Suzanne Vega Quotes

Basically, I try to treat the electric guitar like an acoustic guitar. What you have to do is attack the instrument and know that your feelings aren't controlled by the controls of your guitar.

As a guitar player, you can gravitate to the blues because you can play it easily. It's not a style that's difficult to pick up. It's purely emotive and dead easy to get a start with.

I did play a lot of fingerstyle when I first started playing. I could never really find the right combination of flatpick or fingerpick, so playing fingerstyle is really the easiest way - though it's quite strenuous on the fingertips.

Basically, I use hammer-ons and pull-offs.

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

The only one I can play like is Johnny Ramone. I would love to be able to play like other great guitarists, but my mind doesn't work like that.

Rock & Roll is feeling, and after you know most of the basics ... chords, rhythm, scales and bends ... getting that feeling is just about the most important aspect of playing guitar

It's just a favorite language to me, that country finger-picking guitar style.

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.

David Gilmour can do more with one note than most other guitar players can do with the whole fretboard

Ray Cummins is my good friend and one of the best finger pickers around.

I really wanted to get that dynamic on the record onto people and let them know it wasn't just a simple strumming along the guitar type of thing without ramming it down their throats so I kind of went the opposite way and sang some of the songs more quietly which allowed for the louder parts to sound as though there were more. It was the only way singing those songs made sense to me.

The way I play guitar is very, very hard and I bloody myself incredibly without the tape. And the nails are my picks.

It seemed so wimpy at first when I started to play [guitar]. So I started playing loud with lots of effects just to try to mimic the dynamic [of the drums]. Drums seemed a lot more expressive. [I was] Trying to emulate the feeling of playing the drums on the guitar - I guess that's why I played it so loud.

I play the guitar every day.

When a guitarist can evoke a certain mood through his playing, that's what's most important to me.

I find it quite easy to play chords, and, you know, that was all I ever did. I never wanted to be a lead guitarist.

Sweep picking is when the right hand sweeps down and up the strings in succession. But when you do sweep picking, one note rings into the next, and it sounds almost like you're playing a chord, and that's exactly what you don't want.

It's so satisfying as a guitar player to play stuff that's related to the blues.

I played the Spanish guitar for eight years, like flamenco.

When I picked up my guitar, I spent the first day learning the chord E, the second day A, then B7, and all of a sudden, I could play the blues.

Something people might not know about me is, I like playing the guitar.

I have seen Tommy Emanuel play; my wife and I went to see him and he just melted my face off. How do you play guitar like that? There are so many people that play at a ridiculous level and I sit there watching them and I'm like, 'Wow, wish I could do that.'

I have a sloppy style of playing guitar. A percussive style. Unique in fact.

Guitar is the most expressive instrument in the world. I don't play much any more. Maybe a bit in private.