Top 100 Chord Quotes
#1. My songs, they have just the one chord, there's none of that fancy stuff you hear now, with lots of chords in one song. If I find another chord I leave it for another song.
Junior Kimbrough
#2. It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. I mean we've all read pieces where we thought, 'Oh, who gives a damn.'
Nora Ephron
#3. There is in souls a sympathy with sounds:
And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased
With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave;
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.
William Cowper
#4. I used to try and make up visually for what I couldn't play as a musician. I used to get into very incredible visual things where, in order just to make one chord more lethal, I'd make it a really lethal looking thing, whereas really it's just going to be picked normally.
Pete Townshend
#5. The word discipline sometimes touches a slightly rebellious chord in our natures. Remember that it comes from the word disciple.
Boyd K. Packer
#6. Universitas in modo citharae sit disposita, in qua diversa genera in modo chordarum sit consonantia. The universe is arranged like a cithera, in which different kinds of things sound together harmoniously, just as they do in a chord.
Honorius Augustodunensis
#7. The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.
Joyce Carol Oates
#8. The performance group The Ant Farm redoing JFK's assassination in Dallas was an event that struck a chord with me, especially when one of the members said they'd only intended to do it once, but the Dallas audience insisted they repeat the performance.
Laura Mullen
#9. Then I began to play. Variations on a G major chord, the most wonderful chord known to mankind, infinitely happy. I could live inside a G major chord, with Grace, if she was willing. Everything uncomplicated and good about me could be summed up by that chord.
Maggie Stiefvater
#10. I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I'm seeing we don't live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist.
David Levithan
#11. You can find me in the melodies, the chord progressions, the song style and structure. The lyrical places you fine me most are in the lyrics that 'show' more than 'tell.' I like to describe what the listener is seeing and let them make up the middle rather than telling them.
Kristian Bush
#12. When the chord of monotony is stretched to its tightest, it breaks with the sound of a song.
G.K. Chesterton
#13. I really write emotionally so whatever mood I'm in, or if a chord hits me a certain way that's what I'll go off of.
Zac Farro
#15. It's very much a piece of myself when I write a song. I don't mean to say it's very personal, like the lyrics mean something personal to me. When I write a song, that's my taste in music - my taste in chord progressions and melodies.
Zooey Deschanel
#16. I just scribbled away and eventually a C-major chord was there. I didn't ever decide I was going to be a composer. It was like being tall. It's what I was. It's what I did.
Richard Rodney Bennett
#17. We wanted to guide the musicians, so we could create our own sound. We would never let the band just go in and play the chord sheets. We were very focused on what we had in mind for these productions.
Lamont Dozier
#18. Sometimes it rose to an aching chord that caught the throat, saying this is the safety, this is warmth, this is the Whole.
John Steinbeck
#19. It turns out kids today still learn that four-chord progression when they're just picking up the guitar.
John Scofield
#20. I studied chord theory and started playing the piano.
Flea
#22. The problem with real life is there's no musical score. In movies, you know you're in danger because there's an ominous chord underlining the scene,
Sue Grafton
#23. The song could start with a riff that I base the song around. Or a chord progression or a melody I have, I just write a story about it. Lyric-wise, it's cool to have someone else's input too.
Orianthi
#24. 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.
Charlie Watts
#25. I had an affinity for pandas. Something about clumsy vegetarians struck a chord with me.
Lish McBride
#26. The reason we did 'Land of a Thousand Dances' and 'Gloria' on 'Horses' was because I liked repetitious, three-chord rock songs, but I didn't understand that I could write my own. I didn't realize that you could use those chords a million times.
Patti Smith
#27. I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?
Joni Mitchell
#28. It was no half-hearted spring, this: the whole island vibrated with it as though a great, ringing chord had been struck. Everyone and everything heard it and responded.
Gerald Durrell
#29. The most obvious effect of inverting a chord is to change its bass note, and one result of voice leading through the use of inversions is the creation of melodic bass lines that connect from chord to chord by steps rather than by the wider leaps common when root position voicings alone are used.
Carl Schroeder
#30. I write my songs many times to chord progressions on a piano. Unfortunately, I can't keep playing the piano, so I just record it into the software.
Nadia Ali
#31. It was a feeling which he had seen before in his mother; but no chord within vibrated to it.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#33. Neil Young does throw in a major seven chord here and there, so if you're a new guitar player learning Neil Young songs, you'll learn some seven chords, and some different positions. Nothing too complicated, just enough to kind of open up your knowledge a little bit.
Jesse Harris
#35. When we appeal to the throne of grace we do so through Mary, honoring God by honoring His Mother, imitating Him by exalting her, touching the most responsive chord in the sacred heart of Christ with the sweet name of Mary.
Robert Bellarmine
#36. Indeed, all forms of human folly and beastiality touch a very symphathetic chord within our breasts!
J.D. Salinger
#37. I hardly know where I found the hardihood thus to open a conversation with a stranger; the step was contrary to my nature and habits: but I think her occupation touched a chord of sympathy somewhere;
Charlotte Bronte
#38. Talking about covers, whether visually or sonically, if a particular combination of notes struck a chord in your heart in a way that you want to be a part of it by covering that song, then there's nothing wrong with it.
Ville Valo
#39. I always take care to have interesting chord progressions, because you can have the best sound design in the club, and you'll kill it in the club, but in five years, kids will have better sound design. But if your music is good, you'll always be able to listen to it, even in 20 or 50 years.
Zedd
#40. I set down a beautiful chord on paper - and suddenly it rusts.
Alfred Schnittke
#41. Normally writers do not talk much,because they are saving their conversations for the readers of their book-
those invisible listeners with whom we wish to strike a sympathetic chord.
Ruskin Bond
#42. Not everyone in Santa Monica is a well-heeled, juice-cleansing, Prius-driving yogini, but for better or worse, that is the city's dominant chord.
Meghan Daum
#43. The third note in a chord is what depicts whether it's major or minor. Rhythm and Blues hardly ever uses it because it means that the melody is free to move between major and minor because you're not clashing with the third being depicted one way or the other.
Robert Palmer
#44. I practice all the scales. Everyone should know lots of scales. Actually, I feel there are only scales. What is a chord, if not the notes of a scale hooked together?
John McLaughlin
#45. I've been kind of listening to the composer Britten and his rendition of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' The opening track is a choral section where all the weird fairies, who are played by kids in the production, sing. It's a crazy opening melody and chord sequence - really amazing.
Dev Hynes
#46. Into the silence rips a sound that makes me let go of Max's hand and cover my ears. It is like the strafe of a bullet, nails on a chalkboard, promises being broken. It's a note I have never heard - this chord of pure pain - and it takes a moment to realize it is coming from me.
Jodi Picoult
#47. Then an odd thing happened. Britney put her finger on the ridge of the painted glass and rubbed it. It made a perfect noise. The kind of noise that goes on and on as a beautiful noise does once it has wrung the ear. It was the chord of the wild sea.
David Paul Kirkpatrick
#48. Maybe sometimes things come to you that you never, in a thousand years, would have included. But they strike a chord, so grab it. Trust your ability to know what's true to it and what would carry you off into outer space.
Joan Tewkesbury
#49. There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.
Terry Pratchett
#50. The marvels of God are not brought forth from one's self. Rather, it is more like a chord, a sound that is played. The tone does not come out of the chord itself, but rather, through the touch of the musician. I am, of course, the lyre and harp of God's kindness.
Hildegard Of Bingen
#51. The jazz chord substitutions in a country song ... that was another thing that bent people's ears. I guess that my favorites are the unique ones. It's not how fast you play. It's that unique blending of different stuff I'm most proud of.
Brian Setzer
#52. Well the country songs themselves are three-chord stories, ballads which are mostly sad. If you are already feeling sorry for yourself when you listen to them they will take you to an even sadder place.
Willie Nelson
#53. Sometimes images may emerge from some chord in my subconscious, the way a dream might. Even in those paintings where an image unconsciously develops, a certain kind of experience is usually necessary in order to perceive it.
Robert Motherwell
#54. Trust me, the only real way to understand 'Chic' is in highfalutin terms. Our chord progressions were based on European modal melodies. I made those early 'Chic' records to impress my jazz friends.
Nile Rodgers
#55. Genius is when you strike a chord accidently, and the ensuing music is beyond your control
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#56. By adopting a certain physical posture, a resonant chord is struck in spirit.
Bruce Lee
#57. Just because you can leap off a drum kit doing a scissors kick while hitting a chord, people expect you to be an extrovert socially. But I'm not always comfortable with the idea of small talk at a party.
Alex Kapranos
#58. I've always been a fan of 'Beat It,' 'You Rock My World,' and 'Smooth Criminal.'
Chord Overstreet
#59. With the classical stuff, I've always been better at the big brushstrokes and broad textures than spending ages honing a chord, or tweaking a sample.
Anna Meredith
#60. Feeling has as much to say as the words do. You can have the greatest words in the world and if they're not believable, they don't strike a chord and they're not said convincingly, it's not a great song.
Sam Phillips
#61. I love classical music; I love the way it's worked ... all those chord sequences so I often use that sort of effect in my solos.
Jon Lord
#62. Chris (Anderson) is risking his life with every chord, that's how much it means to him. He has such a reverence for beauty, he plays like an angel.
Charlie Haden
#63. Art only survives by striking a chord in someone's heart and offering solace and reassurance.
Hannah Mary Rothschild
#64. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.
Alan W. Watts
#65. This is our grace: To be a note
In the exact chord that animates creation.
Deena Metzger
#66. I got bored with the old way - it came too easy. I worked until I could play and chord changes at any tempo in any key, and then said 'What else is there?' Now I'm finding out.
Don Ellis
#67. When you have 13 horns, and one is soloing, you have 12 people to play the richest, fullest chord you could ever imagine behind that solo.
Carla Bley
#68. It's funny how three or four notes of anger can be struck at once, creating the perfect chord of fury.
Tayari Jones
#70. What I'm trying to produce is the visual equivalent of the chord change that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
Rian Hughes
#71. But over and above the offers of help and love, precious and determined though they are, is the fact that we are public knowledge. Our signal has been heard. By each response a friend is activated. Our message had a single note. Here is its returning chord.
Marion Coutts
#72. If jazz has to be termed as a wave, then music is a sea, but if the reflectors in the water is the chord.
Pat Metheny
#73. I didn't want to be this four-chord acoustic singer songwriter because that stuff just got so old to me.
Kathleen Edwards
#74. Why would that cause him to pack up his bolt, chord, and sphere, and hurry to Ecba, of all places?
Neal Stephenson
#75. You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#76. 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!
Ken Hensley
#77. I tend to hear rhythm and melody, chord-progressions, long before I hear words.
Zach Condon
#78. Peace, a commodity purchased with friendship and safety and anything comfortable and all things familiar; peace that was a pleasant melody playing through the moments of their day; a chord striking only the notes of security and agreement and understanding and order.
Dan Groat
#79. I freaking love Gwyneth Paltrow - I think she's awesome. She is fantastic.
Chord Overstreet
#80. It's like a piece of music; you never lose sight of the theme. Each scene pushes off to the next like music builds and you can almost hear the next chord progression, so it has a strict structure, which is very compelling.
David Strathairn
#81. The flanger setting ... makes it sound as if the chord is being chewed over thoughtfully by a large genie accustomed to telling long, implausible stories
Tim Brookes
#82. I personally kind of yearn to play characters who are complex and who strike a truthful chord in me and who are challenged in some way and, I guess, who kind of move through those challenges.
Toni Collette
#83. I have just awoken, having dreamed of music. The final chord fades away within me while I try to focus on individuals amid the living, breathing mass packed into this vast waiting room, in this mixture of sleep and weariness.
Andrei Makine
#84. Whenever I work on the computer, I have folders and you know how you always give everything working titles, if you have a riff or a motif or a chord progression or a lyric written on a page, it's just a line or a word or something so I always give everything a working title when I'm making a folder.
Page Hamilton
#85. Bird's mind and fingers work with incredible speed. He can imply four chord changes in a melodic pattern where another musician would have trouble inserting two.
Leonard Feather
#86. The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
Albert Camus
#87. So I learnt a few country western songs, I bought a chord book, and right away I started writing my own stuff, which nobody else did that, I don't know why.
John Fahey
#88. There's magic and metaphors in music superior to any other art form. An exquisite alchemy is involved in mixing pieces of your self and soul into the precisely perfect blend of harmonies, melodies, and lyrics that strike a chord.
A.J. Compton
#89. When the Killers first came out, a lot of people thought we were English, and it touched a chord in me, because my roots are very American.
Brandon Flowers
#90. The way jazz works is that we take a theme, and then we write using the same structure, same chord changes, and then we can do different tunes.
Tommy Chong
#91. The way that words mutate reminds me of fashions in music. The word
the note
is a constant. But the setting and chord in which it occurs alters with the mood of a nation from major to minor, from the assertive to the mournful and foreboding.
Neal Ascherson
#92. The search for meaning is really the search for the lost chord. When the lost chord is discovered by humankind, the discord in the world will be healed and the symphony of the universe will come into complete harmony with itself.
John O'Donohue
#94. I grew up with a piano, and my aunt taught me chords. I played with bands in high school and I could do like, C chord, G chord, D chord; really simple, rhythm piano.
Cristin Milioti
#95. I can't remember the first song I learned to play on bass, but the first song I learned to play on guitar was 'For Your Love' by the Yardbirds. That kind of was the beginning for me. I thought it was a great song and I loved the open chord progression at the beginning of that song.
Geddy Lee
#96. Every person, every race, every nation, has its own particular keynote which it brings to the general chord of life and of humanity.
Annie Besant
#97. She quite liked this aspect of her personality, the way her mood could change from melancholy to euphoric because of a breeze or a flavor or a beautiful chord progression. It meant she never had to feel too down about feeling down.
Liane Moriarty
#98. I came up with a 'forecasting cell,' which is basically a mixed intention cell or chord that is a complete hybrid of a consonance and a dissonance, and what that does when you are improvising is lead you to where you are supposed to go.
Christian Scott
#100. War and marriage and childbirth had passed over her without touching any deep chord within her and she was unchanged.
Margaret Mitchell
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