A guitar is just theoretically built wrong. Each string is an interval of fourths, and then the B string is off. Theoretically, that's not right, all the strings should be off.
Rock & roll is not so much a question of electric guitars as it is striped pants.
I do more writing by myself than with anybody else. My best thing is sitting...around somewhere with a guitar, and having an idea. You never know where it'd come from. Songwriting is a God-given talent.
I discovered after going to music festivals that I am a rock fan. I love the guitars, the phrasing, and the abandon of rock fans.
That happens every time I get behind a guitar, regardless of what I'm saying, 'cause music is freedom and being free is the closest I've ever felt to being spiritual.
I honestly believe that you have to be able to play the guitar hard if you want to be able to get the whole spectrum of tones out of it. Since I normally play so hard, when I start picking a bit softer my tone changes completely, and that's really useful sometimes for creating a more laid-back feel.
I'm working on guitars for free, because I love working on guitars anyway.
We weren't listening to guitar bands, we were thoroughly ashamed of being a guitar band. So we bought loads of keyboards and learned how to use them, and when we got bored we went back to guitars.
That's all I wanted to do as a kid. Play a guitar properly and jump around. But too many people got in the way.
I read and write classical piano and percussion, also guitar.
When I'm having a bad day, I pick up my guitar.
There are two kinds of music. One comes from the strings of a guitar, the other from the strings of the heart.
It is a well-known mystery that guitar players suddenly get better once they are dead. Buddy Holly was the first. Stevie Ray Vaughan is known by a lot more people than had ever heard of him when he was alive.
We were just amazed we were putting out a record. We were, and are, still learning. But we've never cared much for professionalism as long as the energy was there. Like our live shows: We're out of tune and use a lot of feedback. That's not on purpose or because we don't care, we're just musically and rhythmically retarded and we play so hard that we can't tune our guitars fast enough.
Rick Rubin said, well, I don't know that we will sell records. He said, I would like you to go with me and sit in my living room with a guitar and two microphones and just sing to your heart's content everything you ever wanted to record. I said, that sounds good to me. So I did that. And day after day, three weeks, I sang for him.
I'm amazed that I can sit down, put a guitar in my hands and start playing kind of free style, and it will be four hours later and it will feel like it's been five minutes. I think that adds depth to your being, when something in your life can do that for you. Everybody should try to find something in their life that can do that for them. People find really elaborate self-destructive ways of killing time on this planet. That's why they take drugs or drink, trying to alter their state of being. If you can find something that doesn't destroy you, but deepens your character, you're really lucky.
When I went over to the States to promote Outrider, everyone was telling me I was a blues guitarist. I'm not a bloody blues guitarist. I'm a guitarist.
... by far the most astonishing guitar player ever has got to be Django Reinhardt ... Django was quite superhuman, There's nothing normal about him as a person or a player.
I guess anybody who plays can say that they play guitar, but if you want to be a guitarist, you've got to practice all the time and you've got to get good at it. It's more than just having one and playing it.
I had sat in one day in Central Park with Bonnie and Delaney, and Duane was playing with them, so I asked if he wanted to work on an album. You never had to say to him how to play the guitar.
I know artists whose medium is life itself, and who express the inexpressible without brush, pencil, chisel or guitar. They neither paint nor dance. Their medium is Being. Whatever their hand touches has increased life.... They are the artists of being alive.
Elmore James only knew one lick, but you had the feeling that he meant it.
I kind of just want to get to know people and I have a genuine interest in people that listen to my music. I've just always felt like that. I think it's from the days of playing guitar to a few people and being very conversational and very intimate and I've always wanted to keep that vibe.
I started out with the guitar and was a studio musician back in the 50s, and then got shot in my finger.
Just the other day someone threw a bra duct-taped to a tennis ball. I just stood there, playing guitar, thinking how this was totally premeditated. Some girl sat around inventing a way to get her bra onstage from 40 rows back.
