thing that I'm better at than the others.

I took piano lessons when I was really young, like five years old, and I didn't really enjoy that very much. It was kind of too strict. So when I was probably 11 or 12, I started playing guitar and just kind of taught myself.

I'm going through a divorce now. This is the second one, and like baseball, I'm not gonna get three strikes. I've been living by myself for five years and I'm very comfortable. I can play my guitar when I want to.

I destroyed a lot of guitars trying to get them to do what I wanted, but I learned something from every guitar I tore apart, and discovered even more things. Things like if the string is not straight from the bridge saddle to the nut, you're going to have friction.