Words matter. These are the best Zacky Vengeance Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I think, as long as people have a strong opinion, whether they love or hate us, I think we’re doing something right.
We’re trying to do something nobody else is doing right now.
Everything an artist does is scary, but we do it anyway. If someone tries to steer you off-course, push them outta the way and get back on course. Never giving up – that’s what I truly believe all the greatest bands have done.
We’re in the business of making fans that will last with us a lifetime. In order to do that, you’ve gotta give them something special.
We wanted to write songs that we really like that incorporate everything. It seems a lot of bands want to stick with one thing. We didn’t want to be scared to do anything that we wanted to do. We didn’t want anything to hold us back. We wanted no boundaries.
When you see a band, you want to see characters.
I absolutely remember when I decided upon playing Ernie Ball strings, and it was right then and there at the guitar store up in Seattle when I picked up my first guitar ever. They said, ‘What kind of strings should we put on it?’ And I just looked at the brightest color package and said, ‘That one!’
When we were recording, sometimes I wondered if what we were doing would even be possible to play live.
We really wanted to create an album that had no boundary or limit to it. There’s nothing to say that we couldn’t release a song that belongs on ‘The Stage’ 20 years into our career. We want it to be an album that constantly grows with what we want to do, and that’s what we did.
After ‘City of Evil,’ the world was still kind of apprehensive about Avenged Sevenfold. They didn’t know if we were a serious band or just some kids trying to play really ambitious music with crazy guitar parts that would be here one minute and gone the next.
With any success, a lot of voices come out, and you start hearing a lot more opinions on the matter. We’ve provoked very strong reactions in both directions since day one.
I can honestly tell you, if it wasn’t for our fans, there would not be Avenged Sevenfold right now.
We have been harnessing every aspect of what makes Avenged truly unrelenting and building off of that.
There’s always going to be haters, but those people are few. We’re not too worried about it.
When we were trying to come up with a concept for our music video for ‘The Stage’ we basically run through a lot of different ideas, and ultimately, I sat and studied the lyrics that Matt had written – and they really resonated with me.
We’ve never tried to write radio hits. If I hear our song on the radio, it’s cool, and I’m proud, but it’s never a goal.
We’re very historically tried and true when it comes to our albums. We pick the best songs; we get rid of the songs we feel don’t fit on the album, and we don’t work on remixing or remastering albums.
Once you can get a fan to listen to an album a handful of times and really have a lot of substance for them to grasp, then you’re looking at having a fan that really appreciates what you do for life and can appreciate coming to see it live.
We’re not the kind of people to just take a break and say everything’s going good, you know, let’s rest on our laurels, act like rock stars – we take it very seriously, and we certainly aren’t just celebrating and doing a victory lap.
To be honest, we never, ever let business weigh down the creativity of this band.
We go out there every night, and we fight the battle. We don’t care about people who don’t think we’re true metal. We hope to change their minds. I have total faith.
My dad played some guitar, and both my parents are fans of music and have huge record collections.
I think there’s a whole group of kids out there that don’t relate to the glitz and glamour of hanging out in clubs and partying all the time. So I think some people are just more real than that, and I think our fans are those kind of kids that need something to relate to, and I think we’re the band to do it.
With every album, I write above my ability, and my job as a guitarist is to catch up and be able to play it live. The thing about practicing is that once you master something, you don’t have to remaster it. You just keep moving forward.
All the song choices that we’ve picked are unique in their own right. They’re fun, and it’s really just to engage our fans.
We wanna go back to Southeast Asia and just do it right for them.
A great way to get your rhythm playing together is to work with a drummer, preferably someone that has a good groove and plays solidly in time.
When we called each other and got the call that Jimmy had died, literally, it all ended right there. Everything we’ve ever known as human beings, everything we’ve ever known as a band, changes at that moment, and you can’t think clearly.
We didn’t say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna pick a bunch of cover songs,’ or, ‘We’re gonna write an original song that has to sound like this, because we’re a metal band, so we’re gonna cover some metal songs.’ We did the opposite. We just said, ‘We’re gonna have fun with these songs, and we’re gonna try different things.’
I wanna keep people on their toes, and that’s just kind of how we’ve always operated.
I love listening to Led Zeppelin and classic rock albums from the Seventies. They’re just so brilliant because they breathe.
On our first album, ‘Sounding the Seventh Trumpet,’ we were listening to more obscure heavy metal bands and hardcore bands.
When you start running out of things to do on a guitar, you have to find other ways of making music with your instrument.
There’s people that have never heard our album. The most they’ve seen is either our video on ‘TRL’ or our picture on the cover of magazines.
We’re always talking and plotting and discussing what we can do to give our fans the best possible experience and leave everyone going home with having an amazing time and a memory that will last a lifetime.
I think everyone’s trying to come up together and bring up other bands along the way, and we’ve always been really blessed to have bands like Metallica and Iron Maiden take us under their wing and say nice things about us.
Basically, everything I’ve learned on guitar, I’ve learned from listening to my favorite albums. I never had any formal training. My teachers were Dimebag Darrell and Slash and the guys in Rancid and Slayer.
One of our biggest pet peeves is listening to bands that use harmony guitars for the sake of it. If you can’t figure out how do something different than Maiden, UFO, or even Boston, then what’s the point?
What makes Avenged so exciting to me musically is that people either love us or hate us, but nobody sounds like us.
In terms of content and instrumentation, I feel we have been extremely ambitious on every one of our albums going back to high school. We were the first screaming hardcore band to put a big ballad on our record.
A lot of people have ideas and opinions on what Avenged Sevenfold should be or what we should do, and I think our No. 1 rule is to always make sure we never listen to any of that and to always do what we believe.
We’re not a Screamo band.
From day one, we’ve always gotten backlash for certain outlandish ideas that we’ve had and presented. That’s also kind of been the driving force that’s pushed us forward.
I like being able to do dueling leads, and it’s fun to be able to shred.
I think people have the right to love whoever they want, and I think that women have the right to do whatever they wish to their bodies given the circumstances.
I worked a lot on our album cover, and I didn’t just want to post it on our website one day and move on. We wound up breaking it into 18 pieces and hiding them on fan sites all over the Internet and then posting clues, so fans could put together the puzzle.
With ‘Hail To The King’ – our last album – we obviously wore our influences on our sleeve, and it was a blatant attempt to turn on our younger generation of fans to more classic-sounding metal.
We’re focused on making our fans happy, keeping each other happy, so we can do this forever.
I can’t honestly say with a straight face that every Avenged Sevenfold album is my favorite.
It was a big deal for us to be on Ozzfest, especially as one of the main headliners and being the band that wasn’t announced: the mystery band. We’d never played the second stage at Ozzfest, and all of a sudden we’re on the main stage.
