Guitar The Quotes

#1. The music I want to hear in my head sounds somewhere between Jimi Hendrix and Massive Attack. It's not really like my dad, but there will always be similarities because we have the same vocal cords, and I learnt the guitar the way he taught me.

Dhani Harrison

#2. I'll bet she's beautiful, that girl he talks about, and she's got everything that I have to live without ... He's the reason for the teardrops on my guitar, the only one who's got enough of me to break my heart. He's the song in the car I keep singing; don't know why I do.

Taylor Swift

#3. I consider myself as a singer first, but something that really helped me come into my own is that there's not a separation between me singing and me playing the guitar. The two fed off the other.

Shawn Colvin

#4. I like jazz, but I could never play it. You just sit there with a guitar the size of a Chevy on your chest, wearing a stupid hat, playing the same solo for an hour.

Dave Mustaine

#5. The more I got into playing guitar, the more I enjoyed music, and the broader my listening became. The instrument itself became important to me, and I started messing around with classical guitar and took classical lessons.

Alex Lifeson

#6. We were really interested in music from all over the world. We realized that what we were doing was very close to contemporary classical music because of the lack of tonality in the guitar- the fact that I play guitar the way I play.

Arto Lindsay

#7. I can play the guitar, the dulcimer, the piano, and the drums. However, I am not a "performance quality" musician. Rather, I am a composer and a producer.

Frederick Lenz

#8. P.I.L. has been a favorite of mine since high school especially there metal box album. The guitarist Keith Levine gets some of the best sounds ever to come out of a guitar. The songs are really free form and experimental and have a heavy dub influence.

Marcel Dzama

#9. A student might ask, how long will it take to learn guitar ... , the answer is, as long as you live - that short.

Philip Toshio Sudo

#10. The bass should be the note of the bass drum, and then you've got the engine of the band that everything else builds on. Everything else, the guitar, the keyboards, is a colour.

Suzi Quatro

#11. To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

Henry Miller

#12. In the '90s, I think I rediscovered my guitar. The Jam was obviously very guitar-based, but in the Style Council I just got really disillusioned with playing the guitar. The further it went on, the less and less I played, to a point where I couldn't pick it up any more.

Paul Weller

#13. Well I was on the one hand, the more I played the guitar the more I began to really love the guitar and to love virtually any kind of music that anybody played well on guitar.

John Fahey

#14. A trumpet sounds pretty much like a trumpet, and that's true of a lot instruments; pianos sound like pianos, but there's something about the guitar - the range of possibilities is much broader.

The Edge

#15. I think when I began, I played distortion more than the guitar. The results of my strumming. Now I play the twang of the string, which is a lot closer to the source of the sound making.

Ian Williams

#16. The gut-strung guitar, the classical guitar, that is a whole different world on its own. When you think what the guitar can do and what every individual player does with a guitar, everyone has their own identity coming through the guitar.

Jimmy Page

#17. Barney Kessel was 'Mr. Guitar,' the foremost jazz guitarist of his generation. He had an amazing imagination, his solos were incredible, he swung his tail off, he was a heck of an arranger and could out-read anybody ...

Larry Coryell

#18. I had this idea ... I wanted the sound to sing and have that thickness but yet still have an edge so that it could articulate. So my dad and I designed the guitar ... the one that was made from an old fireplace.

Brian May

#19. The reason I put make-up on or wear the costume is to try and find my own style. It's like my guitar style - I'm just trying to be an original artist.

Miyavi

#20. Among God's creations, two, the dog and the guitar, have taken all the sizes and all the shapes in order not to be seperated from the man. -Andres Segovia

Andres Segovia

#21. The guitar is a meditative tool to touch God and find love within yourself.

Pepe Romero

#22. I would prefer it if people thought that I didn't work hard, that I just played the guitar for three minutes a week and was like, 'Check out this song - what do you think?' That would be ideal. I would prefer telling people that I'm just truly talented.

Julian Casablancas

#23. I could have probably gone on and still played the part of the guitar player of Limp Bizkit, but musically I was kind of bored. If I was to continue, it would have been about the money and not about the true music, and I don't want to lie to myself, or to them or to fans of Limp Bizkit.

Wes Borland

#24. When I read the 'Country Strong' script, I thought, 'Can't they just hand-double it? Can't I just do the rest of the movie and not have to do the performing?' It took me six months to learn to sing and play guitar at the same time.

Garrett Hedlund

#25. A good example of a lyric that makes me laugh but might not hit anybody right away is, "Sit behind the guitar and play the chords," just because it's such a lame image. It's not rock'n'roll at all to be sitting behind a guitar.

Tim Heidecker

#26. Guitar Player Magazine says Dick Dale is the father of Heavy Metal, blowing up 48 amplifiers, creating the first power amplifier.

Dick Dale

#27. A wah-wah is important as well. I love it; it makes the guitar scream.

Robin Trower

#28. A guitar is a very personal extension of the person playing it. You have to be emotionally and spiritually connected to your instrument. I'm very brutal on my instruments, but not all the time.

Eddie Van Halen

#29. Catfish is not playing guitar no more, he's doing like a home-front thing. He had been in the business around ten years before I got in it, so I guess he's had enough of it.

Bootsy Collins

#30. Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat, as James Brown and Prince can, has my eternal respect. Prince, who is a genius of the highest order, can come back up while singing and playing the guitar.

Bill Nighy

#31. I deplore those long brown curly fingernail folk. I don't even especially like people who have one long thumbnail for guitar. My mate Karl has one, and it scratched me the other day. I was sickened.

Russell Brand

#32. I do play the guitar, and I can sing, but just enough to carry a tune.

Cameron Monaghan

#33. For decades I'd flit from drawing table to typewriter to guitar with no sense of strain or contradiction. They all exercised the same psychic muscle (the Imagination), and working in one medium refreshed my appetite for the others.

Peter Blegvad

#34. Nothing can duplicate the sheer power and feeling you get from standing in front of your amp and bashing on your guitar.

James Hetfield

#35. It means a lot that fans feel connected to us and care about us, and that means the world, because that's what we want. We don't want them to feel like we're unattainable because we're just like them. We're all normal kids but somehow we got lucky when we picked up a guitar.

Taylor York

#36. Acting, I love it and I feel that I'm good at it, but the thing that makes me feel most alive is when I'm playing guitar and singing.

Taryn Manning

#37. He could play the guitar just like ringing a bell.

Chuck Berry

#38. Never ever let anyone take the charge of your Guitar called LIFE. Tune your Dreams, for you are the composer of the tracks of your life. Why do you wait? What are you scared of?

Vikrmn

#39. I shoulda learned to play the guitar.

Mark Knopfler

#40. It was cool at the rock camp - girls could just be themselves and they could be silly, they could roll around on the floor playing guitar.

Courtney Barnett

#41. Some are skeptical. My mom thought the guitar was going to fizzle out in two weeks, that it was just a fad-and that was in 1958.

Jeff Beck

#42. It's not like you're being fake, it's just the way you color it, like a guitar player uses pedals or different effects. That's why I get so mad about people who are down on vocal reverb. It's not a crutch, people, it's an aesthetic choice!

Kelly Hogan

#43. I don't really feel like a rock artist, but I guess in the small category of the world of music genres, that's where I fall in because I've got a guitar.

Courtney Barnett

#44. I started playing the guitar and singing at about 11 or 12.

Drake Bell

#45. Sold my guitar to the baker's son for a few crumbs and a place to hide.

Bob Dylan

#46. 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.

Bonnie Raitt

#47. If I'm playing with Ozzy it's just a guitar thing. But with the vocals I feel like I'm studying for the SATs.

Zakk Wylde

#48. My guitar is like my best friend. My guitar can get me through anything. If I can sit down and write an amazing song with my guitar about what's going on in life, then that's the greatest therapy for me.

Miley Cyrus

#49. The best music happens when you have a personal connection to it. That same philosophy can extend to the instrument you hold in your hands: if a guitar means something special, you're bound to do great things with it.

Frank Iero

#50. I'm just not arbitrarily choosing to have five guitars play one type of thing. In that way there's a definite similarity between a symphony orchestra and the 100 guitar symphony.

Glenn Branca

#51. There were times I used to go to parties when I was, you know, like 15-, 16-years-old, and I'd always bring my guitar, and all my friends would be like, sing one of the Smokey songs. And everything I sang was his music, and I could sound just like him.

Teena Marie

#52. That happens every time I get behind a guitar, regardless of what I'm saying, 'cause music is freedom and being free is the closest I've ever felt to being spiritual.

Ben Harper

#53. I suppose my father was more influential in my starting to play the guitar.

Andy Partridge

#54. I wish I had met [Francesca] Woodman forty years ago. It would have been great to live with her for a year. She didn't save anything. She played the camera like a new guitar. She murdered herself out taking pictures ...

Richard Prince

#55. I just think that the question of women in rock or women playing guitar, I just think it's such a non-issue, and I think that probably the sooner critics and press outlets can just erase the 'what's it like being a women in rock?' question from their vocabulary, the better off everyone will be.

Annie E. Clark

#56. I like the guitar better these days. I like the bass, too, but it's hard to fit a bass amp in a small car.

Dee Dee Ramone

#57. There comes a point with any collaboration like that where you start having other interests creatively. I was moving in one direction musically, and as a guitar player, Mark wanted to move in another direction. That was essentially the reason we broke up.

Scott Stapp

#58. I'm in hotel rooms night after night, playing a lot of the same venues as my dad and carrying the guitar that used to be his. We're the same person. I don't know if he realises how much of a legacy he has left to his children.

Martha Wainwright

#59. Too bad that Paul Ryan confessed to being a fan of Rage Against The Machine. By doing so, he not only begged for a bucketing by many of their fans but actually got one from the band's guitar player, Tom Morello.

Henry Rollins

#60. Be a master of your dreams, not the slave of your sorrows.

Vikrmn

#61. I try not to punish the audience by making them listen to too much acoustic guitar.

Kaki King

#62. By the time I was 12 or 13, I felt that I was special, because I could play the guitar and write songs.

Paul Simon

#63. I've got a quick mouth, and I set my boundaries. Nothing ever happened that I couldn't handle. Once when a guy came on stage making rude gestures, I hit him over the head with my guitar.

Suzi Quatro

#64. I still believe in the need for guitars and drums and desperate poetry.

Frank Turner

#65. There's a sound with Motley Crue, and it comes with Vince's voice, which is such an important part of the show, and Mick's guitar. And the way Tommy and me play together is an important part of it.

Nikki Sixx

#66. I don't know why you're making the poor girl play with you," Peter said. "You're going to completely slaughter her."
"Well, I am the greatest Guitar Hero player of all time," Jack said.

Amanda Hocking

#67. My voice is my improvisational instrument, the melody instrument. The guitar is harmonic structure. I'm not a good enough guitarist to improvise on it.

Paul Simon

#68. The concept of clearing one's mind before performing a task so that it is consumed by nothing but that task, yet is open at the same time to anything that might happen - that concept can be applied to playing guitar, and it's enormously helpful for improvising.

Kirk Hammett

#69. The guitar is the most unpredictable and least reliable musical instrument in existence ... and also the sweetest, the warmest, the most delicate, whose melancholic voice awakes in our soul exquisite reveries.

Andres Segovia

#70. I remember feeling for the first time going somewhere where I was part of a community where I didn't feel like an outcast. I felt like I belonged. Everyone had a guitar strapped to their back.

John Petrucci

#71. I'm not that fluid when it comes to scales and modes. I just pick up the guitar and play. It's all about exploration: just tune the guitar any way you want and start playing.

Alex Lifeson

#72. A lot of places we go, when they see the organ coming in, they're expecting rock and roll, but after they hear us play they like it. To me, guitar cuts through-it carries more than organ. But organ has got more guts.

Wes Montgomery

#73. I started writing songs when I was 10. It was a natural way to express myself as a kid. It wasn't until I started listening to jazz, joined the choir and picked up a guitar that my little hobby became something far more serious.

Kimbra

#74. The guitar is the coolest instrument in the world.

Steve Vai

#75. I would have liked to grow up in Liverpool and become a rocker. I would have put my boots on, jeans and a leather jacket, and long hair and played the guitar.

Hasso Plattner

#76. 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.

Brian Eno

#77. I play guitar; you'll find me at home strumming 'Vincent' on the guitar. I also read a lot of poetry, and Shakespeare was my first love, which was why I got into acting. A lot of the fighters are intelligent!

Dave Legeno

#78. The first song that made me interested in music was 'Oh, Pretty Woman' by Roy Orbison. It was the guitar intro, that riff, that I really liked and made me listen in a different way.

Geddy Lee

#79. Even before I wrote any songs, I had this idea of a triangle where the voice was at the top, some sort of guitar element on one side, and then some sort of really basic rhythm on the other side. That's where I started from in the recording process.

Panda Bear

#80. And I've also come to the conclusion that, as far as guitar solos and things like that are concerned, it's more important to complement the music rather than take away from it.

Dave Navarro

#81. I'm actively going out onto the porch and noodling around on my guitar.

Jemaine Clement

#82. And oh my God, who brought that goddamn guitar? I want to kill them. Do you know how you can tell who the douche bag is at the party? It's the guy who starts playing the acoustic guitar.

Robin Benway

#83. So you do shorter versions of the hits, or you take out a long guitar solo or things like that to make time for the hits and new music as well. But I don't think any of us ever get to do as much new music as we would like to.

Lee Ann Womack

#84. I explored rock culture and what the guitar can do though people like Jimmy Page and John McLaughlin, and the music moves away from pop.

Johnny Marr

#85. At school I had a really hard time being a guitar player. It's like being a male ballerina in a way. It's not the norm.

Orianthi

#86. A lot of the songs start with an image. I was sitting there playing the guitar and I pictured this old, dirty green car, with the window rolled down, in the hot, hot, hot Texas heat, and this beautiful woman I knew when I was a kid sitting behind the wheel, looking out at me.

Edie Brickell

#87. If a guy can play Guitar Hero with me and sit at home and watch the Food Network and read magazines with me, that's good. I don't think there are many guys that's fun for. It's a lot to ask.

Blake Lively

#88. Oh, man, I love the Staple Singers. I love Pop Staples' guitar playing, too. He's one of my favorite guitar players.

Brittany Howard

#89. The thing with One Direction songs is that you can probably break them all down to an acoustic guitar and vocal.

Jamie Lawson

#90. There was a dark aura about him, a hint of caged power in that deceptively casual, sprawled poise. Danger personified.
If this had been a film she would have expected to hear the warning wail of an electric guitar creep over the soft background bustle of the city.

Heather R. Blair

#91. The thing about guitar players is we're all like a brotherhood or sisterhood. We don't care if you're great, good, bad, in between or whatever. As long as you love it, then we're all going to help each other.

Tommy Emmanuel

#92. I tried to connect my singing voice to my guitar an' my guitar to my singing voice. Like the two was talking to one another.

B.B. King

#93. and I learned more at the hands of Carl Wilson than I learned from anybody else. He taught me a fuck of a lot of guitar playing. That man is a good guitar player.

Holly George-Warren

#94. We sat side by side on the swings. The creaking sound they made seemed sexier to me than a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo.

Ryu Murakami

#95. Just the other day someone threw a bra duct-taped to a tennis ball. I just stood there, playing guitar, thinking how this was totally premeditated. Some girl sat around inventing a way to get her bra onstage from 40 rows back.

Dave Grohl

#96. I did pick up a guitar once, but the strings hurt my fingers so I put it down again.

Bill Nighy

#97. You can't go on stage and live - it's false all the way. I can't stand the premise of going out in jeans and a guitar and looking as real as you can in front of 18,000 people. I mean, it's not normal!

David Bowie

#98. At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.

Joni Mitchell

#99. It's not crazy to want to have certain songs be developed harmonically and still want to make noise with the guitar. And you can have both.

Elvis Costello

#100. The ukulele was the first of many instruments they had bought for me. They got me a guitar when I was eleven, which my son Morgan uses until this day. They paid for 3 years of guitar lessons; they bought me a bass fiddle, which I still play.

Tony Visconti