John Frusciante Quotes

I never think about rhythm versus melody; I've always just played to what's in my head.

I need to hear what I am doing in order to create the next note. If I don't hear it then I can't feed myself.

I've held onto little musical sketches that I thought could be useful, and the more time that I spend doing them for each film, then the more I have to draw on.

In the past, I have not been able to hear myself. I play with feeling so I need to hear what is coming out of the amplifier to inspire me; I don't just play mechanically.

I don't think I think when I play. I have a photographic memory for chords, and when I'm playing, the right chords appear in my mind like photographs long before I get to them.

I must have been five or six when I realised all the stuff I was writing made sense with what I was playing on the piano.

In reality everybody has got musical thoughts. If you are able to overcome the part of it which is muscle training, which is what most musical playing actually is, performance actually is, is muscle training, and you are able to convert your ideas directly into music, you're a musician, too.

Now, when we first started, I would be playing something good and then feel like I wasn't doing the right thing and launch into some idiotic cliche. Luckily for me, Bobby was patient.

You're just sort of searching for this 'thing' and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.

My head works in music, so there's always music there.

Just because you know umpteen billion scales, it doesn't mean you have to use them all in a solo.

I played recorder in assembly, then I became passionate about the guitar, I don't know why. I started on electric then moved to acoustic - my brother was playing bass in the next room.

I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.

To me, the object of practicing is to allow you to play what you hear. But you're always hearing new things, so you never get to the end of it.

Every day, you have to make three hours of music, just randomly improvising, and that's a great way to weed stuff out.

I'll just start laying out the melody exactly where I want it to fall. And then I'll go back and fill it out. Whereas, in other pieces I'm really just going a couple bars at a time.

The music that I make is built on layers upon layers of musical ideas. I want to keep it fun and fresh to where listeners won't get everything from just one listen. They can go back to it months, weeks, or even years later and hear something that they didn't ever hear before. That's what it's all about.

I never learned to verbalize an abstract musical concept. No thank you. The whole point of being a serious musician is to avoid verbalization whenever you can.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

If I try to write a song, I will completely fail to write a song. But if I'm just holding my guitar and I just start humming, then I'll have a song in an hour.

Tunings are wonderfully inspiring, and it helps you to write music. If I'm stuck, you know, I change the tuning.

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

If I get an idea for a song, I have a melody for it. I'm a musician first. I'm not limited by the fretboard.