People do ask, ‘Are you going to embellish this stuff?’ I wouldn’t change any of my guitar parts.
If I try to write a song, I will completely fail to write a song. But if I’m just holding my guitar and I just start humming, then I’ll have a song in an hour.
I’m surrounded by great guitar players.
I mean, I can sit down with a guitar, and in fact, we do two, three songs with just guitar and percussion.
I like to be quiet and play guitar and just chill.
I come from a very musical family. My dad taught me to play guitar. I play violin and drums as well. Violin, I started in elementary school. Drums actually came when I was in a program called ‘Rock Star,’ which was really awesome. We were doing a song by the Ramones, so I thought, ‘Why not play the drums?’
It’s actually not that hard to play guitar in a rock band.
Rap bores me, and all the glamour rock groups like Bon Jovi just amuse me. They obviously have a place, but they all sound like they use the same guitar player to me.
I never went out to make the music that people would like. I mean, I tried, because every teenager tries to do that. But in my heart, I’d always come from gigs where I played upbeat guitar covers and I’d start writing sad songs on the piano.
When you play guitar and strum, you’re using biceps and triceps to move up and down. I realized you could just turn your wrist, your forearm, using smaller muscles in your arm that are much more efficient and much quicker.
I can plunk out enough chords to write a song, but I’m completely afraid to play guitar in front of other people. It’s a fear of failure, I guess.
For 20 years I’ve been screaming at these guitar companies, saying, ‘It’s abnormal to put your arm around an acoustic guitar that is about 6 to 8 inches deep.’ Your arm reaches over, and you start to strum, and then all of a sudden you get a charley horse in your back. The older you get, the greater the charley horse.
I don’t really know why I chose bass except that it was different than guitar.
I didn’t know until later, but my uncle was quite a famous bohemian in Glasgow, and he played guitar. My father was a kind of a poetic bohemian, and he read me poetry.
I wanted to play this part: the goofy rock and roller who can’t hang up his guitar when it’s clear to everyone else that he should.
The day before my 16th birthday I got my guitar.
I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland. And when we moved to America, it was just the typical thing except I was really good at it; so was my brother.
We’ve got an electric organ, a sax, drums, guitar and bass guitar. We sound less like the Beatles than most of the groups.
Bryan Adams might not be what I want to put on, but he’s a pop singer with a great voice and great guitar tone. Plus, he’s done more for Canada than Rush have, because he works all the time. I envy him for that.
I think a good guitar solo sounds so much better within the context of a good song.
You’d always see a lady or a little girl sitting at a piano. I decided I wanted to play something more unexpected, so that’s when I got interested in learning to play the guitar.
I wouldn’t mind working with Queens of the Stone Age, doing some guitar stuff on that. Even Arctic Monkeys. I’d like to do be a bit of guitar with them guys. I’ll play on anyone’s record to be honest with you.
I got my first instrument for Christmas when I was three or four years old. My parents got me a mandolin because it was the only instrument that would fit me because I was so small. I went straight from that into the drums when I was six, and then I started playing guitar when I was seven or eight.
I don’t recall getting a first guitar.
I created this picture of this character who would play the guitar effortlessly, who had no limitations, performing beautiful music, and he moved around with great acrobatic skills, just capturing the audience and being a great entertainer.
I’m definitely a guitar player, but it’s the last thing I listen to in a song, after the singer and the drums.
The violin is my mistress, but the guitar is my master.
The flute was an alternative to being a small fish in an increasingly bigger pool filled with a number of great guitar players.
Guitar is the best form of self-expression I know. Everything else, and I’m just sort of tripping around, trying to figure my way through life.
I really respect Zakk Wylde’s guitar playing and his compulsive work ethic.
When I can focus on something like guitar or painting, I do. I started painting people I admire, like Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Nelson Algren, Marlon Brando, Patti Smith, my girl, my kids.
I may be learning guitar, but I’ll never be able to sing.
We used to say when we were 20 years old, that when you reach 30, you gotta hang up your guitar and get a real job.
The idea you start from is ‘What’s cool to a kid in their early teens?’ So we had the guitar in ‘Devil May Cry 3.’ Guitars are cool to kids that age, and motorcycles are, too.
I do not consider myself a guitar player. My father is a guitar player – I’m not.
The most important part of my religion is to play guitar.
The greatest guitar player in the world today for me is Paco de Lucia, who is actually Spanish.
I play Rock Band, which is Guitar Hero times ten. You can play with four people, so when you have parties, you have a real band. Nobody ever wants to sing, so I’m always the one throwing down on the mic.
My first guitar, a Fender Jazz Master, I traded it in for a Les Paul Deluxe.
The guitar can go at a scream. It can yell at you.
It turns out kids today still learn that four-chord progression when they’re just picking up the guitar.
The ukulele was the first of many instruments they had bought for me. They got me a guitar when I was eleven, which my son Morgan uses until this day. They paid for 3 years of guitar lessons; they bought me a bass fiddle, which I still play.
I wasn’t planning on being a guitar player; I was going to be a singer. And I was for a little bit in the Sex Pistols – that is, until we got John Lydon. And then I realized I wasn’t really suited as a front guy.
I had an edge in ‘Andhadhun’ because, being a musician, I knew how to play a guitar, so it was not difficult for me to learn a musical instrument.
I play, like, 12 instruments. Guitar, piano, harmonica, African drums… I’m working on mastering the accordion.
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.
When I was 14 I would pick up my brother’s bass guitar, and I would just pound on it, having no idea how to play it.
I just want to play like Jimi Hendrix. I love other forms of music and wish I could play classical piano, or saxophone like John Coltrane, but that will never happen. Because my nature is to play electric guitar really well and to emulate my heroes from the late 1960s.
If you can’t play it on an acoustic guitar or a grand piano then it’s not a song.
I started doing all kinds of weird stuff on the guitar, which became part of my playing. I started doing harmonics and tapping on the guitar and pulling off strings and doing all this weird stuff that no one had ever done before.
When you pick up a guitar, you don’t put down your First Amendment rights.
I actually bought a travel guitar, and that guitar is really cool. You can actually fold the guitar, and you can plug headphones into it, but it’s acoustic, or semi-acoustic.
Now they have banging guitar and no bass and call it rock, but that’s not what I call rock.
I had, like, a keytar. I was always attracted to the guitar, but I never really thought that I could be good at it because I was trained on piano, so it was kind of a jump.
But yeah, I played bass guitar in high school and in college and then I actually fractured my thumb, so my bass career went bye-bye.
Puberty was very vague. I literally locked myself in a room and played guitar.
I got into guitar because no parent will buy their eight-year-old kid drums unless they’re divorced and trying to get back at their wife. You know what I mean?
I just love crafting and shaping sounds. Actually, many of the sounds that I work with start off as organic instruments – guitar, piano, clarinet, etc. But I do love the rigidity of electronic drums.
Being 16 years old and getting an electric guitar is never going to get old. There’s always going to be kids making music. There’s always going to be kids in bands.
I had done a fair bit of traveling during the holidays in my school days with my guitar and discovered that I could live on it. Admittedly, I traveled with a sleeping bag but I could always find somewhere to lay my head.
The first guitar I ever owned was a Kay SG copy. That cost like $35. Man, that was a terrible guitar.
I had been playing single note instruments and I wanted to hear a guitar played as a piano.
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.
My whole life is geared to play guitar. I play what I want when I want and I hope the listener gets as much pleasure listening to the music as I get playing it.
