Quotes About Playing The Guitar

#1. Age isn't a barrier to playing the bass, and I've definitely improved over the years, although maybe I'm not as flash as I once was. But looking back, I can't imagine a life without a guitar.

Suzi Quatro

#2. I worked hard at that through most of the '80s, and in 1990 my house burned in New Hampshire, and my studios and my offices. I had to decide at what level to rebuild, and I decided that I was going to stop trying to be all things to all people, and just go back to playing the guitar.

Tom Rush

#3. The Tinted Windows shows were very fun but it's very different for me as a performer. I'm not playing music - I'm just singing and I missed that. I miss rocking out on keys, drums, guitar ... whatever it is.

Taylor Hanson

#4. The very first concert I ever went to on my own was actually Rory Gallagher. In a one-month period in 1973 or '74, I saw him, Thin Lizzy and the Rolling Stones. I wasn't really a big Rory Gallagher fan, but I thought his guitar playing was fabulous. But Thin Lizzy, they were fabulous.

Robert Smith

#5. 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

#6. I'm just very sort of compulsive and lack the ability to keep things in perspective. If I'm not writing or playing guitar or on the microphone or out on the road, I'm cleaning pots and pans or freaking out about some plumbing issue or tweeting.

Marc Maron

#7. Death is never more than a breath away from the act of playing music. Each note on a guitar represents a small curve: birth, life, and death-and then you start over.

Andy Summers

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. It was great to do August Rush and have all the challenges of playing that character, especially the American accent for the first time and also playing the guitar and the conducting I had to do.

Freddie Highmore

#11. Do you have a feel for the guitar? Do you have any idea what this little baby is capable of?" Without waiting for an answer, he climbed up into his chair and began playing "Light My Fire," adding, "This one is for Joan.

David Sedaris

#12. 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

#13. Keith Richards ... was once asked how he came up with all those amazing guitar riffs. His answer? He just starts playing until he makes the right mistake. In other words he's optimistic he will create something good by virtue of getting something "wrong."

Mark Stevenson

#14. I'm glad I get singled out for my slide guitar-playing, which isn't that difficult to do. I didn't take guitar lessons, but I just love the way it sounds, almost like the human voice.

Bonnie Raitt

#15. 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

#16. I designed a guitar for Ibanez and then they started manufacturing it - it's called the Jem - it's 26 years old and I still play it. As a kid I liked Les Pauls and Strats, but they had limitations for the kind of playing I wanted to do.

Steve Vai

#17. 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

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

Drake Bell

#19. I've learned not to let it be the end of the world if a boy doesn't like you. I used to put so much effort into boys. I started playing guitar because I wanted to impress this boy. Then, I ended up in love with guitar and I didn't care about the boy anymore.

Ellie Goulding

#20. 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

#21. I've always enjoyed singing and can't recall a time in my life where I wasn't singing. I'm most grateful for the strength I have in that department. I have a lot of bad habits on the guitar which limits my playing ability. But I get a little better each year.

Jason Mraz

#22. I'm still like an excited kid playing guitar in front of the bedroom mirror.

James Bay

#23. Playing the guitar is like telling the truth - you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don't have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don't have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It's you.

B.B. King

#24. I have come to the conclusion - and I don't know why it took me so long, but nevertheless, I'm here now - that a lot of people tell me they don't get enough guitar on my albums. So I decided to do an album where the guitar would be the singer, playing the melody.

Carlos Santana

#25. When the intellectual part of guitar playing overrides the spiritual, you don't get to extreme heights.

John Frusciante

#26. When I was about 12, I had my first paying gig - 8 dollars to play rhythm guitar in a polka band. Pretty soon, I ended up playing in all the bars within driving distance of Abbott, Texas.

Willie Nelson

#27. 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

#28. I think a guitar solo is how my emotion is most freely released, because verbal articulation isn't my strongest communication strength. My wife thinks that I should do interviews by listening to the questions and playing the answer on guitar.

David Gilmour

#29. I was basically a dork that hit the books and liked to build things and did all of the things that you weren't supposed to do to be popular. But somehow I ended up onstage, playing guitar in front of everybody else.

Tom Scholz

#30. A horn has that voice quality, and an electric guitar can emulate that. But playing an acoustic, the notes don't sustain like that.

Bill Orcutt

#31. I'm a huge fan of Joe Walsh and a big James Gang fan. A lot of what I know about playing the guitar I learned from listening to him.

Tom Scholz

#32. I'm really looking forward to it, if you can imagine floating weightless, watching the world pour by through the big bay window of the space station playing a guitar; just a tremendous place to think about where we are in history.

Chris Hadfield

#33. I have been playing a lot of keyboards, especially in the last five or six years. I suppose it gives you more scope than the guitar, although it does tend to make you write a different way.

Mick Ralphs

#34. When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn't play it. I couldn't get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn't get them out on the guitar.

Pete Townshend

#35. You are working up to Mr. Fantastic Fiction levels of Zombie Expert, which is like playing Guitar Hero on some level that actually melts the guitar controller, burning your fingers with searing hot plastic till you scream in pain. Only with words. And zombies.

Libba Bray

#36. I was really into music. I started playing guitar also when I was nine. I wanted to be in the Beatles, even though John Lennon died the year I got a guitar and the Beatles broke up before I was born.

Tig Notaro

#37. Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.

Terry Pratchett

#38. 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

#39. Whenever I'm on tour and I'm in my hotel room and I'm writing and playing my guitar, I go in the bathroom and I record whatever I'm writing in there. It's just what I love to do.

Colbie Caillat

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. I will concentrate on playing guitar, on lyrics and on singing. I am a part of things; I am not the encompassing 'Smog.'

Bill Callahan

#43. If you can play guitar and sing, you can probably get a gig down the road playing at a restaurant, but don't throw your life away chasing something that is so elusive it will only lead you to regret and may turn you bitter.

Cliff Richard

#44. There was nobody at the time who was playing slide guitar like Johnny, and nobody, or no white guys at least, that was playing country blues like that on the acoustic guitar. And it was at that point that I realized what Johnny had to offer.

Rick Derringer

#45. Well, Steve Vai joined my dad's band right around the time when I actually started playing guitar. So he gave me a couple of lessons on fundamentals, and gave me some scales and practice things to work on. But I pretty much learned everything by ear.

Dweezil Zappa

#46. Playing guitar is like telling the truth.

B.B. King

#47. Guitar playing is both extremely easy for me and extremely difficult for me at the same time.

Kirk Hammett

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. When I picked up the guitar for the first time, it opened up a whole new world for me. I became obsessed with writing and playing.

Drake Bell

#52. I love playing guitar. It's the only thing I've ever really been great at,

Johnny Winter

#53. 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

#54. I mean, playing music at home and writing and hanging out with my guitar is kind of medicinal for me, but when I bring the songs to people on stage, it's very joyous.

Ani DiFranco

#55. The bulk of my set is instrumental and you have to give yourself and the audience some relief because a performance is not about great guitar playing it's really about entertainment.

Leo Kottke

#56. 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

#57. I'm singing and dancing and playing guitar. I really enjoy pushing myself into different aspects. I'm not going to do this for the rest of my life, but I want to keep challenging myself. And if I'm fearful of something I definitely want to step into it and see how good or bad I am at it.

Dustin Clare

#58. 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

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

Brittany Howard

#60. I wanted to be heard myself, which is hard in a household of people who were very showy. It forced me to find myself and define a personality and a way of being different, and that's a thing that's going to help me to survive in a world of many people playing the guitar.

Martha Wainwright

#61. 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

#62. I think if you're a lady playing a guitar, other ladies need to see you playing the guitar, and they don't need to see men come out and fix your equipment for you. It just looks incredibly pussy. So I just do it all myself.

Neko Case

#63. 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

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

Vikrmn

#65. I remember growing up always loving the guitar. I used to love to watch the people play on the Country Western shows on TV. My folks told me that when I was just a toddler, I used to pretend I was playing a guitar on a toothpick.

Carl Wilson

#66. The Lounge Lizards were relating with a tradition and it was like I was playing within a musical context. The guitar playing stood out as being different in some way. That was a real education for me.

Arto Lindsay

#67. My only real hobby is playing music. I write a lot of music on guitar and keyboards and hope one day to make a record or maybe even write the score for a film.

Graeme Base

#68. When you play the 12-string guitar, you spend half your life tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune.

Pete Seeger

#69. I had been practicing guitar about six months beforehand; I concentrated mostly on the songs I had to play. I got those down pretty well so they could use me actually playing.

Freddie Highmore

#70. My dad always played a lot of music, so I heard him playing all the time, and then I decided that I wanted to learn to play guitar, so I got an acoustic and started taking lessons. I wanted to be able to shred like Yngwie Malmsteen.

Oscar Isaac

#71. I began playing drums when I was seven and guitar when I was fourteen, but it wasn't until the early '90s that I took music seriously.

Tom Curren

#72. Pot put me in a position where I could walk far away from my playing and hear it in the second person. It helped me step away from myself. I stopped seeing the guitar as a thing I'm holding in my hands and started seeing it as a thing that's at one with outer space and nothingness.

John Frusciante

#73. 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

#74. I assume most guitar players are like me. They're playing, having fun; then they get a magazine in the mail that says "Shred Is Dead" and they say, "What the Hell?" They throw it away and keep on playing.

Joe Satriani

#75. I started getting interested in the notes that I could hear being generated when I hammered on while playing a classical guitar.

Fred Frith

#76. Playing the guitar, you kind of lock into a rhythm and a groove, and then it relaxes me to make up lyrics and sing.

Cat Power

#77. I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.

Dolly Parton

#78. I wouldn't want to compare myself to David Byrne whom I consider a genius, but what I think what we have in common is that he's also a guy who is very interested in the world and who has a lot of passions beyond singing and playing guitar.

Anthony Bourdain

#79. If I ever get some free time I end up thinking about what to make next. I don't pick up a guitar and start playing the songs I already know; I immediately try to write a riff.

Chaz Bundick

#80. I'm looking for anything interesting in the guitar playing, songwriting, artwork, and production. If you look at the stack of CDs on my desk and in my car, you'll find a very wide range of music under the umbrella of metal.

David Pajo

#81. I've never thought Mr. Nelson had much use for me since I wasn't an athlete. He probably considered me a failure to the male species, and I'm sure he harbored questions about my sexuality. To him, I was some artsy-fatsy guitar playing fairy. Like I said, the man was an asshole.

Katie Ashley

#82. Weirdly enough, if I'm having trouble with a guitar part - not the playing of it but the writing - I'll mess around with echo and other effects, just turn everything up and make it as crazy as can be, and it winds up taking me somewhere. I've found so many guitar parts from echo. It's limitless.

The Edge

#83. It's about the time I was riding my Motorcycle, going down a mountain road at 150 miles an hour, playing my guitar.

Arlo Guthrie

#84. I had a series of mini-breakdowns where the public persona - this thing, this face, this person who writes this music ... I would walk past that person in the mirror or listen to that person playing guitar and I didn't know who they were.

Thom Yorke

#85. I grew up not really listening to guitar players. Especially when I was studying music, I was just interested in piano players and arrangers and composers; I came to playing in a band from the perspective of someone who never expected to play guitar in a band.

Daniel Rossen

#86. I got to be about 13 and everyone started playing guitars and being in rock bands. There was no place for me with my trumpet and I wasn't cool anymore. Although now if I played the trumpet it would be the coolest thing in the world.

Douglas Booth

#87. I remember people would talk about Country Music like it was this sexist, lame thing. Well, no, because Dolly Parton is writing songs and playing her guitar and producing. She's doing it all and she's got hits on the radio.

Neko Case

#88. When it's a funky uptempo song, you're basically having the same kind of release you would have when you have sex, only it lasts longer. Whether you're playing it on the guitar or on the dance floor, you're in that moment.

Bonnie Raitt

#89. People have always been resistant to change. If you go back to the 17th, 18th century, playing guitar was frowned upon. When rock n' roll first started, no one took it seriously.

Moby

#90. Life is like playing a guitar and meditation is like music. Small session of rehearsals daily won't show much but would make you ROCK in the long run.

Vikrmn

#91. I started playing ukulele first for 2 years from age 9 to 11 and got my first guitar and got inspired by blues I heard on the radio that turned me on and I started learning myself.

Johnny Winter

#92. I first started actually playing guitar when I was eleven years old. I had some neighborhood friends who told me they were starting a band and needed a guitarist. I told my folks, and by the next day I had a guitar lesson set up with a local teacher.

Darren Robinson

#93. I kind of just want to get to know people and I have a genuine interest in people that listen to my music. I've just always felt like that. I think it's from the days of playing guitar to a few people and being very conversational and very intimate and I've always wanted to keep that vibe.

Ellie Goulding

#94. I grew up with all kinds ofmusic, but my heart was particularly drawn to Country Music because of the guitar playing, the lyrics and of artists like Steve Warner and Vince Gill.

Bryan White

#95. Unless the guitar works as a color, then I don't use it, so I haven't been playing guitar too much lately.

Trevor Rabin

#96. Duane Allman inspired the group to explore the extended jam format that was already a staple of the Allman Brothers act. Moreover, his ferocious slide playing motivated Clapton to turn in some of the finest guitar performances of his career

Bob Whitlock

#97. Later in high school, I met Hillel Slovak, who was the original guitar player of the Chili Peppers, and we became really close. We had a band, and we didn't like the bass player, so I started playing bass, and I got a bass two weeks later.

Flea

#98. When I was 15, I begged my grandfather to give me this guitar he'd always had in the back of his closet. I promised him I'd learn to play it, but I never did. Then my grandfather died, and I felt so guilty. So I started playing.

Valerie June

#99. I guess I'm interested in pushing the boundaries of the cello without giving up on the idea of playing the cello, if that makes any sense. I have no real interest in putting the cello through different effects to make it sound like a guitar or other instruments.

Okkyung Lee

#100. I played recorder in assembly, then I became passionate about the guitar, I don't know why. I started on electric then moved to acoustic - my brother was playing bass in the next room.

Ellie Goulding