Top 105 Chords Quotes

You see people you identify with, and you take pieces of people you like and shape who you are. Like, I sound just like my dad. But that’s literally my vocal chords. I can’t sound like anything else… I sound like him, but I act like myself.

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

People don’t know major and minor chords; they know what they like. I feel the same way.

I get the biggest kick out of it, to hear words that I wrote and chords that I wrote being sung by somebody else.

If it has more than three chords, it’s jazz.

The one area where I’ll say that Hendrix is underrated was his ability to use chord melodies. He used different inversions of chords and was able to make a three-piece band sound absolutely huge. From the moment Hendrix and the Experience came on the scene, power trios had their work cut out for them.

I started playing bluegrass with my family, so there were the G, C and D chords. I was playing a Martin acoustic because that’s what Carter Stanley of the Stanley Brothers played. Then I got into the really raw blues of Hound Dog Taylor and started on electric guitar.

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.

Bon Jovi’s trick is to use heavy-metal chords and still sound absolutely safe. Rock & roll used to be rebellion disguised as commercialism; now so much of it is commercialism disguised as rebellion.

I don’t have dairy because I’m a singer and, quite frankly, I don’t want to mess around with my vocal chords and how those behave, and dairy is an allergen for me.

Bill Gates recently picked up the ukulele. And Warren Buffett is a huge ukulele fan. I even got to strum a few chords with Francis Ford Coppola. It blows my mind that these people, who have everything in the world they could want, have picked up the ukulele and found a little bit of joy.

Music is gathering. Taking our scattered thoughts and senses and coalescing us back into our core. Music is powerful. The first few chords can change us where no self-help books can.

I’m trying to make paintings like giant musical chords, with a polyphony of colours that is nuts but works.

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.

One of the things I really like about West African guitar playing is the way it makes harmony linear. They’re really spelling things out and turning chords into melodies instead of just letting them be these hanging blocks of color.

All my songs were made at the end of the neck, ‘farmer’s corner’ chords.

I wanted to have absolute control over my music – from the chords and the voicings of the songs to the arrangements and the production.

I liken movies to playing a piano: Sometimes you’re playing the chords and different notes with unresolved cadences and playing all major chords that are all over the place, and you’re enjoying yourself with a great, simple melody.

A lot of my friends are doctors, and the difference between me and them is there’s no musical emergencies to pull me away from dinner. ‘I need the chords for that song right now!’ No, it can wait.

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.

I bought one of those Learn How to Play Guitar Chords By Yourself and it shows you the diagram where to put your hands and I took that in my room, sat with my singles and learned how to play guitar.

Electric Gypsy’ was really raw. I was literally sketching out the lyrics as they walked in the door. I jumped up and had a sheet of paper and I showed them the chords, which are simple. We counted it off, I got the lyrics off the sheet into the song and played a solo at the end – done!

I don’t know how to read music. You pick your guitar, you start playing chords and make up a melody that comes out of your head.

You obviously don’t really forget how to play the old songs; you just don’t have to spend so much time convincing yourself that you remember them. Way less mental energy is spent swimming around in lyrics you’ve already written and chords you’ve already played.

Chords that were broken will vibrate once more.

We’re not playing your typical guitar tuning, so there is no normal chords for us to get our footing with. We’re pretty much making it up as we go as far as the sounds we’re creating. Oftentimes, the song will be inspired by just a certain kind of block of sound that somebody creates.

I’m taking loads of vitamins, drinking herbal teas, I steam every single day. I constantly steam. I have to, it is a really good way to keep your vocal chords healthy.

I’ve been diagnosed with what’s called vocal tension dysphonia. The muscles around my vocal chords kind of constrict my vocal chords from doing what they should do. It’s kinda like being a body builder and you have muscles that are so large that they don’t allow you to have flexibility, if that makes sense.

When I was on the air a lot my throat and vocal chords got tired. If you don’t vary your tones you can’t get pretty tired of your own voice.

I am something of a ham. Yeah, I’d always been a writer. But in high school, I acted in plays. So it wasn’t as if you had to drag the words out of my vocal chords.

I don’t read music. I refuse to learn how to do that. I barely know half the chords I’m playing. I like being naive when it comes to that.

I’d been thinking I’d have to learn how to play really well, but obviously the message of punk was that you just learn three chords in a week and you’re away.

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.

We have jokingly said if you’ve got good hair, can sing and know three chords, you can lead worship at First Baptist Houston or wherever. But that’s kind of scary, putting somebody on stage just because they have a good voice. Do they know theologically and spiritually what they’re saying and why they’re doing it?

I’m a real musician’s musician: I get really geeky on chords and arrangements.

I immediately recognised that Freddy’s vocal chords bore an uncanny resemblance to mine – or vice-versa, I guess – and yeah, the rest is history.

My favorite way to get into the songwriting process is to get into the studio, and then usually, they play a loop of four chords, or something, or guitar, and then I just start singing.

Three chords and the truth – that’s what a country song is.

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.

I grew up playing the saxophone. I joined the jazz band in high school, but somewhere along the way I realized the guys who strummed acoustic guitars at parties were the ones who got the attention. So I asked a friend to show me a few chords, and when I moved to L.A. I spent a lot of time practicing my guitar.

Journalists, especially English journalists, were very cruel to me. They said I only knew three chords when I knew five!

When I was six years old, Mom and Dad gave me a guitar for my birthday, and Daddy taught me the chords to ‘You Are My Sunshine.’

Slowly, over time, I learned enough that I started considering myself a musician, where I actually knew how to play instruments. But still, when I talk to my real musician friends, they’re calling chords out, and I have no idea what they’re talking about.

Those chords on ‘You Won’t Change Me’ are huge.

Maybe that’s what makes my stuff different, ’cause I write it all on the bass. I can’t play but a few chords on the guitar, so the bass works just fine for me.

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

It’s really weird to be playing chords again. Haven’t played chords for a long time. I realised I haven’t played chord changes since OK Computer and stuff like that.

I get the same charge from juxtaposition of colors as I do from juxtaposition of chords.

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.

I can write hundreds of songs on simple power chords.

I was pretty much into punk rock and that’s all I cared about. I was into Green Day and the Ramones. I wanted to get a guitar so I could play punk songs because this kid taught me power chords at summer camp.

If you take the duality of things – like sunny-sounding music with weird lyrics on it – it makes this dichotomy. I’ve never had that because when I make music, I make major chords, happy-sounding stuff, and my lyrics are positive.