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Guitar Quotes



"The guitar is a small orchestra. It is polyphonic. Every string is a different color, a different voice."


"I'll always do the guitar parts since it's my main instrument."


"If I'm playing with Ozzy it's just a guitar thing. But with the vocals I feel like I'm studying for the SATs."


"It is the most delightful thing that ever happens to me, when I hear something coming out of my guitar and out of my mouth that wasn't there before."


"If you play acoustic guitar you're the depressed, sensitive guy."


"For me, the guitar synthesizer is a great writing instrument."


"I sit down and create atmospheres, start playing guitar or piano and just sing whatever comes out of my mouth."


"As a guitar player, it's harder for me to impress somebody than it is to write a song that they like."


"I was playing with steel picks on a steel guitar, and there was no amplification needed."


"I can play rhythm guitar. I know how to hold a guitar and strum it."


"In Kid A and Amnesiac, the guitar becomes one more texture, difficult to separate from other textures."


"I would walk down the hall with my guitar and play for anyone that would listen. As a young kid I was really driven and I was going to make it happen no matter what."


"I'm not a really good classical guitarist by any means, but what I learned from this is a way of working very slowly on solo pieces and I enjoyed working on these pieces of John's. They were not written for solo guitar but a lot of them were easy to adapt."


"Yes, I took up the guitar when I was about 14 or 15, in high school."


"As a teenager I started painting and playing guitar."


"So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top."


"So it's more the musician in me that makes me stretch out and try different things more than anything. But, like a lot of guitar players, I have one certain niche that's my thing that I'm better at than the others."


"Oh yeah, I mean, it wasn't a very good guitar, most good guitars have got thrust rods in the necks that you can adjust or that'll keep them in shape, you know keep them straight. This one just, well it turned into a bow and arrow after a couple of months."


"I have been playing a lot of keyboards, especially in the last five or six years. I suppose it gives you more scope than the guitar, although it does tend to make you write a different way."



"Experimenting with different sounds is great, but when it comes down to it, you're still playing a guitar."


"I can't say I feel influenced by today's guitar players."


"It's hard to say this about a guy like Eddie Van Halen, one of the greatest guitar players who ever lived, but he's really limited to a style and they're locked into it."


"I was left with an urge to make the guitar sound like things it shouldn't be able to sound like."


"Once I picked up an electric guitar, I lost interest in piano, and I just wanted to rock. I studied piano for so long, I got burned out on it."
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