Quotes & Sayings About Classical Guitar

I'm not a really good classical guitarist by any means, but what I learned from this is a way of working very slowly on solo pieces and I enjoyed working on these pieces of John's. They were not written for solo guitar but a lot of them were easy to adapt. — Marc Ribot

I was trained at classical piano as a youngster back in PA. To rebel, I bought a drum set and played in some rock & roll bands. In college I picked up a guitar and became obsessed with practicing which led to playing guitar in indie rock bands in the mid 90's. Which led me to Los Angeles. — Jeff Cardoni

I started playing heavy-metal guitar because that's what I liked. And then I got into classical guitar because it was so technically complicated. — Cory Arcangel

The guitar is such an incredible instrument; it plays classical, flamenco, jazz, country, bluegrass, rock, acid, blues. You'll never see a clarinet playing Black Sabbath. But you will see a guitar in a clarinet band playing rhythm. It is the most popular instrument in the world; it is the one everybody loves. — Randy Bachman

She felt the adagio from Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez strumming at her inner thighs like a guitar, and then slowly moving upwards until it wrapped around her heart in its denouement. — Lawren Leo

I have some good books of Bach keyboard music transcribed for guitar, and there's always a nylon-string guitar hanging on the wall in my house and a bunch of classical guitar books to grab. I kind of do that just for fun. — Rivers Cuomo

From the classical guitar right through to the furthest electrical experiments and everything in-between, it's amazing what the guitar can actually do. I mean, when one thinks about sounds. — Jimmy Page

When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands. — Moby

I had a big background in listening to classical music and I started trying to compose, like I was playing the guitar but I heard an orchestra in my head. — John Fahey

It's hilarious, because my guitar has what's known as a tremolo bar or a whammy bar. And the whammy bar is probably the most alien thing on my guitar that could possibly relate to a classical guitar. — Steve Vai

I used a baritone guitar with a very unusual tuning that became the body of the composition, while the classical guitar is on top of it with the main rhythm part. — Lee Ritenour

The guitar to me, from the classical/gut-string guitar right through to Hendrix, et cetera, has all the range [of sound]. Within those six strings it is incredible what one can get sound-wise. It's just down to imagination, really. — Jimmy Page

The gut-strung guitar, the classical guitar, that is a whole different world on its own. When you think what the guitar can do and what every individual player does with a guitar, everyone has their own identity coming through the guitar. — Jimmy Page

I had learned classical guitar when I was a kid, and I embraced it, and apparently I got good at it. — Andy Rourke

There was a period when I'd just come out of college where I'd been playing classical guitar and I suddenly realised that it wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. — Andy Summers

I'm a boxing junkie, a serial-killer junkie, and a classical guitar junkie. All of these guys are great, poetic references. — Mark Kozelek

When I first got a guitar, it was a Spanish, classical thing. — Roger Waters

Well, I've been a musician my whole life. When I was two, I would sing the theme from Star Wars in my crib; my mom taped it for proof. Then, when I was five, I asked for a violin. No one knew why I would want one, but my wish was granted and I ended up a classically trained fiddler by age 12. The only problem with that was, when you're a classical violinist, everybody expects you to be satisfied with playing Tchaikovsky for the rest of your life, and saying you want to play jazz, rock, write songs, sing your songs, hook up your fiddle to a guitar amp, sleep with your 4-track recorder, mess around with synths, dress like Tinkerbell in combat boots, AND play Tchaikovsky is equivalent to spitting on the Pope. — Emilie Autumn

A gut-string classical Spanish guitar, a sweet, lovely little lady. The smell of it. Even now, to open a guitar case, when it's an old wooden guitar, I could crawl in and close the lid. — Keith Richards

It was my 16th birthday - my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do - write songs and sing them to people. — Stevie Nicks

I'm thinking about learning a few new things - like taking classical guitar lessons - and I'd like to bring what I learn into hard rock. — Mick Mars

I read and write classical piano and percussion, also guitar. — Suzi Quatro

Music has always been in my family, but it was mainly keyboards. I learned to play classical piano, but when I first heard the amazing bass guitar of James Jamerson, who played on all the big Motown hits of the '60s and '70s, I knew bass guitar was my instrument. — Suzi Quatro

My family was musical on both sides. My father's family had a famous flautist and a classical pianist. My mother won a contest to be Shirley Temple's double - she was the diva of the family. At 8, I learned how to play guitar. I used to play songs from the '20s, '30s and '40s in the kitchen for my grandmother. — Gloria Estefan

I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland. — Eddie Van Halen

My parents signed me up for classical guitar lessons, which made for two years of the most depressing Wednesday evenings. — Andrew Garfield

I just loved classical music, but I also loved playing rock guitar, and I loved playing piano, so it was a natural thing that those things would merge at some point. — Trevor Rabin

I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice. — Boz Scaggs

It wasn't all spent on practicing, I did do other things! but the classical guitar means a lot to me so I spend many hours building good chops and getting a good program together. — Jim Sullivan

I wanted to shred, so I learned classical guitar. — Oscar Isaac

What's the difference between a classical guitar and a pizza? A pizza can feed a family of four. — Faye Kellerman

I love classical music. Yes, I was in a conservatory when I was younger and played guitar and all that stuff, so I also love rock. — Matt Schulze

I started getting interested in the notes that I could hear being generated when I hammered on while playing a classical guitar. — Fred Frith

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

The more I got into playing guitar, the more I enjoyed music, and the broader my listening became. The instrument itself became important to me, and I started messing around with classical guitar and took classical lessons. — Alex Lifeson

The cello is such a versatile instrument. It can rock like the hardest rock guitar, and it can sing like the human voice. We couldn't do what we do without the classical training. It's a hard instrument to play. There are no frets, and it takes finesse and technique to play. — Luka Sulic

I play piano and trumpet. I studied classical guitar. — Mike Figgis

We were really interested in music from all over the world. We realized that what we were doing was very close to contemporary classical music because of the lack of tonality in the guitar- the fact that I play guitar the way I play. — Arto Lindsay

Andres Segovia, the great name for guitar, he put classical guitar on the map. He was the proponent of it, the best in the world. So I was listening to a record that he had made, and a little bauble happened in the middle of the record. A finger slipped, and I said, 'Wait a minute. He's not allowed to make mistakes,' - my mind. — George Benson

If you would dance, my pretty Count, I'll play the tune on my little guitar.. — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I started piano lessons at age six but didn't take music seriously until I was a teenager, when I thought about a career in music. I studied classical music, and my instruments were guitar and piano. I played keyboards in bands, and after high school I went to Vienna to study at the Academy of Music. I also became a session player, which culminated in my work with Tangerine Dream. — Paul Haslinger

Sometimes guitar riffs get repeated over and over ("vamping," in the lingo of musicians), but generally there is a soloist proving variation that runs above that background, lest the song sound monotonous. Philip Glass's minimalist compositions (such as the soundtrack to 'Koyaanisqatsi') deviate from much of the classical music that preceded them, with much less obvious movement than, say, the Romantic-era compositions that his work seems to rebel against, yet his works, too, consist not only of extensive repetition but also of constant (though subtle) variation. Virtually every song you've ever heard consists of exactly that: themes that recur over and over, overlaid with variations. — Gary F. Marcus

Andres Segovia literally created the genre of classical guitar, which hadn't existed before around 1910. There was flamenco, which he borrowed from, but he actually arranged the works of Mozart and other classical composers for guitar, something that had never been done before ... Segovias' style is not slick or contrived, but it's still very clean and his timing is impeccable ... it's got a feeling of casual elegance, as if he's sitting around the house in Spain with a jug of wine, just playing from the heart. — Roger McGuinn

I don't play classical guitar. But I do in my mind. I've got it on a stand. — Michael Gambon

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