Top 100 Chord Quotes
#1. Vanity is easily forgiven, for we are all vain, and even as we laugh at the weakness of others we feel that their vanity has touched the responding chord of our own.
Arthur Lynch
#2. When I first started, I worked with three chords in every bar, but I found that tied me down - I'm not a chord-change writer, I'm a songwriter.
Neil Diamond
#3. In actual pieces of music, the pitches of a chord may be duplicated and heard in many different octaves depending on the number and type of instruments playing.
Jonathan Peters
#4. I heard what I'd learned against my will to identify as new age music. Aimless and spacey, it meandered from unresolved keyboard chord to unresolved keyboard chord with some somnolent noodling in place of melody. Drooling pianos, music to sleepwalk by.
Timothy Hallinan
#5. I discovered the same thing Gram Parsons did, that soul music and country music are practically identical. Based off of the same chord structures, and the songs are of heartache and loss. The main connection is they both came up in church.
Justin Townes Earle
#6. I think The Hulk really hit a chord with me, I love the Hulk. But, I never dreamt I'd be playing Doctor Doom.
Simon Templeman
#7. Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging - weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn't want to do. I'm very grateful to him, actually.
Brian Eno
#8. Sometimes when you make a film you can go away for three months and then come back and live your life. But this struck a much deeper chord. I don't have the ability yet to speak about it in an objective.
Keanu Reeves
#9. Wait. Somehow the word chicken struck a chord. I played with it in my mind. Rolled it over my tongue. Then came to a conclusion; It was me. I was a chicken butt.
Darynda Jones
#10. Every breath drawn by an individual who truly serves God will elicit a responsive chord from the universe around him.
Samson Raphael Hirsch
#11. Star Wars has always struck a chord with people. There are issues of loyalty, of friendship, of good and evil ... The theme came from stories and ideas that have been around for thousands of years.
George Lucas
#12. Even an ordinary broken chord is made to disclose rare beauties; we are reminded of the fairies' hazelnuts in which diamonds were concealed but you could break the shell only if your hands were blessed.
Neville Cardus
#13. The music of your youth stays with you and winds itself around your heart. I hear one chord of "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Satisfaction" and am instantly back in time. It doesn't matter where I am, suddenly I'm walking through the woods, I'm in my best friend's room ...
Alice Hoffman
#14. It's tough to play the right chord on the instrument when there's someone out there who wants to kill you.
Darrell Hammond
#15. A thousand years of dominion went ringing across the Thames like a trumpet blast. Anglo-Saxon and Viking-Norman ancestry combined in a chord that had deafened and conquered nations. It expected the moon to bow the knee. If not, so much the worse for the moon.
Ariana Franklin
#16. Before I went on stage at Kyle Hutton's Real Life Real Music Festival, I heard one of his songwriting students, Abbey Hirvela, sing; she was in the poet's saddle and riding that horse like she owned it. She was good! I probably ruined her by showing her how to make an E chord without the 3rd though.
Ray Wylie Hubbard
#17. The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden chord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors.
Hakim Bey
#18. Sometimes adults seem as though they have cut a chord from being a child.
Roddy Doyle
#19. the Stoics had always approved of participation in public life, and this stand struck a chord with the Roman aristocracy, whose code of values placed a premium on political and military activity.
Marcus Aurelius
#20. A Schubert song, the A-major chord at the opening of Wagner's 'Lohengrin' - such incredible beauty is a mystery, the divinity of music.
Gian Carlo Menotti
#21. A chord that becomes a melodious delusion,
In polar discrepancy from blue to yellow painted,
In yellow I existed, with digoxin's deadly illusion,
Like Van Gogh's stars in a bright night untainted.
Selina A. Mahmood
#22. There is not a string attuned to mirth but has its chord of melancholy.
Thomas Hood
#23. It's a double-headed coin, because technology is a convenience but it's stifled our attention spans. At one time, albums had songs that were like ten minutes long, with different variations and chord progressions and changes.
Cee Lo Green
#24. When the wind is against you, like a kite, have your chord of faith rooted and you would fly highest ever.
Vikrmn
#25. The topic of leadership is a touchy one. A lot of leaders fail because they don't have the bravery to touch that nerve or strike that chord. Throughout my years, I haven't had that fear.
Kobe Bryant
#26. Bob Erlendson, a local piano player, taught me chord structure and which scales go along with them. Later, I began listening to [pianists] Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner. Then I got interested in [saxophonist] John Coltrane.
Lenny Breau
#27. I assure you, my dear, were you to play the piano on the moon, I would hear every chord.
Amor Towles
#28. In the symphony of love, the lost chord is a small organ lying somewhat north of the vagina.
Ruth Herschberger
#29. Wild Horses" started in a B-minor chord, and Stu didn't play minor chords, "fucking Chinese music.
Keith Richards
#30. The more melodies and chord changes, the less good it is for the clubs, but the better it is for radio, because it makes it really emotional.
David Guetta
#31. If you are able to discover your own keynote or chord and play it over gently to yourself, you will revive as if by magic. Your keynote can be ascertained by listening to some good music. When the note is played it will send a thrill right through you.
Vera Stanley Alder
#32. I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes (harmonies) that were being used all the time ... I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive.
Charlie Parker
#33. Even now, hearing the debates about Medicaid, the suggestion that somehow we could save money by cutting Medicaid strikes a chord in me personally. It seems there are some other ways we can save money rather than making it harder for people like my aunt to get health care.
Josh Earnest
#34. Peter couldn't help remembering the stirring moment when he and Kate had sung back into life the chorus of health and well-being in Andrew's body; the base chord that hummed in all living beings, distinct to each person but closely linked together.
Alan McCluskey
#35. Surrender your whole being to a note, and gravity disappears ... wi th one chord
Carlos Santana
#36. Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere.
Maurice Saatchi
#37. To create a minor 7 chord we add a b7 to a minor triad. The formula is 1 b3 5 b7.
Joseph Alexander
#38. I try to find nice chord changes, that's how I love to start, and then I start trying to knock it into a song, knock it into shape.
Jeff Lynne
#39. You just pick up a chord, go twang, and you're got music.
Sid Vicious
#40. I've never been a huge prog fan. My background is punk. My background is learning how to play a bar chord and listen to Discharge records when I was a kid.
Justin Broadrick
#41. A movie can and should have some real dissonance throughout - rage, heartache, tears, conflict, catharsis and all the other elements Aristotle demanded of a good story - but the chord has to be resolved.
Josh Radnor
#42. In those days, I didn't know how guys like Clapton and Beck were getting that searing blues lead sound, so I developed my style to be rhythmic and chord-based, with simple lead lines that you could almost hum.
John Fogerty
#43. We learn best - and change - from hearing stories that strike a chord within us.
John P. Kotter
#44. If you hear a C-major chord with an equal temperament, you've heard it a million times before and your brain accepts it. But if you hear a chord that you've never heard before, you're like, "huh."
Aphex Twin
#45. No chord in populism reverberates more strongly than the notion that the robust common sense of an unstained outsider is the best medicine for an ailing polity. Caligula doubtless got big cheers from the plebs when he installed his horse as proconsul.
Alexander Cockburn
#46. We'd hold a chord for three hours if we could.
John Cale
#47. There's a difference between the blues of the New Orleans guys and anyone else and the difference is in a chord, but I can't figure the name of it. It's a different chord, and they all make it.
Jimmy Rushing
#48. One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.
Lou Reed
#49. I like really sparse electronics, lush arrangements, and interesting chord structures.
Josh Klinghoffer
#50. Every once in awhile I'll call up Eddie (Van Halen) and ask, Found that fourth chord yet?
Billy Gibbons
#52. If I don't already know a song's chord progression, I'll stop writing and try to figure it out. I can occasionally listen to unstructured, amelodic ambient music, but I prefer no music. I don't need silence - I can write just about anywhere - but music is a major distraction.
F. Paul Wilson
#53. I have heard from many readers since 'The Girl in the Blue Beret' came out. The story of my airline pilot, former B-17 bomber pilot Marshall Stone, on his search to find the people who helped him during World War II has struck a chord.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#54. Playing inside the changes means playing enough of the important notes of the chord progression at important times. A good solo might be very free, but every once in a while it loops or hooks into an essential note that describes the harmonic change.
Chuck Israels
#55. Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises; when a disease touches such a visceral chord, it is often because that chord is already resonating.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#56. Here, I can hear things, the world throbs differently, silence thrums like a chord strummed eons ago, music in the aspen trees and in the firs and burr oaks and even in the fields of drying corn.
Nickolas Butler
#57. See, records have helped me to fall in love, no question. I hear something new, with a chord change that melts my guts, and before I know it I'm looking for someone, and before I know it I've
found her.
Nick Hornby
#58. I started wanting to inject more colorful chord phrasings from the music I actually grew up on, which was Hendrix, Rolling Stones, and stuff like that.
Bucky Pope
#59. And Paul hits this chord and I turn to him and say, 'That's it! Do that again!' In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that - both playing into each other's noses.
John Lennon
#60. It's really weird to be playing chords again. Haven't played chords for a long time. I realised I haven't played chord changes since OK Computer and stuff like that.
Ed O'Brien
#61. It's a real gift to be able to have the works of brilliant, great people to learn from and build from. It gives you so much more to draw on, and then you don't have to be all about three-chord pop songs. I don't really like that kind of writing.
Regina Spektor
#62. I was working like a dog as a housekeeper, barista, nanny, cook, so I could save enough money to really sit with my instruments. Whenever I had 20 minutes, I would practice a new chord or write a new verse.
Valerie June
#63. I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#64. For recessional music there's "Closing Time" by Semisonic, a four-chord farewell to the old century.
Thomas Pynchon
#65. The Beatles changed music forever. They took rock n' roll from a medium that was about cars and girls and gave it context, interesting chord changes and true musicianship.
Bob Spitz
#66. I'm not joking around when I've said occasionally, trying to learn how to play a D chord properly has been a very big thing for me.
Lou Reed
#67. My love is new music, I tend to go and see a lot of bands, while [co-producer] Mark Cooper spends his time reading the press. It's often the new acts that strike a chord, because they aren't seen on other shows.
Jools Holland
#68. I can talk about feelings, but I can't talk about why this chord on top of this chord sounds cool to me. It just makes me feel a certain way, and I like it.
John Dieterich
#69. A lot of people ask me why I don't expand and explore other musical areas, but I like the plain three- and four-chord rock-and-roll that I call the the semi-blues.
Joan Jett
#70. The wind makes you ache is some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die - migrate or die.
Stephen King
#71. The greatest romance in the life of a lyricist is when the right word meets the right note; often, however, a Park Avenue phrase elopes with a Bleecker Street chord, resulting in a shotgun wedding and a quickie divorce.
Yip Harburg
#72. If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.
Sylvia Plath
#73. I'd have these weird experiences where I'd just be walking down the street with this chord progression in my head, this happened more than a few times, and I'd walk home and find a fax in my machine and it would match the music in my head.
Duncan Sheik
#74. What I love about lyrics is that they don't have to be very complicated. A good sentence over a great chord with a good melody - all you need is that one moment.
Jason Schwartzman
#75. As an actor, you want as much variety as you can muster up. Otherwise you just keep playing the same chord over and over again.
Michelle Forbes
#76. My real name is Chord Overstreet. I actually got my name because my dad is in the music business as a songwriter. I was the third one in my family born, and there are three notes in a chord, so that's how they came up with my name.
Chord Overstreet
#77. I'm definitely responsible for coming in with some basic chord changes, or ideas. Everybody in the band looks to me to come up with the basic seed, so it's not very productive to come in with nothing.
Billy Corgan
#78. People listen to the music and sense what it is about. Sometimes they know exactly what the songs are about, sometimes they interpret their own meaning to the music, and thats great when this happens because it shows its striking a chord.
Enya
#79. For me, songwriting starts with a melody. When a musician plays a chord progression, either the words and vocal melody come to me, or they don't. That's how I determine who to write with. It works, or it doesn't.
Rain Phoenix
#80. Our lips brushed,and I felt like a chord had been struck inside me, and my body was humming with a pure musical note.
Amy Plum
#81. To experience courage,
is to experience life.
Reflected in loved ones,
the greatest encouragement.
Dignity, integrity and strength,
a harmonious chord,
interwoven
into an unbreakable cord.
Tom Althouse
#82. It's a law, a law of the universe. Like gravity or stupidity or how a minor chord always sounds sad.
Catherynne M Valente
#83. The melodies are always the most important part to me. I am pulled more to the groove than the chord progression. After you find the groove, you find the most simple chord progressions and then sit inside that groove.
Dave Matthews
#84. For we human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter of the incongruous; it is a tune to which we can go to sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang of a perfect chord.
G.K. Chesterton
#85. There is a chord in every heart that has a sigh in it if touched aright.
Ouida
#86. Eye , gazelle, delicate wanderer, Drinker of horizon's fluid line; Ear that suspends on a chord The spirit drinking timelessness; Touch, love, all senses ...
Stephen Spender
#87. I get inspiration, a lot of times, from very commonplace things that just strike a chord and develop themselves in the subconscious.
Stephen King
#88. In January 2006, Phantom of The Opera broke the record for the longest-running show in Broadway history, overtaking Cats and reminding us what real entertainment is about: candles, dry ice, big hair, and the sort of synthesized chord progressions only achieved by a collapse at the keyboard.
Emma Brockes
#89. The message of reconciliation, of nation-building, of granting amnesty, indemnity, has struck a powerful, favorable chord. And people can understand that we're here not for purposes of retribution but to forget the past and to build our country.
Nelson Mandela
#90. Chord progression is progression of emotions; storytelling - taking one person from one mood to the next. We are doing the same thing within a DJ set.
Richie Hawtin
#91. I had a love affair with books, with characters and their words. Books kept me company. When the voices of the book faded, as with the last long chord of a record, the back cover crinkling closed, I could swear I heard a door click shut.
Marya Hornbacher
#92. I wanted to write songs which I think is a different thing. I wanted to write music that is informed by folk music. The chord progressions are obvious references.
Joanna Newsom
#93. I look up after the last chord and smile. I tell Antony Barellan to shove it up his arse, and I see Dad clapping his hands off. I give him a little wave to show him that it's okay to be happy. I give him a little smile to show him what it looks like.
Cath Crowley
#94. I really got into psych because everything has a really good groove to it and it's nicely spaced out, but ultimately they are just cool pop songs with a little something else that makes them special and unique. They are interesting and have another dimension to them besides a three chord change.
Mike Romano
#95. I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#96. I just couldn't take school seriously: I had this guitar neck with four frets which I kept hidden under the desk. It had strings on it so I would practice my chord shapes under the desk and that's about all I did at school.
Alvin Lee
#97. Sometimes an unexpected chord change can be the difference between a good song and a great song.
Gary Talley
#98. Yes, basically, like you said, I'll work out a chord pattern and work out the lyrics over that.
Roger McGuinn
#99. I think the one-on-one gigs connecting with the fans - is the most important thing. That will help build your fan base. They'll talk about you, and word spreads. Those things are just as important as knowing how to play an E chord.
Joan Jett
#100. All of our songs take these really big creative turns and twists throughout the process, so sometimes songs will start out as a melody or some musical chord progressions.
Chester Bennington
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
