Quotes & Sayings About Chords

Those three chords were part of my life - G, F, Bb - yeh, it is, it is, and I can't help noticing it. But there have been other things nearly as close to it which people haven't noticed, other things we have done. — Ray Davies

My heart is tuned to sorrow, and the strings Vibrate most readily to minor chords, Searching and sad; my mind is stuffed with words Which voice the passion and the ache of things: Illusions beating with their baffled wings Against the walls of circumstance. — Amy Lowell

I am the consequence of a particular type of demographic movement, one that has always involved paying a high price. But I don't know much about styles or genres. I only know notes and chords. — Concha Buika

She preferred to lie up by the dunes with the waves bursting, to listen while they crashed like the final chords of a symphony except they went on and on. There was nothing as fine as that. — James Salter

Journalists, especially English journalists, were very cruel to me. They said I only knew three chords when I knew five! — Leonard Cohen

Rock music is quite big in India - but it mostly just replaces all the intricacies of Indian rhythms and Indian melody with lumpen rock drumming and power chords. — Jonny Greenwood

"The Hallmark Sessions" is an extraordinary release. Breau plays beautiful chords (sounding a little like Johnny Smith in spots) and inventive single-note lines. It is remarkable that this music was not released until 2003, but a happy event that it was finally put out. This is a must for Breau fans and an important release for all jazz guitar lovers. — Scott Yanow

I bought one of those Learn How to Play Guitar Chords By Yourself and it shows you the diagram where to put your hands and I took that in my room, sat with my singles and learned how to play guitar. — Joan Jett

My kids learned to color on this table. There's been a lot that's went around this table. Waylon Jennings sat right there in that chair and showed Miley the chords to 'Good Hearted Woman.' Sitting in that chair. This table's a bit like life. It's a circle. And I believe everything in life is a circle. You come into this world a little teeny wrinkled-up fetus — Billy Ray Cyrus

I stopped going out and taking pills and I started hanging out and learning about flat eleven chords ... — Jamie Lidell

I don't want to discredit people's opinions of me, but you talk about the violin or the cello or lead guitar where you have to learn tons of chords, that's much more difficult. — Bonnie Raitt

Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that, symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn't see my mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on account of the sounds it is. — James Joyce

I guess the approach to song writing for me so far has been to use more chords and less math. — Mick Barr

I'm taking drama classes, they say I'm a natural actress. I think it's just because I talk a lot. I'm also learning how to play guitar and piano. Piano is really hard though. My dad is teaching me and I just get so confused because the chords are so different, but by learning I hope to be able to be a songwriter as well. — Lindsay Pagano

Speaking softly and slowly, and breathing through the vocal chords in a low voice, has become the mythical ideal voice for a yoga teacher. — Gudjon Bergmann

I can see the driver as if I'm looking at him through binoculars, bending to adjust the volume on his radio, eyes wide at what he hears, which I can't understand because when he hits you there is only silence. My feet, pounding through the grass, make no sound. I know that my mouth is open, that air is rushing across my stretched vocal chords, but I hear nothing. You lift into the air and the car is past before you land silently at my feet, as if something as small as you couldn't possibly make a sound in a world where buildings can come down. — Philip Beard

I don't doubt that at the dawn of martial arts, the main goal was to beat up one's opponents in the most effective way possible. But then, indirectly, the alchemy of martial arts began to strike some chords deep within the spirit of many individuals, transforming living war-machines into poets, artists, and philosophers. — Daniele Bolelli

I've mainly been sampling jazz because the tone of the chords are expressive in itself, so it's quite nice to write over. It's got interpretations of a lot of different genres, too, a lot of dubby-ness and experimental stuff. — King Krule

I use a lot more chords than most organists and I'm careful to phrase them with the guitar. — Alan Price

I learned to play by ear before I learned music theory. For me, that makes sense. After all, children learn to speak before they read and write. The more you understand of music - how harmony and time signatures work, and what chords and inversions are - the more you'll enjoy it. — Jools Holland

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Indeed, there is a moment on the first CD - the electrifying opening to "I Got Loaded," which sounds like an R&B standard but isn't - when you might find yourself asking whether anyone who has ever been smitten by pop music can fail to have his heart stopped by the chords, the swing, and, once again, Steve Berlin's wonderfully greasy sax. — Nick Hornby

Quit the bitching on your blog
And stop pretending art is hard.
Just limit yourself to three chords
And do not practice daily.
You'll minimize some stranger's sadness
With a piece of wood and plastic.
Holy fuck it's so fantastic,
Playing ukulele. — Amanda Palmer

I'll write and make chords with my voice sometimes if I don't have an instrument even though it takes a million times longer. — Zooey Deschanel

I understand I'm supposed to be feminine and dainty, but I'm not. There are two sides to the coin. People are more impressed with things that I do because they almost treat you as if you're handicapped if you're a woman ... people can be impressed that I can play a few chords on the guitar. — Kesha

I looked. George Shearing. And as always he leaned his blind head on his pale hand, all ears opened like the ears of an elephant, listening to the American sounds and mastering them for his own English summer's-night use. Then they urged him to get up and play. He did. He played innumerable choruses with amazing chords that mounted higher and higher till the sweat splashed all over the piano and everybody listened in awe and fright. They led him off the stand after an hour. He went back to his dark corner, old God Shearing, and the boys said, 'There ain't nothin left after that. — Jack Kerouac

Sunset's the best time to take a stroll down Mouffetard, the ancient Via Mons Cetardus. The buildings along it are only two or three stories high. Many are crowned with conical dovecotes. Nowhere in Paris is the connection, the obscure kinship, between houses very close to each other more perceptible to the pedestrian than in this street.

Close in age, not location. If one of them should show signs of decrepitude, if its face should sag, or it should lose a tooth, as it were, a bit of cornicing, within hours its sibling a hundred metres away, but designed according to the same plans and built by the same men, will also feel it's on its last legs.

The houses vibrate in sympathy like the chords of a viola d'amore. Like cheddite charges giving each other the signal to explode simultaneously. — Jacques Yonnet

Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.22 — Michael Shermer

As soon as you impose Western chords on an Indian scale, something great collapses. — Jonny Greenwood

No-one knows what huge suns will illuminate the life of the future. It may be that artists will transform the grey dust of the cities into hundred-coloured rainbows; that the never-ending thunderous music of volcanoes will be turned into the sound of flutes resounding from mountain ranges; that ocean waves will be forced to play on nets of chords ... — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Kissing him is like falling into a river, some great fierce current carrying me outside of my body, and all around us the music of the water rises and rises, and I can hear the wind moving over the sand, the distant singing of the stars veiled behind their curtain of blue sky, the slow, resonant chords of the earth turning on its axis. — Sarah McCarry

Trane was the perfect saxophonist for Monk's music because of the space that Monk always used. Trane could fill up all that space with all them chords and sounds he was playing then. — Miles Davis

I don't know about five guys against the world. It's more like five guys against these three chords, and we're gonna wrestle 'em down no matter what it takes. — Benmont Tench

In high school, I decided I wanted to learn guitar, so I picked it up and starting teaching myself some basic chords and started playing with friends. Guitar inherently lends itself to be guitar music, especially when you're not good at guitar. — Autre Ne Veut

When I was a kid, I used to listen to my Emerson radio late at night under the covers. I started by listening to jazz in the late 1940s and then vocal harmony groups like the Four Freshmen, the Modernaires and the Hi-Lo's. I loved Stan Kenton's big band - with those dark chords and musicians who could swing cool with individual sounds. — Frankie Valli

To charm, to strengthen, and to teach: these are the three great chords of might. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I still feel like if I can get a song to work with, say, a basic beat, a rhythm, some chord changes, and a melody, a vocal melody - if it works with that, then I feel it's written and there's something there. — David Byrne

You think it's all written, but it's not. There's always another way to twist those three chords around. — Joe Perry

Wherever inspiration comes from, it's like I'll hear a melody and chords, almost a rough structure of the whole thing [song]. I'll just hear it and chase what's in my head. The rest comes from jamming with band, improvising, seeing what comes up as well. I'll come up with it off the top of my head, catch it, sing and hum, and if something is missing, just jam, and that's the [songwriting] process. — Chris Wyse

But we got up there and decided to stick to this mix of power chords and funk and that's where it really started for us. In having the courage to take that decision. To take a gamble not just with our music but our lives. — Michael Hutchence

To play with a band all of the time, just about nightly, was good for me because I wrote lots of arrangements and I got a lot of my transposition and chords ironed out. — Allen Toussaint

Motherhood is at its best when the tender chords of sympathy have been touched. — Paul Harris

rhythmic drums were pumping waves of emotion into both of them. Her lusty eyes looked at him with a penetrating stare. Fionna's naked breasts pressed against Dick as they came together to dance. Dick faced Fionna and he held her tight. His naked rippling muscles pushed against her firm aroused female flesh. Dick danced with his wife Fionna. Then he grabbed the guitar to stroke a few chords of ecstasy. Another man was pounding the drums while Fionna danced naked in front of the live audience. Fionna made harmony with Dick as the throbbing beat made her explode with excitement and pleasure. He touched her deep inside with his music. He made love to her with his instrument. Each stroke of the guitar was like a motion of erotic love. Dick made her feel as if her body was quivering inside. — Fionna Free Man

Most beginners want to learn lead because they think it's cool .. consequently, they never really develop good rhythm skills .. since most of a rock guitarists time is spent playing rhythm, it's important to learn to do it well .. learning lead should come after you can play solid backup and have the sound of the chords in your head — Eddie Van Halen

I like men who have known the best and the worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip. Storms have battered them, they have lain, sometimes for months on end, becalmed. There is a residue even if they fail. It has not been all tinkling; there have been grand chords. — James Salter

With a track like 'White Christmas,' everybody has done that song in every format you can imagine, so I just looked at the chords at that particular song and what chords would make it work. That's kind of quite a sad song, and I had this idea of someone singing it in the subway, someone who is homeless, old and sad. — Vince Clarke

I go from chords to cords, amped to amps. — Rachel Cohn

If oceans of time
could grant
heart one simple
desire
We would be
lovers afloat
on trained trapeze
high wire
Pleasurably bound by
invisible chords
of rapture
Harnessed in mid air
embraced foiled
skilled arms of capture — Zuky Rose Leigh

"Playing" the resources of characterology for the sake of clarification and insight into the structures of actual existence is many times more daunting than playing a piano; it requires the thinking of chords of thoughts, not just isolated simplisms or abstracta; it demands the shaping or encompassing of morphological modes of intelligence that can comprehend gestalten, syndromes, historical and civilizational patterns in which it is not the particulars but their interactive significance (as an ensemble of actualities or principles) that is vital. — Kenny Smith

When I first starting making beats, I didn't know samples were being used in any beats. I had no idea where producers were getting the real string sounds or the voices on their tracks. I knew nothing about loops or sampling off of records. So, by me knowing nothing about this it made me concentrate on my chords on the keyboard. — Rahki

Jazz is my adventure. I'm after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That's it. Just using notes differently. — Thelonious Monk

I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out. — Carla Bley

Writing is a perpetual choice between a thousand expressions, none of which satisfies me, none of which, above all, satisfies me without the others. Yet I ought to know that only music permits a succession of chords. — Marguerite Yourcenar

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

Whatever is original in my writing comes from my musical apprenticeship. I look for rhythm in words. I imagine words as if they were musical chords. Often I'll write something, read it, and find it musically unsatisfactory. There is a musical imperative in my choice of words. — Chico Buarque

It's really weird to be playing chords again. Haven't played chords for a long time. I realised I haven't played chord changes since OK Computer and stuff like that. — Ed O'Brien

He was so far from being able to carry out such threats that one might conclude that the author of this document was utterly mad. Indeed, the man in the cave had entered a separate reality, one that was deeply connected to the mythic chords of Muslim identity and in fact gestured to anyone whose culture was threatened by modernity and impurity and the loss of tradition. By declaring war on the United States from a cave in Afghanistan, bin Laden assumed the role of an uncorrupted, indomitable primitive standing against the awesome power of the secular, scientific, technological Goliath; he was fighting modernity itself. — Lawrence Wright

I tend to be freer on the piano. I never took guitar lessons, so my reach exceeds my grasp - what I hear in my head I don't always know how to play. But I love to play over something else. I'm not a self-starter. I get kind of bored with the same three folk chords that I know. — Bonnie Raitt

I get the same charge from juxtaposition of colors as I do from juxtaposition of chords. — Joni Mitchell

I like to start with an idea, but then again, I might be sitting at the keyboard, and just playing a bunch of chords that sound cool together, and something just inspires an idea from that. — Diane Warren

I envy the music lovers hear. I see them walking hand in hand, standing close to each other in a queue at a theater or subway station, heads touching while they sit on a park bench, and I ache to hear the song that plays between them: The stirring chords of romance's first bloom, the stately airs that whisper between a couple long in love. You can see it in the way they look at each other ... you can almost hear it. Almost, but not quite, because the music belongs to them and all you can have of it is a vague echo that rises up from the bittersweet murmur and shuffle of your own memories. — Charles De Lint

I started playing guitar back in '56. I was a teenager, and guitars had just come in, and I had a thing for it and got one. Started learning lead breaks from songs, because that was the easiest thing to do at the time. I had the guitar for two years before I learned any chords. Really. — Roger McGuinn

If Dave Robbie's a song, he's written in major chords. — Cath Crowley

Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me. The guitar is my conscience, too - whenever I've lost my way, it's brought me back to center; whenever I forget, it reminds me why I'm here. — Slash, Anthony Bozza

Presently, I sense within me the slightest touch. The harmony of one chord lingers in my mind. It fuses, divides, searches
but for what? I open my eyes, position the fingers of my right hand on the buttons, and play out a series of permutations.
After a time, I am able, as if by will, to locate the first four notes. They drift down from inward skies, softly, as early morning sunlight. They find me; these are the notes I have been seeking.
I hold down the chord key and press the individual notes over and over again. The four notes seem to desire further notes, another chord. I strain to hear the chord that follows. The first four notes lead me to the next five, then to another chord and three more notes.
It is a melody. Not a complete song, but the first phrase of one. I play the three chords and twelve notes, also, over and over again. It is a song, I realize, I know. — Haruki Murakami

I try to be prepared for the moment, through understanding, and being warmed up, knowing all about chords and scales, so I don't even have to think and I can get right to what it is I want to say. — Pat Metheny

Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artists is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful - as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony — James Whistler

All you needed was a couple of instruments and a few chords and you could be on an indie label. — David Byrne

The lyrics, the strings, the chords, everything comes at the moment like a gift that is put right into your head and that's how I hear it. — Michael Jackson

There are no rules or certain methods. I usually start with the guitar or piano and sing melodies over the chords. The lyrics seem to be born out of that, and the fact that it's still a mystery to me is my favorite part. — Jason Reeves

The universe sings a deep, eternal song, sound in waves, in deep sighs, in whispers, in swirling chords and rising, falling tones. The music of the worlds, weaving in a pattern that is both chaos and order, both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end. — Jessica Khoury

I knew a lot of chords, but they weren't the chords that came with the melody that came with the idea I had for the song. Melodies are simple things. If you see a train wreck, there's a melody. If you see a little daisy blowing in the breeze, there's a melody. — Tom T. Hall

If you play more than two chords, you're showing off. — Woody Guthrie

In life, everybody gets the same three chords. It's what you do with them that matters. — Greg Kihn

Chords that were broken will vibrate once more. — Fanny Crosby

Music really does just boil down to basically, essentially songwriting chords and melodies. — Flume

I live in Nashville, and I don't know how many people there would call me country. I really started in punk and anti-folk, but one of the reasons I originally gravitated towards country music is because most of those songs only use three chords. That was the easiest place for me to start, but I'm always trying to expand what I do. — Caitlin Rose

Till now, my conception of love has been based entirely on what I have seen in Hindi films, where the hero and the heroine make eye contact, and whoosh, some strange chemistry sets their hearts beating and their vocal chords tingling, and the next you see of them they are off singing songs in Swiss Villages and American shopping malls. — Vikas Swarup

My songs, they have just the one chord, there's none of that fancy stuff you hear now, with lots of chords in one song. If I find another chord I leave it for another song. — Junior Kimbrough

He it is, the innermost one, who awakens my being with his deep hidden touches.
He it is who puts his enchantment upon these eyes and joyfully plays on the chords of my heart in varied cadence of pleasure and pain.
He it is who weaves the web of this maya in evanescent hues of gold and silver, blue and green, and lets peep out through the folds his feet, at whose touch I forget myself.
Days come and ages pass, and it is ever he who moves my heart in many a name, in many a guise, in many a rapture of joy and of sorrow. — Rabindranath Tagore

He was a god of rock. He nearly solved all the world's problems with nothing but power chords and anguished cries into a microphone. — Kevin Hearne

I write the music because I can't really write lyrics. But I can write chords like Robin's never heard of. So I provide the music for them to add the lyrics to. — Maurice Gibb

I tend to hear rhythm and melody, chord-progressions, long before I hear words. — Zach Condon

Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely. — Rebecca West

My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there. — Brian Eno

At the magic touch of the beautiful the secret chords of our being are awakened, we vibrate and thrill in response to its call. Mind speaks to mind. We listen to the unspoken, we gaze upon the unseen. The master calls forth notes we know not of. Memories long forgotten all come back to us with a new significance. Hopes stifled by fear, yearnings that we dare not recognise, stand forth in new glory. — Okakura Kakuzo

Sometimes it feels like I have so much to say, yet none of the ability to actually articulate it. So I remain silent, a quiet observer of human life as it orbits around me, so bright and fascinating. It catches right in my lungs, this need to express myself, and burns like a river of fire up to my vocal chords, stunting everything that's inside, struggling to break out.
Florence Vaine, A Vision of Green — L. H. Cosway

[On the virtuous man] He combines the highest, lowest and middle chords in complete harmony within himself. — Plato

The term "black metal" has become a lot looser, or can include a larger range of sounds and extra-musical aesthetics, not just Satan and power chords. — Colin Marston

When we sing, I am one of many, and the individual me evaporates. I am one of 23 university choir members. Not a professor. Not an American. Not a 46-year-old in the midst of twentysomethings. Not a woman trying to outpace the aspects of self she has yet to make oeace with. I am simply what we all are
another voice, a set of lungs, some vocal chords and someone who finds joy and comfort in singing. But when the music stops, so does the we. The union dissolves. The silence transforms first person plural into first person singular. — Laura Kelly

I do think that film is closest of all to music. Notes and chords on their own don't mean anything. They only mean something when you juxtapose them with something else — Michael Koresky

Since I was doing all of it myself, I had to decide where I wanted to go with the songs, how to proceed with the chords, if the sound was alright, and all that detail on my own. — Utada Hikaru

I'm not your boyfriend!" I snapped, trying to gently move her hands away from my body.
"How can you say that?" Sara asked in horror.
"It's shockingly effortless," I replied. "My vocal chords vibrate, and my mouth and tongue articulate. I can even do it without thinking." I had to remind myself to stay calm, and sarcasm was the best way to do that.
"When are you going to give me a key to your house so I don't have to knock like some guest?" Sara asked, coming at me again.
I backed away. "How about never? Is never good for you?"
Sara, undeterred, said, "You're the reason I go to therapy on Fridays."
"The plot thickens!" Gabby exclaimed for comedic relief. — Laura Kreitzer

I remember writing a song when I was about 15. This is the one I can remember. I know I'd been writing poetry for a long time, since I was about eight, but I remember my first one that I put to chords. I was really trying to be like the psychedelic era Beatles, I was obsessed. All I could think about was Beatles and Hendrix. So I tried to write a psychedelic song, and it was the worst. I couldn't even ... If I read it now - I still have the book somewhere - it makes me cringe out loud. It was just about psychedelic stuff. — Ladyhawke

Pastor Hardy's wife had been the organist back in Arkansas, and he missed her acutely whenever Mrs. Turner - her small spidery hands - would play the opening chords of "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling" or "Abide with Me." A warmth would travel up his spine and then fly off, leaving him more lonesome than ever. In front of his flock, he sometimes could feel the abyss of despair open beneath him. He feared these moments and felt the hand of the devil in them. — Rae Meadows

My stepfather met my mother when I was seven years old, and he was a guitar player. So he caught me messing with his guitar, his electric guitar, and he tried to show me some chords, but my hands were too small. — George Benson

No," I said, raising my voice to be heard over the piano chords. "I didn't lie to you, Puck. I meant what I said - at least, I did back then. But it's not the same as what I feel for Ash, you knew that."
"Did I?" Puck's voice was ugly. "Maybe I did, but you sure led me on a merry chase, princess. Just like a pro. When were you going to tell me I didn't have a cold chance in hell? — Julie Kagawa

Sound doesn't carry as well through gills. You have to use a different level of your vocal chords." I point to the spot just above his Adam's apple. "Higher."
He just stares at me, looking confused - but breathing like he was born to it.
"Pretend you're talking like a girl."
No way, he mouths, shaking his head.
Stupid male ego. — Tera Lynn Childs

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

The only way a djinni can advance in rank and increase in power is to obtain more knowledge. For example, djinn can manipulate the matter in the universe by changing the vibration of strings. This action is much like playing a guitar: the more chords a person knows, the wider the repetoire. Individual string vibrations determine the type of particles and matter formed, and djinn are able to change the "notes" of the strings, thus changing one form of matter into another. — Rosemary Ellen Guiley