Ritchie Blackmore Quotes

Jeff Beck is my idol .. sometimes he finds notes that I just do not have on my guitar. Frank Zappa's another one .. I loved Frank Zappa ... I do think Van Halen reinvented the guitar ... he's an excellent musician, a shrewd guitarist and as a person he's wonderful.

When you're around someone good, your own standards are raised.

But you have to give your whole life to a cello. When I realized that, I went back to the guitar and just turned the volume up a bit louder.

One of the reasons I took up the guitar was I didn't want to speak to anybody. I really felt uncomfortable speaking to people, so I took the guitar up so I could hide behind it. I'm not comfortable explaining things, because my brain doesn't work that way.

The only way you can get good, unless you're a genius, is to copy. That's the best thing. Just steal.

Playing a Fender is an art itself. They're always going out of tune.

Combing my hair doesn't make me a better musician.

I've always played every amp I've ever had full up, because rock and roll is supposed to be played loud. Also, that's how you get your sustain.

When something is not good, it's bad. Period

Simplicity is the key.

I don't play by those rules; I'm my own worst enemy sometimes. There's something in me that has to go against the grain. You know, I don't like to be a dead fish, swimming with all the other dead fish, I like to go upstream sometimes, against the flow.

If you can play well in the studio, you can play well on stage.

I'm very moved by Renaissance music, but I still love to play hard rock - though only if it's sophisticated and has some thought behind it.

Ian Gillan, Roger Glover and I wanted to be a hard rock band - we wanted to play rock and roll only.

I have never met one person who likes Grand Funk.

I don't see myself as such an important guitarist.

A lot of blues guitarists play with only three fingers, and they can't figure out certain runs that require the use of their little fingers. Classical training is good for that.

I like leaping around on stage as long as it's done with class. None of this jumping up in the air and doing the splits

I criticize my own work pretty harshly.

Sometimes if I'm not playing well on stage, I'll purposely play even worse; I'll tear it apart, because I'm so disgusted with what I'm playing that I'll go the wrong route: instead of trying to make it better, I'll go the other way and really make myself sound bad. Which is a kind of a strange outlook I suppose, really.

I'm not into that Keith Richard trip of having all those guitars in different tunings. I never liked the Rolling Stones much anyway.

When I was 20, I didn't give a damn about song construction. I just wanted to make as much noise and play as fast and as loud as possible.

I don't put myself on Jeff Beck's level, but I can relate to him when he says he'd rather be working on his car collection than playing the guitar.

I've always thought that I'm not really a guitar player, but I just practised so much that I developed into a kind of a bit of a musician, but I've often doubted my musical ear. If someone sings me a melody, I have to improvise on that melody, because I can't retain the information they've given me. That's why I still practise today, I suppose, because I still feel inadequate.

Pete Townshend used to crash chords and let the guitar feed back. He's overrated.