Top 100 My Instrument Quotes
#1. I like to use the audience as my color palette, my instrument.
Bobby McFerrin
#2. I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I cam to sing remains unsung.
Rabindranath Tagore
Christina Carson
#3. The Pleasure Seekers eventually turned into Cradle, when we started writing our own material. My younger sister Nancy was brought in as singer and I kind of stepped aside as main lead singer and concentrated on my instrument.
Suzi Quatro
#5. I try not to talk during the day when I have a show that night. My voice is my instrument, just like a saxophonist's instrument is his saxophone, plus also his voice, if he's the one between tunes that makes announcements.
Emo Philips
#6. If you listen to the way I speak, I have a lot of rhythm, use a lot of accents. When I'm playing my instrument, that concept comes through very clearly.
Stefon Harris
#7. The song I came to sing
remains unsung to this day.
I have spent my days in stringing
and in unstringing my instrument.
The time has not come true,
the words have not been rightly set;
only there is the agony
of wishing in my heart ...
Rabindranath Tagore
#8. Rock guitarists usually do not wish to think trains of thought about anything but their own guitar playing during a long solo, and I could not play this way if I were not able to divide my attention between my ever changing musical environment and my instrument itself.
John Frusciante
#9. If I ever start talking to you about my 'craft', my 'instrument', you have permission to shoot me.
Drew Barrymore
#10. I think when I was pretty young I got really into the tone of my instrument and I remember just playing one note for an hour to just kind of feel the resonance of the violin.
Andrew Bird
#11. I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.
Rabindranath Tagore
#12. I've been playing my instrument since I was about three or four. That's when I started banging around on the piano, trying to be like The Beatles.
Nat Wolff
#13. My instrument is the studio. When I play my instrument, I'm creating music using the studio. All the other instruments serve it.
Son Lux
#14. After I learned the piano, I went on to learn percussion, the tuba, b-flat baritone, French horn, trombone, trumpet, most of the instruments in the orchestra. Trumpet was my instrument.
Quincy Jones
#15. He was seriously thinking of becoming a monk. He thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument, but my instrument needed tuning, and we had to split.
Mimi Rogers
#16. My identity has everything to do with me and my instrument. It doesn't have to do with what production style I use, or how many people played on it, whether it's sparse or grandiose or whatever. And I'm social, frankly.
Liz Phair
#17. I don't play the traditional Charlie Parker songs. But I do improvise and I do create with my instrument, and that to me is jazz. But there are people who use the word 'jazz' only in a traditional sense, and they would be offended by that, and that's fine.
Kenny G
#18. One of the reasons why I went to the Yale School of Drama is because I felt that I was acting off of instinct, but sometimes that is not reliable. When you're not feeling it, what do you do? So, going to grad school was about getting the tools to just use my instrument to the best of my ability.
Lupita Nyong'o
#19. My main calling in life is to seek and achieve spiritual balance, and to express that through my instrument. Everything else is here today, gone later today.
Steve Vai
#20. The audience is like my instrument. It's not just me up there, it's collaborative.
Bobby McFerrin
#21. The piano is like an orchestra - I'm very fortunate that I chose it as my instrument.
McCoy Tyner
#22. Music has always been in my family, but it was mainly keyboards. I learned to play classical piano, but when I first heard the amazing bass guitar of James Jamerson, who played on all the big Motown hits of the '60s and '70s, I knew bass guitar was my instrument.
Suzi Quatro
#23. I have always personally preferred to think of what is more difficult for my instrument, and not what is the most natural or the easiest. I enjoy the challenges - especially those that come with composers who have written contemporary music for the recorder.
Michala Petri
#24. Spring has past, summer has gone and winter is here. And the song that I meant to sing remains unsung. I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument.
Robin S. Sharma
#25. My voice is my instrument ... It is not in the throat, from where it appears to come. It is in my feet and how they touch the floor, in my legs and how they lift and sink with the rhythm of the song. It is in my hips and belly and lower back ...
Holly Near
#26. I almost tell him that I'd never be able to do something like that, just take out my instrument and begin playing on a street corner. But it feels to personal. Yes, I'm shy, but why bring it to his attention? I'm too shy to talk about how shy I am.
Andrew Clements
#27. [John Coltrane] liked my qualities as a person and that's the reason why he let me play with him. It wasn't what I was doing musically or my instrument or anything like that. He let me play whatever I wanted to play.
Pharoah Sanders
#28. I'm looking forward to some more solo acoustic dates. That's a lot of fun for me, because I get to be alone with the song. And I get to hear every little nuance; if my instrument does something that I wasn't expecting, I get to chase that. Chase that down a little bit.
Bob Weir
#29. I do go back and listen to my songs. I'm biting my fingernails the whole way through, but I do listen. I have a lot of songs I've wanted to re-record just because of how advanced technology is and the different instrument sounds that I'm more experienced with.
Andrae Crouch
#30. He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.
Rachel Hartman
#31. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#32. My first instrument was actually the trombone, but that didn't last long. Soon I was playing guitar in bands from the time I was 11 or 12.
Dave Grohl
#33. 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
#34. I probably wrote three-quarters of the songs without an instrument in my hands.
Richard Thompson
#35. The stage sharpened my creative instrument and encouraged me to go deeper and try new things.
Ben Vereen
#36. At age ten I switched to guitar, and I've loved the instrument ever since. And I love to practice. I just do. I just love guitar. It still brings a smile to my face!
Michael Angelo Batio
#37. In the beginning of my twenties, I started transcendental meditation. For years, I did nothing else. Every holiday, I went to courses. Meditation is a real simple instrument. You don't need a long beard or a sari. It's meant to bring you to yourself. It's as easy as that.
Peter Lindbergh
#38. Since love first made the breast an instrument
Of fierce lamenting, by its flame my heart
Was molten to a mirror, like a rose
I pluck my breast apart, that I may hang
This mirror in your sight
Gaze you therein
Muhammad Iqbal
#39. My parents encouraged us to commit to things, so if we wanted to learn an instrument, it was all the grades and all the theory.
Laura Mvula
#40. I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.
Tom Waits
#41. Charlie Parker and Art Tatum to me were genius, and I'm right below that. I did, in my own way, do something different on the instrument, and that's the way I'd like to be remembered.
Buddy DeFranco
#42. I think my first instrument was a ukulele that they gave me. I used to know how to play that pretty well.
Don Henley
#43. My father was in a dance band, and I wanted to do what he did, play the saxophone, but I couldn't blow a note, so he suggested the guitar. Chromatic harmonica was actually my first instrument, and I got very good at it - not quite Stevie Wonder, but very good.
Pete Townshend
#44. My headmaster chastised me with a diabolical instrument a leather strap tacked to a piece of wood but he taught me with such villainous success that I am now Prime Minister.
Robert Menzies
#45. But the guitar is my favorite, first and foremost instrument.
Midge Ure
#46. Everybody in our family studied a musical instrument. My father was really big on that. Somehow I only took a year or two of piano lessons and I convinced my father to let me take dancing lessons.
Madonna Ciccone
#47. I think having musical training as a child was really, really important. I studied piano as a child. Piano is a great instrument to understand musical theory on. I think I have that in my brain somewhere.
Corin Tucker
#48. The music on the radio is fine, it's just not my type of music. You don't play an instrument, and you don't need to be able to sing. You just need to be able to make a beat and use auto-tune. It's crazy!
Elizabeth Gillies
#49. I have looked to the Steinway piano since I was three, not only as my ideal choice of an instrument. But, as a responsive and ever reliable friend.
Ahmad Jamal
#50. When I was in school, you could pick any instrument you want, and they'd teach you how to play it. That changed my life. I loved playing music in school, and it sent me on my path as a musician.
Flea
#51. I wanted to take up music, so my father bought me a blunt instrument. He told me to knock myself out.
Jay London
#52. My mother had a mantra: musical instrument, foreign language, martial art.
E.L. James
#53. There's something fundamental to the harp that has retained its appeal my whole life. It's an instrument I am just in love with.
Joanna Newsom
#54. My first instrument was the drums. Not quite sure why I quit and changed to guitar, but I'm sure my parents might have convinced me that the guitar was way better.
Jill Sobule
#55. I've written lots of songs on the piano. My mother had a piano and it was the first instrument I played.
Mick Taylor
#56. When I was 17 I got a guitar for my birthday and started discovering Bob Dylan and James Taylor and the whole '60s thing, and that made me want to make songs, to go beyond just playing an instrument. I needed to write I guess.
Jason Reeves
#57. Is my understanding sufficient for this or not? If it is sufficient, I use it for the work as an instrument given by the universal nature. But if it is not sufficient, then either I retire from the work and give way to him who is able to do it better,
Marcus Aurelius
#58. Greg Trooper writes great songs, including one of my very favorite songs in the world, Little Sister. On top of all that, there's his voice - an instrument I have coveted for 15 years.
Steve Earle
#59. My first stringed instrument was a cigar box banjo where I cut and turned the pegs and strung the wires myself.
Carl Sandburg
#60. I believe that every human being should try to do good for someone else. There are so many different ways to do it. My art can be an instrument for helping people ... What a good feeling - that I can do that with my art ...
Romero Britto
#61. Sing, Susu, through your severed head, through your severed arteries; and I shall put my mouth to your lips as though you were such an instrument. My breath shall reinflate your brain. Susu, O bag of pipes, I approach you in my dreams.
William H Gass
#62. Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.
Vladimir Nabokov
#63. I wanted to play my violin and have my musical expression through the instrument. But then I was really young when I had my first opportunity to conduct.
Gustavo Dudamel
#64. If nothing else will do to sever me from my sins, Lord, send me such sore and trying calamities as shall awake me from earthly slumbers. It must always be best to be alive to Thee, whatever be the quickening instrument.
Robert Murray McCheyne
#65. In 1972, I got my first electric bass and started playing the kind of instrument I play now. I found that the majority of musicians couldn't bear that. They are not used to listening to the bass because they think the bass is in the background to support them.
Eberhard Weber
#66. That was my way, and I also use the music after five years, I started hearing opera, opera, it was very good instrument to keep the spirit very strong because you feel like you are yourself singing opera, and I used to hear a lot of opera, they send me tapes.
Mordechai Vanunu
#67. I took vocal lessons for the first time and actually learned a lot about using my voice as an instrument as opposed to just doing what I've always done and going by feeling. I'm still doing that, but I've learned a lot of tricks and how to manipulate and play with my voice a little bit.
Travie McCoy
#68. I approach playing acoustic guitar more of as a percussive instrument. It's fragile. I don't have a lot of finesse when it comes to my guitar playing.
Billie Joe Armstrong
#69. I always felt a love for music, but I never got my nerve up enough to try a musical instrument in school.
Don Cornelius
#70. I've never taken a lesson in my life, and I can play every instrument there is. I play by ear, but I can fool anybody into thinking I went to some conservatory of music.
Dick Dale
#71. From all my talks with Henri, even the most cordial, I have always left with a slight taste of defeat; of also having been, somehow inadvertently, not a man to him, but an instrument in his hands.
Primo Levi
#72. Drums were my first instrument.
Dick Dale
#73. I pray without ceasing now. My personal prayer is: Make me an instrument which only truth can speak.
Peace Pilgrim
#74. I use my voice as an instrument.
Enya
#75. I regret my lack of options. I regret being painted into a corner and having that be the only instrument to get me from point A to point B.
T.I.
#76. I've always said that I use my voice as an instrument. It was something I created myself, and I said, 'Have voice, will travel.'
Yoko Ono
#77. Where, My Lord, is music bred - upon the instrument or within the ear that listens? The loveliness of woman is created in the eye of man.
Karen Blixen
#78. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.
Mikhail Bakunin
#79. Basically, I like to pick up my flute, which is a pretty instrument, and play pretty on it.
Paul Horn
#80. Occasionally, when I run into a great bass backstage at a festival I'll play a few notes on the low E string, just to feel the instrument vibrate against my belly.
Steve Swallow
#81. There are mics inside the instrument, a contact mic on my throat, and countless mics clustered around the air of the horn and throughout the room. I wanted to make something that was specific to the medium of recording.
Colin Stetson
#82. I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all? I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better.
Thomas Jefferson
#84. I play drums and guitar. My best instrument is definitely drums, so I'm featured a lot on the album drumming. It's pretty futuristic as well.
Justin Bieber
#85. 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
#86. It was a needed instrument to spread abroad the truth of a new gospel to woman, and I could not withhold my hand to stay the work I had begun. I saw not the end from the beginning and dreamed where to my propositions to society would lead me,
Amelia Bloomer
#87. I like to work my camera as if it were a musical instrument.
Mike Figgis
#88. Usually now a song starts just in my head with a melody or a lyric idea coming first.Then typically I'll go to a guitar, unless it's a instrumental then I'll usually build it on a keyboard instrument.
Eliot Lewis
#89. The name of my ailment was longing, and it was not cured till I finally went to the department store and counted out the money in small coins before the dismayed clerk. When I came to the house, I held up the instrument before the eyes of the astonished household.
William Christopher Handy
#90. I think I'm a songwriter. I grab an instrument to make my body a song, but I'm not a player as such, maybe a little more on guitar, but certainly not piano.
P.J. Harvey
#91. I consider the piano my 'main' instrument and have been playing for as long as I can remember. It seems to me that I might have come up with something resembling a song as early as 4 or 5 years old.
Ian MacKaye
#92. Most of my favourite guitarists are self-taught, because in a way there's less of a reverence for the instrument itself, so you end up finding and inventing however you want to play it.
Bryce Dessner
#93. The text for me is the musical score. I'm the instrument. My voice is the instrument. My voice is articulating the sounds which are coming through the imaginings and visitations in my head, and I'm making these sounds but I've selected them from an ocean of sound.
Anne Waldman
#94. I'm very interested in music, but I was not born musical. I honestly do think some people have the knack. I can't play an instrument. I'm a terrible singer. I'm not about to launch my album!
Georgia May Jagger
#95. The touch of his fingertips on my back is like a great cellist brushing the strings of his instrument, or a watchmaker turning a tiny screw invisible to the naked eye. The feeling is erotic, magical, and I just want to go home and go to bed.
Chloe Thurlow
#96. You don't have to just hit nails with hammers, you know; you can use a hammer to beat somebody's brains in, to make armor or break a car window. You can do all kinds of things with your instrument outside of its surface purpose. My bass is my crutch but the best crutch I could have.
Stephen Bruner
#97. My body is an object of work. That's why I think to be an actor is one of the most violent jobs. If you're a pianist, you have your piano. If you're a guitarist, you have your guitar. But if you're a dancer, or you're an actor - your instrument is your body.
Monica Bellucci
#98. I do so play an instrument! I play air! I play the air with my fingers, and I'm in touch with the deepest emotions within. It took me a while to learn that whatever I feel like doing is the right thing. If I want to play an invisible instrument, I will.
Jill Scott
#99. I made an instrument which I'm really happy about, because I always wanted to have a machine that did this so once I established it as my unique tool, it was like, now I'm going to master it like a guitar.
Jamie Lidell
#100. This isn't a mass-produced ... instrument. Mike Lull Custom Guitars makes each bass right here in the NW. Over 20 years of collaborating, designing, and building basses has gone into my model.
Jeff Ament
