Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
While you're learning guitar, figure out the drums, too. Not only does it help you have great timing, but it helps you understand how a band works.
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.
And my biggest revelation that will never be beaten is the Beatles. I couldn't believe that I'd gone my whole life without knowing all those songs.
Les Pauls work out real well for me because I'll beat the hell out of them and they'll still work. The only trouble with them is finding good ones.
Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar, no matter what the project is.
Bike riding is great for your thinking. I can't say I've written an entire tune while cycling, but riding has definitely inspired songwriting ideas.
My all-time favorite rock and roll players were Scotty Moore, Chuck Berry and Franny Beecher, and I listened to the country playing of Merle Travis.
Largely I write from life. ... I write from what happens to me. Mostly about love. People notice the other stuff more but I write mostly about love.
On the average, I don't spend more than 15 minutes in the car - to go to the golf course or the gym. And that's the only time I listen to the radio.
I was a regular dork. I was a kid who was scrawny and all that, and probably kind of dumb or something. I wasn't unordinary; I wasn't extraordinary.
If anyone looks back to the '70s, '80s with nostalgic rosy colored glasses and goes, 'Well, everything was awesome.' No, everything was not awesome!
Music is a communication. It's a two-way street. You need people to play to in order to make that connection complete. That's the way we look at it.
I spent a lot of time developing my chops when I was younger. In doing so, I found that one of the hardest things was dealing with what to practice.
I was passionately interested in Elizabethan history at school, so it was natural for me as a musician to take interest in the music of that period.
Having been on tour in countries that are extremely eco-friendly, we automatically end up doing the things that normal people do in other countries.
When we went into the New England states, people were talking about the new sound of Flatt & Scruggs, but we had been doing that sound for 20 years.
So I always get in some kind of situation where next thing I know it's four a.m. and I go, uh oh, I have a photo session first thing in the morning!
The blues is the foundation, and it's got to carry the top. The other part of the scene, the rock 'n' roll and the jazz, are the walls of the blues.
There's something about playing every night, it becomes easy and it becomes fun. I love being up there and playing for different crowds every night.
Nobody's perfect. Everyone slides here and there, and they have their ups and downs. When they are down, that is not the time to step all over them.
I never work out my leads. Everything I do is usually totally spontaneous. If someone says, 'That was good; play that again,' I'm not able to do it.
Scott Medlock. Some say he's a genius, some say he's a fool. I say he's the Jim Morrison of sports art, and proud to say, one of my closest friends.
We've been able to have our cake and eat it, too. Every song, every T-shirt, is absolutely a pure expression of what we want to do. And it connects.
I had been playing with my local band, Skinny Cat. I had been to quite a few auditions before UFO, managed to get the gig and then not want to do it!
I gave a Collings dreadnought to a young guitar player in the Valley where I live because he didn't have a good acoustic, and he's a terrific player.
I really [enjoy] working with new people and just sort of the freshness of it. ... I [want] to have those new conversations, musically and otherwise.
In my first label Shrapnel Records I wasn't expected to do anything except the creative music that I wanted to do. I was my own boss, which is great.
I love Indian food - it's my favourite cuisine. I love the mixture of spices and the subtle flavours. It's really erotic; the spices are so sensuous.
I may just keep releasing singles 'til I run out of music, which is kind of cool in a way - as long as people don't go, 'Oh my God, not another one!'
I'll never forget when I heard Steve Morse and the Dixie Dregs for the first time. I was just blown away, and it changed my whole approach to guitar.
Whatever it is, music should sound spontaneous, I've derived a great deal of pleasure from playing jazz and having the knowledge of that spontaneity.
I think that the first World War put an end the kind of music that Mahler, Bruckner and Richard Strauss were writing. A change of fashion was needed.
It is hard for a black man to just be himself. We spend so much time in defense of something that is indefensible because there is nothing to defend.
My dream artists to collaborate with are probably Cee Lo Green and Imogen Heap. They're completely out of my genre but they're both musical geniuses.
Influence people think about it as someone you like but influence is also what you're revolted by. In fact, often it's what you're running away from.
When I first started playing guitar, everyone was playing Chuck Berry and B.B. King licks. I decided I was going to find other avenues of expression.
I learned a lot about lead; you don't have to blow your cookies in the first bar. It is much harder to be simple that to be complicated during solos.
There are good people in radio and the record companies, but there are others who are completely in the wrong job and holding music up in the process.
When I started to play with my fingernails, it was not just for volume. The most important thing was giving the guitar different colors in its voices.
I don't regard myself as a soloist. It's a color; I put it in for excitement. It's not great loss if a solo has to go. We've made songs without solos.
CS: I always say there's a tribal element in a rock concert. There's a real back-and-forth thing that goes on between the audience and the performers.
The Big Band Era is my era. People say, 'Where did you get your style from?' I did the Big Band Era on guitar. That's the best way I could explain it.
I get egotistical about things where I can do something well - for example, my singing. Most other things, I don't have the wherewithal to back it up.
I used to be a mean maniac. Someone once threw a firecracker at a show and I jumped off the side of the stage and whacked 'em on the side of the head.
She had something down there twice as big as mine. That's why I say you better watch where you stroke, cause it could turn out, turn out to be a joke.
It's better to be an octopus than a fish. If an octopus loses a tentacle to a predator, the octopus will survive with seven tentacles left for itself.
You can always pound out demos and send them to record companies, but most of the successful bands I've seen are the ones that can sustain themselves.
For years I've wanted to find some guys that I could work with, because I realized a long time ago that I can do a lot of things other than Aerosmith.
As soon as the groupie finds out that you make errors in everyday life like everybody else does and that you are human, they turn on you and hate you.
With all tools at my disposal, I'm 100% into chasing tone and checking out new equipment and "geeking" out during sound check by taking too much time.