Quotes About Chords

#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. Those three chords were part of my life - G, F, Bb - yeh, it is, it is, and I can't help noticing it. But there have been other things nearly as close to it which people haven't noticed, other things we have done.

Ray Davies

#3. It doesn't really matter what chords I play, what words I say or time of day it is, as it's only a Northern Song.

George Harrison

#4. 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

#5. Motherhood is at its best when the tender chords of sympathy have been touched.

Paul Harris

#6. There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure

Roger Scruton

#7. If you play the guitar, you've got to hold the chords down with one hand while you play with the other, so you're limited to one hand. But the piano is the king of instruments because you have your 10 fingers, which become the 10 members of the orchestra.

Jools Holland

#8. As a melody instrument player, it's all about getting from one note to the next, and those intervals and how you navigate your way through these vertical structures of chords. You realize that everything's moving forward, and it's all linear.

David Sanborn

#9. Sometimes, I'm driving along in my car, and a song from my high-school years comes on the radio: Springsteen's 'Thunder Road.' Just the opening few chords make me want to roll down the window and let the wind blow back my hair.

Dani Shapiro

#10. To play with a band all of the time, just about nightly, was good for me because I wrote lots of arrangements and I got a lot of my transposition and chords ironed out.

Allen Toussaint

#11. I can write hundreds of songs on simple power chords.

Miguel

#12. Before, singing was my life, my vocal chords used to lead the way. Now, I'm in-charge.

Celine Dion

#13. Sin hath broke the world's sweet peace
unstrung
Th' harmonious chords to which the angels sung.

Richard Henry Dana Jr.

#14. I would describe my songs as just a collection of my thoughts, with melodies that probably occurred to me in the grocery store or cycling home, sung as best I can over a bunch of chords.

Withered Hand

#15. I like men who have known the best and the worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip. Storms have battered them, they have lain, sometimes for months on end, becalmed. There is a residue even if they fail. It has not been all tinkling; there have been grand chords.

James Salter

#16. Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.

Elizabeth Bowen

#17. Beyond the edge of the world there's a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.

Haruki Murakami

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. Your skin reminds me of everything beautiful I've ever loved ...
how the moon gets jealous at how you mock her crescent figure with the shape of your mouth ...
echo of unborn galaxies bounce forth through your vocal chords ...

Brandi L. Bates

#21. I use a lot more chords than most organists and I'm careful to phrase them with the guitar.

Alan Price

#22. Soft as Memnon's harp at morning, To the inward ear devout, Touched by light, with heavenly warning Your transporting chords ring out. Every leaf in every nook, Every wave in every brook, Chanting with a solemn voice Minds us of our better choice.

John Keble

#23. Except for a few guitar chords, everything I've learned in my life that is of any value I've learned from women.

Glenn Frey

#24. But we got up there and decided to stick to this mix of power chords and funk and that's where it really started for us. In having the courage to take that decision. To take a gamble not just with our music but our lives.

Michael Hutchence

#25. Sometimes I think that I want to do something strictly basic, really simple. Just with a few chords. But I won't have anything more than two or three sentences in my head. That kind of evaporates once I start playing and then it goes off in whatever direction.

Tom Jenkinson

#26. Language was just that thing that happened when you opened your mouth at the table, squeezed a few noises out of your vocal chords, and induced Socrates thereby to pass the salt.

Randy Allen Harris

#27. 'Lucky Man' I wrote when I was twelve years old. I wrote it when I first was given a guitar by my mother. I only knew four chords, but I used them all to write that song. And it just stayed with me, stayed in my head. I didn't even write it on a piece of paper. I remembered it.

Greg Lake

#28. When I started, they told me I only needed 3 chords and the truth ... It turned out I could manage with 2 and some vague ideas.

Joe Strummer

#29. 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

#30. Donald Trump has been practicing the chords of reality politics for 11 years doing reality television. And so he's clearly the frontrunner and he is clearly dominating. But I still believe in some old rules.

Hugh Hewitt

#31. If you play more than two chords, you're showing off.

Woody Guthrie

#32. All I've got is a red guitar, three chords and the truth.

Bob Dylan

#33. Anyone who uses more than two chords is just showing off.

Woody Guthrie

#34. To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.

Barry Lopez

#35. In some types of music I'm working out all the chords one bar at a time - the whole structure, because it's about that. And there are other pieces which are really about - okay, the melody is going to start here and play through to here.

Danny Elfman

#36. The ostriches were like messengers who had learned their vital message by heart, but whose vocal chords had been slit by the enemy, so that when they finally reached their goal, all they could do was move their mouths.

Milan Kundera

#37. The universe sings a deep, eternal song, sound in waves, in deep sighs, in whispers, in swirling chords and rising, falling tones. The music of the worlds, weaving in a pattern that is both chaos and order, both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.

Jessica Khoury

#38. Cooper pulled out a high-backed stool, sat down, tapped out the beat on the bar with his fingertips. He'd heard once that the essence of country music was three chords and the truth. Well, the three-chords part still stands.

Marcus Sakey

#39. If you're supposed to be doing something, the spirits will come and help you. They have helped me out with lines I shouldn't have known, chords I shouldn't have known. Every once in a while I get lines from somewhere, and I think, I better write this down.

Gil Scott-Heron

#40. If Dave Robbie's a song, he's written in major chords.

Cath Crowley

#41. The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians.

George Bernard Shaw

#42. This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity.

Jack Vance

#43. I played with so many musicians and some of the musicians would have something I want. I steal a lot of them, and I mash it up, I mash it up into my chords.

David Edwards

#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. As soon as you get off stage, that's the most dangerous time for a singer to kiss people because your vocal chords are receptive to any kind of germ.

Anita Baker

#46. Once I got the open tunings for some reason, I began to get the harmonic sophistication that I heard that my musical fountain inside was excited by. Once I got some interesting chords to play with, my writing began to come.

Joni Mitchell

#47. It is impossible to watch a 'Friends' episode too many times. Phoebe is my favourite character. I used to play her songs on the guitar when I was a teenager. 'Smelly Cat' is very easy. It's only about three chords.

Michelle Dockery

#48. Each acoustic guitar has its own character and personality. On a particular day, I might pick one up and start noodling around, looking for some emotional content in the chords.

Neil Diamond

#49. When I sing, I go somewhere else. Every time after I sing, I'll ask, 'Did I do OK?' Because I feel like it's like my soul squeezing out of my vocal chords. I don't sit there and think about 'I'm gonna do this next ... ' I just sing. I sing from my heart, and my heart's got a little lonesome in it.

Ashley Monroe

#50. I started playing guitar back in '56. I was a teenager, and guitars had just come in, and I had a thing for it and got one. Started learning lead breaks from songs, because that was the easiest thing to do at the time. I had the guitar for two years before I learned any chords. Really.

Roger McGuinn

#51. Quit the bitching on your blog
And stop pretending art is hard.
Just limit yourself to three chords
And do not practice daily.
You'll minimize some stranger's sadness
With a piece of wood and plastic.
Holy fuck it's so fantastic,
Playing ukulele.

Amanda Palmer

#52. I had been wanting to give guitar lessons to girls because I feel like women tend to use their voice as the starting point for a song and learn a few chords, and then it ends there because then they just use their voice to flesh out a song.

Marnie Stern

#53. Ever since I released my first album, I've tried not to use minor chords as the main element in songs. The way I sing is too melancholic.

Jose Gonzalez

#54. The lyrics, the strings, the chords, everything comes at the moment like a gift that is put right into your head and that's how I hear it.

Michael Jackson

#55. 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

#56. I'm basically a keyboard player, so if it's got a keyboard on it, I'll give it a shot. I played a lot of organ in the early days. I can make a few chords on guitar, but that's about it.

Ray Stevens

#57. I learned to play by ear before I learned music theory. For me, that makes sense. After all, children learn to speak before they read and write. The more you understand of music - how harmony and time signatures work, and what chords and inversions are - the more you'll enjoy it.

Jools Holland

#58. A lot of country music is sad. I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times. It applies to music. Three chords and the truth - that's what a country song is. There is a lot of heartache in the world.

Willie Nelson

#59. I learned some chords and I started watching anybody I could, once I really got into it.

Johnny Rivers

#60. If it has more than three chords, it's jazz.

Lou Reed

#61. I think emotion is just anything that is emotional, you know, people can feel with music. Music is already so emotional, like the strings, the chords, and the notes and the melodies and stuff. And then you throw on a topic that everyone can relate to. That's gonna be real music.

Sam McCandless

#62. I tried several times to get the song right. The tune and the chords that I started with, there really wasn't anywhere else it could go. I stopped fighting it and let it take me away.

Nik Kershaw

#63. You don't try to duplicate certain things that other cats do, because you could never do it as well as they do. Nobody can get on that tenor saxophone and play like Trane, because he's the only one who can spell out chords and sound good when he does it.

Wynton Marsalis

#64. By adopting a certain physical posture, a resonant chord is struck in spirit.

Bruce Lee

#65. Sometimes it's tough because I've got to sleep 15 hours to sing the way I want to. It's not easy because my vocal chords are different than most people's.

Mariah Carey

#66. I go from chords to cords, amped to amps.

Rachel Cohn

#67. I've mainly been sampling jazz because the tone of the chords are expressive in itself, so it's quite nice to write over. It's got interpretations of a lot of different genres, too, a lot of dubby-ness and experimental stuff.

King Krule

#68. fact, the whole point of the trick' is that knowledge of just these three chords enables the novice musician to play thousands of songs in dozens of genres. Whether

Dominic Pedler

#69. My heart is tuned to sorrow, and the strings Vibrate most readily to minor chords, Searching and sad; my mind is stuffed with words Which voice the passion and the ache of things: Illusions beating with their baffled wings Against the walls of circumstance.

Amy Lowell

#70. Whatever is original in my writing comes from my musical apprenticeship. I look for rhythm in words. I imagine words as if they were musical chords. Often I'll write something, read it, and find it musically unsatisfactory. There is a musical imperative in my choice of words.

Chico Buarque

#71. It's really strange, but they speak to me - the notes and the chords. So when I hear other people's music, I can feel the composer. Whoever created that, I can see in their soul.

Yanni

#72. A good song is a nice set of chords and some good lyrics; a great song is a song that reinvents itself over time. That you can always find something interesting in the more you listen to it - it keeps revealing something to you.

Bryce Dessner

#73. I'd definitely like to see less twerking and more power chords.

Courtney Love

#74. And when my spirit wants no stimulus or nourishment save music, I know it is to be sought in cemeteries: the musicians hide in the tombs; from grave to grave flute trills, harp chords answer one another.

Italo Calvino

#75. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.

Edgar Allan Poe

#76. We weren't straight-A students. We didn't start playing until we were teenagers, and we started playing rock and roll and punk rock - power chords - before we ever thought we would play folk music. So virtuosity was just never in my reach.

Ketch Secor

#77. Any idiot who knows five chords can bang a song together. But it's probably going to be rubbish.

Joe Elliott

#78. I sometimes try to write something that is actually really simple and I can't do it. So, then, it's not simple anymore. It's really hard and it gets all messed up. I sometimes sit down and try to write a song with just three chords and it doesn't work.

Sondre Lerche

#79. Life is like a guitar and the combination of chords are called moments. Playing them is the called living the moments.

Vikrmn

#80. This is our grace: To be a note
In the exact chord that animates creation.

Deena Metzger

#81. It was even said that some birds spring to life in the tension of accidental chords being struck in the ether, a confluence of arbitrary sound waves from unrelated sources: a piano, a truck, a breaking bottle---a bird.

Carl Watson

#82. Everything you do is different, and you find different chords in every character that you play that strike true with you.

Scarlett Johansson

#83. It was R.E.M. who showed other Eighties bands how to get away with ignoring the rules - they lived in some weird town nobody never heard of, they didn't play power chords, they probably couldn't even spell 'spandex.' All they had was songs.

Rob Sheffield

#84. You see, pops, that's the kind of talk that's ruining the music. Everyone's trying to do something new, no one trying to learn the fundamentals first. All them young cats playing their wierd chords. And what happens? No one's working.

Louis Armstrong

#85. It was more fun trying to figure out I Want To Hold Your Hand than to take lessons. By this time I knew basic chords.

Tommy Shaw

#86. I stopped going out and taking pills and I started hanging out and learning about flat eleven chords ...

Jamie Lidell

#87. To penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery-back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.

D.H. Lawrence

#88. I listen to Prince on my iPad. And I use a Chords & Scales app to warm up before performing.

Janelle Monae

#89. People like us are not good with words.
What we mean gets muddled and wrong
somewhere between our minds
and our mouths.

We make art to say how we feel.

Here: These are the chords
to Make You Feel My Love.

Clementine Von Radics

#90. I know a few chords on the guitar, but I wouldn't be able do a show or even be part of a jam session with one.

Jake Shimabukuro

#91. I don't think I think when I play. I have a photographic memory for chords, and when I'm playing, the right chords appear in my mind like photographs long before I get to them.

Earl Hines

#92. Chords that were broken will vibrate once more.

Fanny Crosby

#93. I tend to hear rhythm and melody, chord-progressions, long before I hear words.

Zach Condon

#94. I was teaching myself notes from three and then by seven I'd figured out how to play some chords, and at school I used to love writing poems and poetry, so I guess I kind of put two and two together and that formed my songwriting from an early age.

Ella Henderson

#95. The powerful chords that emanated from the radio heated me from the inside out, like a microwave.

Sandy Ward Bell

#96. When I was first learning songs, I'd have a favorite song, and I'd take the chords and twist them around. I'd learn the chords and then play them backward. That was my first experimenting with writing a song.

Alicia Keys

#97. This Lullaby is only a few words, a simple run of chords, quiet here in this spare room, but you can hear it, hear it, wherever you may go, even if I let you down, this lullaby plays on ...

Sarah Dessen

#98. It seemed Paris somehow managed to absorb all the beautiful things the rest of the world discarded; it was a sparkling and bejeweled box of lost treasures, a wondrous cabinet that hummed with soft horn harmonies played against a grand piano's minor chords.

Toby Barlow

#99. The power chords in 'Come Sail Away' were super heavy to me as a kid. Metal? No. Hard rock? At times, for sure.

Eddie Trunk

#100. I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

Napoleon Bonaparte