Yngwie Malmsteen Quotes

A Strat was a thing of wonder .. when I was 14 or 15, the Shadows were a big influence, and they had the first Strats that came to England. I like to play all kinds of guitars, but I wasn't getting the sound I really wanted until I got a Stratocaster

Hendrix was a perfect guitarist. And that's all I wanted to do as a kid. Play a guitar properly and jump around.

My first guitar was a Gretsch 6120, and I just loved listening to artists like Elvis, Chuck Berry and Stray Cats.

Strats are my favorite electric guitars, and I've got quite a collection.

I have about 50 guitars around the house. I can't take more than a few steps without finding one to pick up.

I've always loved music, but I never really played anything. After 'Walk the Line' and learning to play guitar, and having that sense of performing, I think that certainly opened the door for me, for music.

I met Leo Fender, who is the guru of all amplifiers, and he gave me a Stratocaster. He became a second father to me.

I started out as a guitarist in the early '80s.

I got into rock music at thirteen, listening to Van Halen, learned how to play the electric guitar.

I do a very poor man's pedal steel on the Stratocaster.

I have a Stratocaster, which is part of my long, doomed ambition to become Jimi Hendrix.

It's like being in a trance, like I get this electric current through my fingertips. Sometimes I shake. People say I look like Hendrix when I'm about to rip a solo because I move my shoulders like he does and do the chewing.

One of the key guitars in my career has been an early-Seventies Fender Telecaster Deluxe that I had before Sonic Youth started and that I played pretty much throughout Sonic Youth.

My fourth birthday, I was given a violin, and my fifth birthday, a guitar. I didn't start to play until I saw Hendrix on TV. They showed him setting his guitar on fire and burning it for the Monterey Pop Festival.

I'm a Telecaster connoisseur, and I love my Teles. I have one from almost every year since the very beginning, in 1950. I'm so obsessed with them.

I don't think there's any music that you hear on the radio today that would be possible without Jimi Hendrix. Rock, blues-rock, heavy metal, any guitar stuff when you get right down to it - Jimi did it. He's certainly the guy who basically invented the blues-rock genre for guitar players.

Jeff and Mike had taken drum lessons at a young age. When the Beatles came out in '64, we all wanted to play guitar.

My heart and soul are in the Stratocaster

A lot of kids bought guitars and started playing rock'n'roll because of us.

I started out playing guitar because Jimi Hendrix was my hero, so my roots were really based on Jimi Hendrix and his style of playing.

I wouldn't be windmilling a Fender Telecaster if it weren't for Pete Townshend.

Scotty Moore plays one of the first really amazing riffs in rock history on Heartbreak Hotel with Elvis Presley ... it was dangerous, it scared everybodys parents, which was part of the attraction then - as it still is now... it totally blindsided me and made me want to get a guitar and do that.

Those original, black, spirited, defiant, rebellious musical masters. Chuck Berry was one of the first masters of Les Paul's new electric guitar; he pretty much laid down the gauntlet, and I don't think anybody's ever beat him since. Way before the British Invasion, I was tuned into the black guys that created the British Invasion. Without Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Lightnin' Hopkins, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and the Motown hits, there would be no Beatles.

I love to collect guitars made in the 1950s. I like preserving and playing them.

I've been playing and singing music since I was three or four years old. I was playing guitar, playing the piano.