I used to run home from school, pick up my guitar, and lock myself in my room and play.
After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music. It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise.
I wanted to be able to play guitar. I wanted to be able to make music hurt.
I'm glad there are a lot of guitar players pursuing technique as diligently as they possibly can, because it leaves this whole other area open to people like me.
Rock n' roll was one thing, and then they chopped off the 'roll' and called it 'rock,' which became a sort of umbrella term for anything with a guitar in it. Like hair bands. How could we possibly believe that? It's just gotten downright silly, to the point where now it's sort of become like professional wrestling.
I approach playing acoustic guitar more of as a percussive instrument. It's fragile. I don't have a lot of finesse when it comes to my guitar playing.
Well, Steve Vai joined my dad's band right around the time when I actually started playing guitar. So he gave me a couple of lessons on fundamentals, and gave me some scales and practice things to work on. But I pretty much learned everything by ear.
It's a complicated relationship with a guitar. I love the Bullet, for sure.
The guitar has a kind of grit and excitement possessed by nothing else.
I played a lot of keyboards, but I really wanted to produce the sound that was in my head that I was trying to emulate on the keys. I wanted to do it for real. And it makes me look at the keys in a different way. So it's like I'm looking at the guitar and bass more like meat and potatoes and keys like coloring over top of it, you know.
When I read the 'Country Strong' script, I thought, 'Can't they just hand-double it? Can't I just do the rest of the movie and not have to do the performing?' It took me six months to learn to sing and play guitar at the same time.
Picking up a guitar - I couldn't imagine doing anything else.
I'm really not that good at Guitar Hero!
Writing used to be my hobby, but now that it's my job, I have no hobby - except watching TV and laying around the pool reading 'U.S. Weekly.' I have tried many hobbies, such as knitting, Pilates, ballet, yoga, and guitar, but none of them have taken.
I had done a fair bit of traveling during the holidays in my school days with my guitar and discovered that I could live on it. Admittedly, I traveled with a sleeping bag but I could always find somewhere to lay my head.
In OK Computer, the guitar was already moving towards a tone generator as well as a riff generator.
When I was around 13 or 14, I started getting really into songwriting. And one day, I was rooting through my mum's old tapes and records, and I found 'Grace' by Jeff Buckley. I remember so vividly the first time I put it on. It blew my mind: his voice, the way he could play the guitar. I must have listened to the album over and over for weeks.
The most obvious thing you can't do with a guitar synthesizer is to really sound like a guitar.
I suppose when I started playing guitar, it was the means to an end. I never thought of myself as a fully fledged guitar instrumentalist. And my early excursions on the electric guitar were curtailed when Eric Clapton came on the scene, and I decided I was never going to be in the same arena as a Clapton or a Peter Green.
I'm an old guitar player who has fallen into television and is so happy he did.
I enjoy his concerts and OK, maybe - I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't play the guitar, but I am going to go a long way if I keep following Springsteen.
I've been in a band, so I understand the politics. Sometimes the bass player doesn't like what the guitar player is doing, and you have to sort of even that out.
The voices on the record, that was trying to treat my voice like guitar players treat guitar tones.
I started writing probably around when I was 15, because that's when I picked up the guitar. That was also around the same time when I began to create my own music, and everything really just clicked for me, and I knew this was what I was going to do.
If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.
Had an awesome time. You tell me to show up and all I have to do is drink beer, play guitar all day and I can lift weights and you're going to pay me for this!
I've just been recording mostly acoustic stuff, drums, and sax, and electric guitar. I'm just still writing songs and what not.
But yeah, I played bass guitar in high school and in college and then I actually fractured my thumb, so my bass career went bye-bye.
The thing about me is that I'm very fortunate to have had the opportunities with Avenged Sevenfold in songwriting. I really think it's helped to bolster my guitar playing as well.
One of the first things electric I ever saw was a guitar. I was living in a house with no electricity until, at 7, we moved to a house that had it. It had electric lights, but the previous owners had even taken the light bulbs with them when they moved.
For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.
A guitar can be so human, so sorrowful, so angry, and I wanted to figure out how to achieve that vibe without having to actually use guitars, because 'Badlands' is a very futuristic record - and making it that in an era of futuristic music is a really hard thing to do!
You should approach a sequencer like you would a Dobro guitar.
I'll get up there and I'll do my guitar solos in one of those space outfits.
I just like simplicity. I like simple songs, I like simple chords, simple vocals, simple lead guitar. I just like simplicity. That's just the way I like it.
The word 'retirement' doesn't really sit well with me. There comes a time when you reach a position in society or culture where people will not let you retire. You can say, 'Alright, I'm going to hang up my guitar,' but people will still not let you retire.
