American Guitarist Quotes

Muddy Waters

Billie Joe Armstrong

Ry Cooder

Albert King

Joe Satriani

Eddie Cochran

Ace Frehley

I'm constantly thinking melodies. Now, to add interest to those melodies, obviously you have to know what things can be superimposed over a chord, and I will think of extended arpeggios and the upper estensions. If I'm playing very vertically, I will invariably start to include certaing passing notes which imply certain scales — like a melodic minor scale against a C minor chord, or diminished scales, something like that. But I'm not thinking of a scale at that specific moment. I'm thinking of the notes as surrounding that chord — because I know how each of the twelve notes in music sound against a C minor seventh, for instance.

Los Angeles is not Mexico City, but we have many fine nightclubs and restaurants here. It is enough. One must not aim too high.

There is something about guitars—maybe something magical—when played right, which evokes past, mysterious, barely-conscious sentiments, both individual and universal.

John Fahey (musician)

This house is lonesome: my baby left me all alone. I said this house is lonesome, my sugar left me all alone. If your heart ain't rock, sugar, must be marble stone.

Blind Lemon Jefferson

Now, when I was a young boy,
At the age of five,
My mother said I'd be
The greatest man alive.
I'm a man.

I shoulda quit you a long time ago.
And I wouldn't a been here
down on the killin' floor.

Learning to play the guitar is a combination of mental and motor skill acquisition. And to develop motor skills, repetition is essensial... Whenever musicians have trouble executing a passage, they generally tend to blame themselves for not having enought talent. Actually, all that's wrong is they don't know where their fingers are supposed to go... You should learn the piece in your head before you play it. And when you do play it, play it so slow that therre's no possibility of making a mistake.

The blues slows you down and gives you time to think.

Brand-new research suggests that the faster you take weight off, the longer you keep it off. Now that's a reason for dieters everywhere to rejoice.

On a bus ride into town, I wondered out loud, "Why am I going to town?"
As I looked around at the billboards and the stores I thought, "Why do I look around?"
And I kissed the filthy ground... the first dry spot I found...
I didn't have to wonder why I was laying down.

The bass is the link between harmony and rhythm. It is the foundation of a band. It is what all the other instruments stand upon, but it is rarely recognized as that.

I think the way that you develop your own sound is you go through a process by which you imitate people sometimes very closely. With me, I would mimic people to the note. And then I think you form a collage of all these different players that you imitate, that you learn, and you form your own recipe. I think anybody that has an originality to them, it came from a pool of taking stuff from their predecessors.

One thing I learned a long time ago was my fretboard, in terms of all the scales in all the positions... You have to learn it - there are no two ways about it. I shift between positions so easily now that I really don't have to think about them much... I would suggest starting your scale education with the major and minor scales, and after that, diminished, augmented and whole-tone. Then depending on what kind of music you want to play, the modes should be learned. My theory about this kind of thing is that you should learn it all. Once you've learned it you can play whatever you want to play, and I think that your playing will be more advanced, and you'll have a better understanding of the instrument.

A guy walks up to me and asks 'What's Punk?'. So I kick over a garbage can and say 'That's punk!'. So he kicks over the garbage can and says 'That's Punk?', and I say 'No that's trendy!'

Billie Joe Armstrong

I loved playing the guitar and I knew I was pretty good at it, so that's what I wanted to do with my life.

There ain't no cure for the summertime blues.

If someone can relate my guitar solo to an exercise in a book … that's no fun at all.