Top 190 Acoustic Quotes

When Taylor Swift was first beginning to really take off, a couple of guys I knew in her band called and offered me a job on her tour playing acoustic guitar and singing background vocals, and they thought I would be a really good fit for it.

Choosing an acoustic guitar for a live setting can be different from picking out one for recording. One doesn’t always work for the other. The sonic properties can be vastly different.

If I want to do an orchestral record, if I want to do an acoustic record, if I want to do a death-metal record, if I want to do a jazz record – I can move in whichever direction I want, and no one is going to get upset about that. Except maybe my manager and my record company.

All of my acoustic playing came from my songwriting. All of the chords I’ve learned and all of the voicings I play them in are a direct result of composing.

As much as I love acoustic Neil Young – and I do deeply – I may be more passionate about the electric. Luckily it’s not a contest, and we never have to make that choice. But Neil Young on an electric guitar – I feel like I’ve never seen or heard anything like it.

I grew up partially with classical music but listened to a lot of rock when I was young – I like acoustic, and folk from Mali and Armenia and Turkey.

I like to check out of reality for a little bit when I listen to music and kind of go somewhere, so I feel like the more broken-down acoustic songs tell stories to me the best.

The mall tour was right off of my second record, before it came out. It was very different. I did an acoustic performance every day in a different mall! One interesting thing I remember is playing ‘My Happy Ending’ a lot, and that song was so new that I remember getting emotional.

With my projects, I really like the extreme high-tech stuff, but I also like the other end, the acoustic things. So it seems like those meet on an iPad, where you make shapes but the sounds coming out of it are really acoustic.

I was just a punk-rock kid who never played acoustic guitar.

At 13, I loved how so many of my peers sang and played acoustic guitar, so I started recording videos with covers of famous songs and posting them online.

I tried when I was 13, when my grandparents gave me an acoustic guitar, and I tried for a year. It hurt so much to play. I mean, the fingertips hurt so much, I gave up.

I love the tone of old, non-amplified, real acoustic fiddles, and Wood Violins are the closest thing I have found to that sound. They play beautifully!

Lately, I love creating ideas on my acoustic guitar. I sit in my living room for hours trying different chords.

The thing I find frustrating about rock music is, how different can you make an acoustic drum kit sound, an electric guitar and vocals?

Sometimes we drop in and do an acoustic set somewhere, and that’s really fun to take all these insanely loud songs, and to do them quiet. It’s really a sight to see… or to hear!

My grandfather gave me my first guitar, an old acoustic with palm trees and dancing girls painted on it.

Amplifying acoustic instruments more than a little is really cheating, and everything becomes a compromise.

I play piano and guitar. Acoustic guitar. I tried studying classical guitar when I was 16 but it got really hard. I could never play a lead to save my life.

For me, it’s always been about a mix of hip-hop, acoustic singer/songwriters, and piano rock. I pull all those together. Each song may lean more heavily on one than the other, but they all have all three pieces.

For me, the best thing I can do is play live. The best way for me to put over what I’m trying to do is to play live. Whether it’s an acoustic show, electric or whatever… if I shine at all, that’s where it all really happens – it just took me a while to rediscover that.

My personal tastes… I actually like quite a bit acoustic and more mellow kinds of things. I quite like American music, like The Fray, I’m a massive fan of them, and The Killers.

I do some solo, acoustic stuff, but I also like plugging in my electric guitar and playing loud with a band.

There’s something about approaching universal truths with the simplicity of the acoustic guitar. You can take it anywhere, and it helps me reach listeners of all ages and walks of life.

I love playing acoustic guitar because I strum with my hands to feel more connected.

When we did the ‘Skin and Bones’ tour I didn’t even own an acoustic guitar, I had to borrow one from my friend.

What Jimmy Page did was pretty inspiring for guitar players. He married a lot of acoustic elements into hard rock. The kind of chords he used were very left of center, with a lot of dissonance – I absorbed that like a sponge. It’s all over the music I write, always.

My guitar playing is a synthesis of traditional American acoustic style and Urban Pop and R&B.

I like to play acoustic slide. I like that. I just… I can do it, you know. But it ain’t my cup of tea.

When I was small, my parents came back from Tijuana, and my dad bought me a very small acoustic guitar. I loved it. I started making up my own songs right away.

The early influences, in many ways, were in Baltimore. I was passing open windows where there might be a radio playing something funky. In the summertime, sometimes there’d be a man sitting on a step, playing an acoustic guitar, playing some kind of folk blues. The seed had been planted.

The first time I saw ‘Minecraft,’ people wanted to have 8-bit style video game music. But I wanted to go around that and make something organic and partly electronic, partly acoustic, and see if that would be interesting.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a friend tell me, in this tender and discreet voice, ‘It’s just you and me bro, and I want to tell you the truth: make a record of you and an acoustic guitar. Please. That’s what everybody actually likes.’ That’s so funny to me.

I normally write on acoustic guitar, although piano is the instrument that I actually studied. Occasionally, I’ll write on the piano or sometimes with no instrument at all.

When I was a kid and writing more acoustic songs, I was doing it more for the attention than for the love of the music. I knew I needed to change something because I wasn’t having fun and wasn’t liking the songs I was writing.

‘Funny’ is really cool live. You break it down into an acoustic set, and sometimes I’ll do that one unplugged and off the mic, depending on the venue.

Originally, AXS TV came to me last year and asked me if I’d be interested in doing an acoustic ‘Live from the Grammy Museum’ performance. But I was bound and determined to do an electric show with this great band to dispel any notion that I wasn’t a ‘rock guy’ in Styx.

John Martyn is my biggest hero. My mom got me into his music when I was a kid. I’ve looked up to him more than anyone as a songwriter. And Bert Jansch is one of the pillars of acoustic music, the holy grail.

If you can’t play it on an acoustic guitar or a grand piano then it’s not a song.

In the early days, I had very little idea about arrangements, and I wrote songs a little flat, as it were, just on an acoustic guitar. They didn’t really have quite enough nuance.

I consider the guitar a tool for the most part. I do pick up the acoustic now and then, I certainly don’t have any routine. Usually the only time I practice is when the band gets together. Hendrix has always been one of my favorite players, but I was a sucker for Nugent in the late 1970’s.

I quite like American music, like The Fray – I’m a massive fan of them – and The Killers. I also like more acoustic stuff like Ed Sheeran; I like this English songwriter James Morrison and another singer called Ben Howard.

If I could do acoustic shows for the rest of my life, that’s fine with me. They require the right venues, small theaters or little bars. You can’t take an acoustic show to a big ol’ country music festival. It’s more intimate, like being in my living room.

It is at least 10 times more difficult to get a good synthesiser sound than on an acoustic instrument.

Or like in the early 70’s when we had the reaction against acid rock and all the fuzz tone, and feedback, and the noise. And you had James Taylor and everyone went acoustic and that.

I played acoustic guitar so intensely, for so long – for nine hours a day as a 10-year-old, writing songs through the night, on tour constantly from when I was 19 – that I destroyed my arms and shoulders in the process.

My head is full of shifting patterns and polyrhythmic stuff; but I want to use all acoustic instruments and create this kind of tapestry of interlocking lulling parts.

Everybody besides my piano player has been with me since the very first day. We were a four-piece band for a solid two years. It was me playing acoustic and rhythm electric guitar, a bass player, a drummer and a lead guitar player. For a couple of years, we sounded like the Foo Fighters.

My stuff was more of a folk coffeehouse thing, with more acoustic guitar, just me doing a single, and then adding on instruments and voices, with emphasis on lyrics and singing and light kind of acoustic jazz.

There’s very little synthesized sound in the ‘Arrival’ score. There are a couple of synthesized beats in there, but 99 percent of the sounds in there are acoustic in origin and either played or sung by a musician or a singer and recorded in a room.