Jeff Beck Quotes

My goal from the very beginning was just to write good songs that don't require any production to be felt or understood. I wanted to be able to sit in a room with a guitar and play the song from beginning to end and have it be as impactful as if you heard the studio version with all the bells and whistles.

I'm coming into places with some people who just want to hear what I did before, with some people who want to hear me with a band, but I am just at the moment sticking to my guns and saying, 'You know what? I want you just to hear this for a minute. I want it to be in the context of me and a guitar.'

I've always been a little bit in the background as a singer and even as an acoustic-guitar player, although I crank it up and rock with my Marshall stacks, too.

Technically, I'm not a guitar player, all I play is truth and emotion.

When I used to write songs, especially on my own, it was just me and a guitar.

Just with the basic one guitar, one piano and one vocal and an audience, I think that the intimacy comes through more. People feel much more connected to the song because there's nothing in the way, and I actually enjoy doing that.

That's pretty much why I went into show business because I wanted to have a guitar and sing unaccompanied, that was like my fantasy of the perfect life.

When you play the 12-string guitar, you spend half your life tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune.

When I'm not touring, I sing at home, either at the piano or I'll pick up my guitar, singing old Buck Owens songs.

I was playing with steel picks on a steel guitar, and there was no amplification needed.

I play guitar, and it's not a prop.

For me, this band and the music that I write and this touring thing that I do and playing in front of people, singing, and making a lot of noise on guitar - all that was more important than a lot of other things.

As a song-writer I have always written with one instrument - either guitar or piano - because I believe that if a song is strong enough to be performed completely stripped down then it is a good one to go on and record.

I write songs, I play a guitar and that's it.

Tony MacAlpine not only plays guitar, but is a stunning classical piano player, so he can show how that influence molded his guitar playing.

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

By the time I was 12 or 13, I felt that I was special, because I could play the guitar and write songs.

Electric guitars are an abomination, whoever heard of an electric violin? An electric cello? Or for that matter an electric singer?

There is far more sensitivity in acoustic guitar players than could ever be compared to any synthesizer. That's a personal point of view but that's the way I see it. I think that's what it's all about. The drive, the fire, the passion - it all comes out on the guitar.

I always had wished somebody else would sing my songs, but there wasn't anybody who knew them, so I sang them myself and eventually became a better singer and guitar player.

Playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table.

I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.

I can play the guitar and the keys and the drums. I'm not brilliant at any of them. I can sing too. Some of my friends are proper musicians but I'm a song-writer. I write songs.

Playing live is about going for it .. it's about bringing it ... you should see a bunch of people trying out stuff, actually performing, instead of learning the record and recreating it note for note. I can't play the show the same way every night .. I really need to be in a creative environment, every night or I'll go nuts ... my manager accuses me of singing just long enough to get me to my next guitar solo - which is true.

I'd say it's harder to play with an acoustic guitar strapped over your shoulder for a few hundred people than it is to play in front of thousands with an entire bombastic band behind you. After all these years, I still get nervous in front of people. I can't help it.