Acoustic Quotes & Sayings

When I was playing with synth players, I was still within a conceptual framework of playing music. When I started playing solo, I became much more aware of the acoustic phenomena that the instruments were producing. — Z'EV

Sometimes we drop in and do an acoustic set somewhere, and that's really fun to take all these insanely loud songs, and to do them quiet. It's really a sight to see ... or to hear! — Michael McKean

I did a smaller gig with an acoustic guitar and a drum machine. In one song, something wrong happened with the drum machine. I tried to cover up the mistake by playing faster and improvising a new song but it became crazy, and I had to admit it was all a mess. — Violante Placido

I made music on Seven the same way as on the other albums. I only used acoustic instruments ... I'm looking for instruments that have vocal sounds, forgotten instruments like the guimbri ... The first and second albums were about the voice, what came before. This album is about introducing those sounds into modern, Western life, — Marie Daulne

It is a curious fact that the delicate acoustic arrangements of a music hall can be impaired by the music of inefficient, discordant orchestras, and for this reason poor musical performances have been forbidden in some places. If a poor performance could affect adversely the acoustics of a hall, would not an able performance tend to improve them? — Robert Henri

What resonates with me now is the acoustic guitar and piano. — Delta Goodrem

A poetic form is essentially a codified pattern of silence. We have a little silence at the end of a line, a bigger one at the end of a stanza, and a huge one at the end of the poem. The semantic weight of the poem tends to naturally distribute itself according to that pattern of silence, paying especial care to the sounds and meanings of the words and phrases that resonate into the little empty acoustic of the line-ending, or the connecting hallway of stanza-break, or the big church of the poem's end. — Don Paterson

For me it always comes down to what is a good song and I'm very old fashioned in the way that I like to make songs that have something classic about them whether you can play them with an orchestra or an electro synthesizer or an acoustic guitar. — Marc Almond

If you were a performer that only had an acoustic instrument, back in the day you couldn't hide behind your guitar pedals or the production or the vibe. There was performance and then there was the song, and that was all that you had. — Will Sheff

I was in Australia in about 1996 when I played some acoustic guitar for some guys at a studio down there. They were pretty happy with it, and mentioned doing an album, so about a year later I met some people who were interested in recording. — Tom Curren

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.
— Julio Cortazar

When I can do an acoustic set, I can sit down and sing. And then when I have a huge arena full of people, there's nothing like that. It's the coolest feeling in the world, but I also like to play small intimate shows because I feel you can connect a little more. And that's something I had to learn - how to connect to a big audience versus the small one. — Avril Lavigne

Saying that you've got acoustic instruments and that's traditional and so people will think it's more intimate, that will always be the case. It's a more intimate sound, so it's going to sound more direct whatever you're singing about. — Alison Goldfrapp

No other acoustic instrument can match the piano's expressive range, and no electric instrument can match its mystery. — Kenneth R. Miller

'Funny' is really cool live. You break it down into an acoustic set, and sometimes I'll do that one unplugged and off the mic, depending on the venue. — Tori Kelly

Actually, I think that a lot of the interviews and acoustic sessions and other things that artists fill their time with are really pointless and suck the energy out of the artist. — Marina And The Diamonds

I really enjoy playing solo acoustic. I think it's good for me as a songwriter to stay in touch with what it takes to make a song work by yourself. — Jeff Tweedy

A year or so earlier I had been to the Sky River Rock Festival in rural Washington, where a dosen stone-broke freaks from Seattle Liberation Front had assembled a sound system that carried every small note of an acoustic guitar - even a cough or the sound of a boot drooping on the stage - to half-deaf acid victims huddled under bushes a half mile away.
But the best technicians available to the National DAs' convention in Vegas apparently couldn't handle it. Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have triggered up to addres his troops during the Siege of Vicksburg. The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phaze with the speaker's gestures. (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. 73) — Hunter S. Thompson

I suppose I am a frustrated musician so I annoy my family by playing guitar in the house. I used to be into acoustic stuff but my son Joseph is learning drums, so now I have an electric guitar and we play Metallica. We have an amp and a PA in the garage with his drum kit. — Kevin McKidd

My grandfather gave me my first guitar, an old acoustic with palm trees and dancing girls painted on it. — Dan Fogelberg

This band - because this is myself on electric and acoustic guitars - we've done three tours together now and I really, really like it which is why I did the DVD as well. — Joan Armatrading

Oftentimes the most produced and synth-tastic songs are the ones that end up sounding the best acoustic. — Emily Haines

I was a grill cook at McDonalds for a little bit. I did landscape for a little bit. I played a lot in the bar scene, I played countless sets of acoustic songs in that arena. — Aaron Lewis

What I'm trying to do is make impressions. I think of myself as a colourist, adding different colours and shades by using different techniques and touching the guitar in different ways. I'd like to play sounds you can see if you've got your eyes closed. — Lenny Breau

In 1996, I was in was in an acoustic kind of rock band, we were called Feeble. We were just playing locally. — Travis Barker

Garcia had traded his Sears electric guitar for an acoustic model shortly after arriving in Palo Alto, and late that spring Barbara bought him a better guitar, and shortly after that, a lovely sounding Stella twelve-string. — Blair Jackson

Beyond the Thunder is the closest I've recorded to an acoustic thing. — Neal Schon

I think the Flecktones are a mixture of acoustic and electronic music with a lot of roots in folk and bluegrass as well as funk and jazz. — Bela Fleck

The mall tour was right off of my second record, before it came out. It was very different. I did an acoustic performance every day in a different mall! One interesting thing I remember is playing 'My Happy Ending' a lot, and that song was so new that I remember getting emotional. — Avril Lavigne

I most enjoy sitting down with the acoustic guitar and just fiddling around and trying to come up with something like a hook or some sort of melodic line. That's something that I do habitually. — James Mercer

One of the ideas behind doing this acoustic record is that I didn't want to have to produce it by committee. — Robyn Hitchcock

For 20 years I've been screaming at these guitar companies, saying, 'It's abnormal to put your arm around an acoustic guitar that is about 6 to 8 inches deep.' Your arm reaches over, and you start to strum, and then all of a sudden you get a charley horse in your back. The older you get, the greater the charley horse. — Dick Dale

Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual. — Marshall McLuhan

I do experiment with lots of different genres. In making music, I don't think of genre like, "I want to do this, because I'm going use that country music sound; I'm going use that hip-hop sound; I'm going use that acoustic [sound]." It's just making music. So now that I've traveled a lot more since I did Acoustic Soul, I'm sure that different sounds will come into place, because I have been exposed to it and I like it. But it's not so much of a conscience effort. It's mind and spirited. You know, we're humans. — India.Arie

I've made three studio albums and one live one with my brother. It's melodic singer-songwriter acoustic-rock music. — Kevin Bacon

I was interested in the electric guitar even before I knew the difference between electric and acoustic. The electric guitar seemed to be a totally fascinating plank of wood with knobs and switches on it. I just had to have one. — Jeff Beck

I really appreciate when someone can blow me away with live acoustic blues. — Johnny Winter

Neighbors are far better acoustic analyzers for determining the quality of their life versus any acoustic instrument left unattended by an expert. — Stephen Ambrose

It's one thing having a great song, but I think for me if you take it to the next level ... say you had a guitar and a vocal, and the song was amazing but the vocalist wasn't that great and it just was a guitar and vocal acoustic track, switching that to something like an amazing voice singing the exact same song with the instrumentation being really nice and lush or unique in some way and interesting and diverse ... I think it's all about the instrumentation and textures in the sound. — Flume

After 40 years of not playing, I admit I'm totally in love with my guitar. It's a Froggy Bottom acoustic steel string guitar. All I have to do is hit a couple of clean chords and the endorphins are right there. It's like the top of my head has come off and stardust and magic have fallen in. — April Gornik

I started playing bluegrass with my family, so there were the G, C and D chords. I was playing a Martin acoustic because that's what Carter Stanley of the Stanley Brothers played. Then I got into the really raw blues of Hound Dog Taylor and started on electric guitar. — Dan Auerbach

My music doesn't really sound like punk music, it's acoustic. And it doesn't really sound like folk music 'cause I'm thrashing too hard and emoting a little too much for the sort of introspective, respectful, sort-of folk genre thing. I'm really into punk and folk as music that comes out of communities and is very genuine and very immediate and not commercial. — Ani DiFranco

At the Muddy Waters thing, I played the first song by myself on an acoustic guitar. I thought that was great that y'all did that tribute to Muddy Waters. I had a real good time. — Gregg Allman

The classical guitar has a dynamic to it unlike a regular acoustic guitar or an electric guitar. You know, there's times when you should play and there's times when you gotta hold back. It's an extremely dynamic instrument. — Steve Vai

Deafness, though it be total and congenital, imposes no limits on the intellectual development of its subjects, save in the single direction of the appreciation of acoustic phenomena. — Edward Miner Gallaudet

John Mayer and Jack Johnson are two of my all-time favorites. I love Colbie Caillat and really cool, beach-y, guitar, acoustic type music. — Halston Sage

Amplifying acoustic instruments more than a little is really cheating, and everything becomes a compromise. — Richard Thompson

The best way to do that is to pick up a new instrument or an instrument that you don't typically write on and see where it takes you. Whether it's using an acoustic guitar, or piano, or electronics as tools, all of these lead to creating different types of songs and I used all of these methods for this record. — Serj Tankian

If your going to learn to play lead guitar, get an electric guitar .. it doesn't have to be an expensive one .. acoustic guitars aren't good for learning lead, because you can't play up very high on the neck and they take heavier-gauge strings which makes it hard to bend notes — Eddie Van Halen

Almost pedantically, she added: They're not really bombs
they're acoustic provocations. — J.G. Ballard

Did Muddy Waters play an acoustic? Well of course he did. But did he turn his back on being able to plug it in and play louder? No, he plugged in and turned it up and got miles and miles ahead of the game in one fateful act of just plugging in. — Billy Gibbons

Our times seem to be so much about redefining where we are physical and where we're not. For me, it is really exciting to take the cutting edge technology and take it as far as it can get virtually, use it to describe/control the musicology or the behavior of raw natural elements, and then plug it with a sound source which is the most acoustic one there is - like gamelan and pipe organ. So you get the extremes: very virtual and very physical. In that way you shift the physicality. — Bjork

Private listening really took off in 1979, with the popularity of the Walkman portable cassette player. Listening to music on a Walkman is a variation of the "sitting very still in a concert hall" experience (there are no acoustic distractions), combined with the virtual space (achieved by adding reverb and echo to the vocals and instruments) that studio recording allows. With headphones on, you can hear and appreciate extreme detail and subtlety, and the lack of uncontrollable reverb inherent in hearing music in a live room means that rhythmic material survives beautifully and completely intact; it doesn't get blurred or turned into sonic mush as it often does in a concert hall. You, and only you, the audience of one, can hear a million tiny details, even with the compression that MP3 technology adds to recordings. You can hear the singer's breath intake, their fingers on a guitar string. That said, extreme and sudden dynamic changes can be painful on a personal music player. As — David Byrne

Before, I was terrified on stage. I only play guitar during the acoustic songs. After a while, you can elicit certain responses from the crowd, like Elvis. — Andy Gibb

When you stand up acoustic in front of an audience, you really are a man without any clothes on. And that can be fun - it depends how much of an exhibitionist you are, I suppose. I quite enjoy it. — Richard Thompson

I write almost all my songs on an acoustic guitar, even if they turn into rock songs, hard rock songs, metal songs, heavy metal songs, really heavy songs ... I love writing on an acoustic because I can hear what every string is doing; the vibrations haven't been combined in a collision of distortion or effects yet. — Corey Taylor

I didn't want to be this four-chord acoustic singer songwriter because that stuff just got so old to me. — Kathleen Edwards

I try not to punish the audience by making them listen to too much acoustic guitar. — Kaki King

With my projects, I really like the extreme high-tech stuff, but I also like the other end, the acoustic things. So it seems like those meet on an iPad, where you make shapes but the sounds coming out of it are really acoustic. — Bjork

I've sung since I talked, when I'm two, but what I sang was ballads, because it's very hard to do a dance track with your little acoustic guitar when you're a kid. — Gloria Estefan

The thing with One Direction songs is that you can probably break them all down to an acoustic guitar and vocal. — Jamie Lawson

Each acoustic guitar has its own character and personality. On a particular day, I might pick one up and start noodling around, looking for some emotional content in the chords. — Neil Diamond

My parents got me a $25 Kent steel-string acoustic guitar when I was around 12. The following Christmas, my parents bought me a Conora electric guitar. It looked almost like a Gretsch. It cost $59, and my mom still has it. — Alex Lifeson

I even played bass for a while. Besides playing electric guitar, I'd also get asked to play some acoustic stuff. But, since I didn't have an acoustic guitar at the time, I used to borrow one from a friend so I could play folk joints. — Mark Knopfler

I'd love to do an acoustic album alright, just on stage. That'd be nice. — Damien Dempsey

When I started performing, I played acoustic music, partly because that way you don't have to worry about interacting too much with other people creatively. Asserting myself in that way was not really a strong point for me. — Patty Griffin

It's interesting to see how acoustic guitars are emerging as a primary instrument once again ... reminds me very much of what Jim Messina and I were doing back then. You can't get too far away from an acoustic guitar — Kenny Loggins

I suppose my little Martin acoustic guitar is quickly becoming a prize possession. It's a lovely guitar. I bought it at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2001 before I had cleaned up. — Graham Coxon

I quite like American music, like The Fray - I'm a massive fan of them - and The Killers. I also like more acoustic stuff like Ed Sheeran; I like this English songwriter James Morrison and another singer called Ben Howard. — Louis Tomlinson

I like the clubs because ... we have two or three acoustic guitars up there and we're not hard-core slamming or stomping through the music. We're singing it with intricate harmonies and really showing the craftsmanship. — Toby Keith

we did an acoustic set at CBGB on October 30, 1987, where we debuted "Patience. — Duff McKagan

Write great songs that sound amazing if sung and played on the piano or acoustic guitar. Always encourage sing-alongs! Be prolific! Say "Yes" to new collaborations because you never know where it could lead. — Wendy Starland

To me, there's never been a difference between electronic and acoustic. I've always had this idea that electricity is another element like wind or fire or water. — Patrick Wolf

Bruce Marshall's acoustic set gets a big thumbs up from me. — Kenny Loggins

My guitar playing is a synthesis of traditional American acoustic style and Urban Pop and R&B. — John Oates

Aside from recurrance, revision, and commensurate symbolic reference, echoes also reveal emptiness. Since objects always impede acoustic reflection, only empty places can create echoes of lasting clarity. — Mark Z. Danielewski

I have always wanted to do an acoustic record from the very beginning of my career. I was a coffeeshop artist where everything I did was acoustic. — Jason Mraz

I would like to sit and and write some acoustic stuff. That's what I want to do. It means creatively, that's what I want so I need to do that for myself and then I'll see. — Avril Lavigne

I always lived with guitarists. When they would leave, I would just pick up their acoustic guitars and start doing finger picking and write. — Lou Doillon

I'm not good enough to be playin' much acoustic guitar onstage. Man, you gotta get so right; I mean, the tones, the feel, the sound. Plus, acoustic blues guitar is just that much harder on the fingers. — Johnny Winter

Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space. — Marshall McLuhan

The girl had a special way of saying "anything". The gods had blessed her voice with a special monopoly. It delivered an acoustic chocolate that was laced with all flavours of euphoria. The substance led to surges in testosterone in all types of men, including the average botanist. "Anything." The way she handled the word endowed it with so many possibilities. Professor Khupe decided to investigate how many of these Ketiwe would let him explore. To his delight the parameters of the word had proven to be quite elastic. — Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

I've always toured solo acoustic. — Jewel

The early influences, in many ways, were in Baltimore. I was passing open windows where there might be a radio playing something funky. In the summertime, sometimes there'd be a man sitting on a step, playing an acoustic guitar, playing some kind of folk blues. The seed had been planted. — Jerry Leiber

My head is full of shifting patterns and polyrhythmic stuff; but I want to use all acoustic instruments and create this kind of tapestry of interlocking lulling parts. — Andrew Bird

Kleos is sometimes translated as "acoustic renown" the spreading renown you get from people talking about your exploits. It's a bit like having a large Twitter following. — Rebecca Goldstein

How do I explain Neil Young? Great question! I explain Neil Young as, I would kill to see his acoustic shows. — Bob Mould

I went to high school right outside Dallas, and (songwriter and performer) Michael Martin Murphey was a senior there when I was a sophomore or junior, really into folk and acoustic music. Larry Gross, who's the host of "Mountain Stage" on public radio, and B.W. Stevenson, also a musician, were there at the same time, too. Michael was a big inspiration
through him I discovered Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Jimmy Rogers. Then I ran into Jerry Jeff Walker there in Dallas back when he was just a folk singer. Those are my earliest influences. — Ray Wylie Hubbard

I was 16 when I started playing. I borrowed a friend's acoustic guitar, and I had a Beatles chord book. I just taught myself that way. — Britt Daniel

For what I can imagine and feel and think and hear, I can hardly do anything on the acoustic bass. It used to be just pure frustration of imagining so much more and being able to get to a certain level of execution. — Esperanza Spalding

I play piano and guitar. Acoustic guitar. I tried studying classical guitar when I was 16 but it got really hard. I could never play a lead to save my life. — Kip Winger

I don't see any rock stars playing an electric guitar from some new maker like you see in the acoustic guitar world. — Paul Reed Smith

There's some pictures of me playing hollow bodies, but I never last long. I always come back to the acoustic. — Dan Hicks

Dorsey played the upright bass and steel guitar, as well as acoustic guitar. Johnny played acoustic guitar and together they were fabulous songwriters and singers. — Jimmy Griffin

If anything, I don't have any intention of recording music that's just me playing acoustic guitar singing a song anytime soon. — King Khan

My favorite music isn't necessarily the songs that One Direction come out with. That doesn't mean to say I don't secretly really love some of our songs, which I do. My personal tastes ... I actually like quite a bit acoustic and more mellow kinds of things. — Louis Tomlinson

I'm gonna design my own fleet of trailers. No! I'm gonna record an album like Jennifer Lopez. It'll be an acoustic version of K.C. and the Sunshine Band. Then maybe I'll design a line of clothes like Puff Daddy, but all in synthetic fur. — Brad Pitt

In the early days, I had very little idea about arrangements, and I wrote songs a little flat, as it were, just on an acoustic guitar. They didn't really have quite enough nuance. — Graham Parker

In certain ways I still feel like I'm finding my way. I feel pretty comfortable playing acoustic guitar and singing, but then I feel pretty good sitting on a reggae groove as well. — Colin Hay

I got this Christmas gift with the entire Beatles catalog. I had fun trying to duplicate what I was hearing on these records, only using the instruments I had at hand - an acoustic guitar, and that's all. It was endlessly amusing to me to try to imitate John Lennon and Paul McCartney's harmonies using the guitar. — M. Ward