Johnny Christ Quotes

I had to learn chord shapes. I bought books with chord charts. I used to listen to all kinds of pop music.

When you're talking about your own music every day, listening to bands, going to festivals, you can kind of lose sight of your initial connection with music. Instrumental music - especially jazz - helps me refocus.

I never got formal training in music. I would just sit with my ear to the speaker and my hand on the needle. I'd listen to Wanda Jackson and think, 'How did she do that?,' and lift the needle and try it myself.

I'm a self-taught musician aside from what I've been able to pick up from other players.

There is a great book out called 'Everything I Needed to Learn I Learned in Kindergarten,' and I believe that everything I ever needed to learn on guitar was in my first two years of hungry learning: Scotty Moore, Hank Marvin, Chet Atkins, Lenny Breau, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that young players - I mean 10- and 12-year-olds - really like my guitar style. There's something in my guitar style that they totally can latch onto and learn quickly, and then go from there to your Yngwie Malmsteens or your Steve Vais or whatever.

The one thing I do have is good ears. I don't mean perfect pitch, but ears for picking things up. I developed my ear through piano theory, but I never had a guitar lesson in my life, except from Eric Clapton off of records.

I've studied several guitar players and songwriters, mostly from Al di Meola to Dimebag Darrell, from Freddie Mercury of Queen to Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Bradley Nowell of Sublime.

I taught myself to play the guitar by listening to Paul Simon records, working it out note by note. He is an incredibly intelligent musician. He's not someone who has a natural outpouring of melody like McCartney or Dylan, who are just terribly prolific with musical ideas.

My dad always played a lot of music, so I heard him playing all the time, and then I decided that I wanted to learn to play guitar, so I got an acoustic and started taking lessons. I wanted to be able to shred like Yngwie Malmsteen.

I've played the guitar since I was 12, and just taught myself songs chord by chord.

I play piano and trumpet. I studied classical guitar.

I learned some chords and I started watching anybody I could, once I really got into it.

I hadn't played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I'm writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about - dancing and trancing and love and love's setbacks.

I was up playing violin at seven and translating that information to play guitar, piano at eight.

I am a self-taught guitarist. I just try to piece together passages that have some melodic value!

I was in a band in high school and college and I always had a love for music, but I didn't go to a conservatory or anything like that. I was fairly self-taught.

I've been studying on my own. I'm not really trained. I went to school for about a year and a half. I never really studied music, but, I mean, I did. I studied for two years, maybe.

I play drums, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, french horn, piano.

Certainly, as a guitarist, I was aware of descending chromatic lines and arpeggios long before 1968.

I don't know the names of any pop musicians. Pop music is standardised; it's made to please the largest audience possible. I also compose to please a large audience, but when you listen to my music, you understand that I have studied and applied the whole history of composition.

I never went to music school.

I play guitar, I jam on the piano, drums, and even the triangle.

I went to school to learn guitar, solfeggio, and harmony. I wanted to know more about music, how it works. I wanted to take voice lessons, too, and that's when I discovered what I could do with my voice. At the beginning, I thought I would do classical and pop, but then I learned that I really liked the classical music.

My dad was a really good classical guitarist. He took lessons with a student of Andre Segovia.