John Frusciante Quotes

The instrumental stuff is a good challenge, and it keeps my fingers athletically tuned, but I'm totally happy to bang away on some chords, sing some harmonies and play some wailing blues solos after the second chorus.

Even if you're improvising, the fact that beforehand you know certain things will work helps you make those improvisations successful. It really helps to have a certain amount of knowledge about musical structure.

You have to know composition to be a good improviser.

The first time I learned how to play, my guitar was out of tune. I didn't know it; I just started writing songs.

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

I noticed a lot of guitar players neglected the rhythm part of rhythm guitar and decided I would try to focus in that. As my skill and knowledge of the instrument grew, I found lead started to come naturally. Sometimes I play guitar like a frustrated drummer. Ha ha!

Guitar playing is both extremely easy for me and extremely difficult for me at the same time.

All of my acoustic playing came from my songwriting. All of the chords I've learned and all of the voicings I play them in are a direct result of composing.

I don't really play a lot of slide in general, but it was fun getting into that style and exploring it.

All I'm trying to do is simply play guitar and elicit this creativity from the instrument.

I'm not that fluid when it comes to scales and modes. I just pick up the guitar and play. It's all about exploration: just tune the guitar any way you want and start playing.

I never actually had a guitar lesson. I taught myself the guitar from piano exercise books, which led me to have a pretty good technique on the guitar and allowed me to find different ways to do things.

You never learn everything on that guitar neck.

I write in all keys. I've always written in all keys. I've probably written a lot of songs in A.

Intense study with Indian musicians such as Gaurav Majumdar and Zakir Hussain has inspired me to rethink my view of instrumental sound.

After playing now for 60 years, it's still very challenging for me to play a simple melody and have it clean and touch the reed at the proper time in the proper way.

As a youngster, I used to try to pick up any bits of wisdom about the guitar I could. It's not like now where you have books and books about every aspect of anything. Any little pearl of wisdom was welcome back then.

I think I'm a songwriter. I grab an instrument to make my body a song, but I'm not a player as such, maybe a little more on guitar, but certainly not piano.

I've always thought that the act of playing the guitar was the act of trying to make a point of playing the guitar.

I've never really been schooled in music theory. I'm a guitar player, and I attack the guitar in a certain way that it not fully unique to me, but it's more unique that some other people.

I like to be sort of grounded with Fish. But, at the same time, I think probably what's unique about us is the way other dynamics happen, where I'll play off Trey for awhile. When we start playing a jam, I don't usually know what's going to happen, I don't have a plan.

My father was a guitar player, and I was raised with a super high standard of what good guitar playing was.

I really had to think and learn about musical intervals.

Play the pentatonic blues scale, just for fret- and pick-hand dexterity and to mesh them both together.

Sometimes it's cool to play major third and minor third diads back-to-back, or a minor third followed by a root/fifth diad - whatever combo sounds good.