I play the guitar a little bit.
At a young age I thought, ‘Wow, that fiddle thing, that’s pretty cool. That mandolin is great. These drums, I like these drums… ‘ They were Indian drums. And I was saying, ‘But that guitar. That guitar. Girls are going to like that guitar.’
I like the guitar better these days. I like the bass, too, but it’s hard to fit a bass amp in a small car.
I think I’ve been playing bass for as long as I’ve played guitar, and I love them both.
As Mick Jagger will tell you, performing is an aerobic work-out. I’ve got the bass guitar, which is the heaviest of all the instruments, and I’m a little girl, in boiling-hot leather under the lights. You have to keep the fitness level up if you want to look good up there.
I was lucky to start playing guitar in the Eighties when so many great players were around to inspire me, like Yngwie Malmsteen, Van Halen and especially Dave Murray and Adrian Smith of Iron Maiden.
I’m supportive of women, absolutely, and it’s so gratifying to have girls come up and say, ‘I’m really inspired by your guitar playing.’ I mean no disrespect to the sisterhood, but musically I feel more drawn to things like Dirty Projectors, the National and Grizzly Bear.
The only time it dominates is during a solo, or when we play a low blues and I put figures in behind Eric’s vocals. There’s never any real problem fitting guitar and organ together.
I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.
My body is damaged from music in two ways. I have a red irritation in my stomach. It’s psychosomatic, caused by all the anger and the screaming. I have scoliosis, where the curvature of your spine is bent, and the weight of my guitar has made it worse. I’m always in pain, and that adds to the anger in our music.
All I know is, I play the guitar, beat it out, and sing a song that has some damn resonance that we feel as musicians. We send it out and people get it, and that’s a good thing.
Everybody would grab a guitar and listen to somebody else and call themselves a folk singer. When they didn’t know no more songs, they’d run out of them.
When I have downtime, music is a big part of my life. Not so much singing, but I play the guitar.
Kane is a band I formed with my best friend Steve Carlson. We just got together and started playing guitar. He was playing some old school rock and roll, and we got together and thought, ‘Hey, let’s take this on the road.’
I did buy an electric guitar while shooting ‘Split.’
For a female artist, it takes a lot more to be taken seriously if you’re not sat down at a piano or with a guitar, you know?
I think it gets boring (for the audience) for the lead singer to have a guitar hanging on them all the time.
I only ever really take out my guitar when I’m miserable, which isn’t necessarily a very good time to do it.
For me, the guitar synthesizer is a great writing instrument.
Yeah. I’m amateurish. I can play enough to write a song, or strum on a little guitar to write out a song. But, I don’t play well at all. I wouldn’t even attempt for a second to play in public.
I’m tired of being around men all the time. I’m going to start a band called Skirt with three girls and I’ll play the guitar and sing backing vocals in drag. I went window shopping when I was in New York, saw a lot of amazing dresses.
I play piano and guitar and I do write my own stuff so to a certain extent I know what I want to do in regards to music. But I’m still finding out what kind of music is my favourite kind to listen to, never mind do myself so I’ve got a lot of time to find out myself and develop myself as an artist.
When I was younger, playing piano and guitar were all things that I wanted to do for a short period of time, like any kid.
If the person who can effectively sanction ill-conceived wars can play the electric guitar, which is a symbol of rebellion, then that whole worldview becomes confused.
I actually learned the guitar with the help of a Pete Seeger instructional record when I was 13 or 14.
On acoustic guitar I tend to stay in the key of D for some reason. On electric guitar I keep basic: C, G, D, and A. The key of D minor is also real good for me.
I’m glad there are a lot of guitar players pursuing technique as diligently as they possibly can, because it leaves this whole other area open to people like me.
For me, something will come in my head and I’ll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I’ll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn’t. So there’s really no set method behind it.
Actually, there was another band where we were three girls, around ’84 when I met John Zorn, called Sunset Chorus. It was just bass and drums and guitar- we didn’t make any records but we played a lot of different clubs in New York.
At some point, I had to make a decision: I could practice more and become a really great guitar player or I could work on writing better songs. There are only so many hours in the day, and I found writing songs more fulfilling than working on becoming this virtuoso guitar player.
And, so, when I picked up the guitar, suddenly, just playing a couple of notes really, really spoke to me. It was almost like I should have been doing it prior to that. You know, it was something that just felt really natural.
It’s not so surprising that there are more women in metal bands. And they’re not just fronting them. There are drummers and guitar players, bass players.
My mother was a very beautiful lady, I thought. She was very good to me. I guess – she died when I was nine and a half, but if she had lived, I probably wouldn’t be trying to play guitar. She wanted me to be known, but as something else. Not a guitar player.
When I sit down and play the guitar, I’m 20 years old again.
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.
I’m not a good guitar player.
When the band begins to get a name for themselves, and the writers get assigned to bands, they’ll hit somebody who just doesn’t like that kind of music, or they love hip hop but hate guitar rock.
As I try to get around with a guitar, a banjo and a suitcase of high heels and dresses, I treasure that little ukulele.
My guitar heroes are Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and people like that – so I’ve tried to make an album of Robert Johnson covers that, well, while not totally faithful for blues purists, is faithful for people like me that grew up with the ’60s and the electric blues-rock versions of Johnson’s songs.
I explored rock culture and what the guitar can do though people like Jimmy Page and John McLaughlin, and the music moves away from pop.
Artie travels all the time. The rehearsals were just miserable. Artie and I fought all the time. He didn’t want to do the show with my band; he just wanted me on acoustic guitar.
A guitar player goes on the road, and he misses his girlfriend for a while, but he manages to get along. A horn player gets out on the road, plays two or three towns, and then he’ll get lonely, and next thing you know, he’s packed up and left. It’s better not to hire him in the first place.
The voices on the record, that was trying to treat my voice like guitar players treat guitar tones.
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.
I still like to play the guitar, but I rarely have anything to do with the music business these days. I mean, there is no music business anymore, is there?
But that guitar is the perfect companion to the human voice. You rest it against your gut, against your heart, and when you strum it the vibrations go outwards for all to hear, but the vibration also hits you on your body.
I have actual dreams of Bruce Springsteen calling me up on stage to wear a bandanna and play rhythm guitar next to Little Steven.
We used to play music for fun. Much more than now. Now nobody picks up a guitar unless they’re paid for it.
Right now, it hasn’t affected my music other than the fact that I don’t have time to write any of it. That’s no different from when I first started and I lived at home. I would play the guitar in the afternoon and then my mom or my dad would come home and I’d have to quit.
So, once I get writing I really try and put five to eight hours a day in my room with a guitar to really try and come up with stuff that feels interesting enough to me to keep it.
If there’s a song where there’s a possibility of guitar stuff that would be fun to listen to, go for it. Don’t worry about what anybody thinks.
Using double coil pickups kills a lot of the guitar tone – you lose the acoustic mechanics. With my single-coils driven through the Marshalls and overdrive, it sounds massive.
When I was 13, I got my first guitar, and I could sort of play Ted Nugent songs, but I couldn’t play the solos. But I could play along with entire Ramones songs.
I’ll get up there and I’ll do my guitar solos in one of those space outfits.
To be a great band it’s like you have that telepathy. You know when the bass player’s in back of you without even looking. You know when your guitar player’s coming up to you to lean up to you and sing into your microphone. You just know these things. You feel it. You feel the energy of it.
