Jerry Garcia Quotes

Experimenting with different sounds is great, but when it comes down to it, you're still playing a guitar.

So it's more the musician in me that makes me stretch out and try different things more than anything. But, like a lot of guitar players, I have one certain niche that's my thing that I'm better at than the others.

After a couple of failed attempts, I came up with a weird tuning where I was dropping the G string down a step so that it became a seventh, and it got me to a place where I could play all these figures fairly easily. It was not an easy thing to work out.

When I tried to play something and screwed up, I'd hear some other note that would come into play. Then I started trying different things to find the beauty in it.

I think music is so diverse today, and bands are so diverse. If you were a rock band in the Eighties, you kind of had to stick to one thing. Now, in this age of Coachella and European festivals and stuff, it's kind of anything goes, so that allowed us to try different things.

A lot of times Mick will play me different things, or I'll listen to a cassette, and out of twenty ideas or whatever, I'll find two or three that are just blowing me away, and we'll start working on them right away.

When you tune your guitar in a different way, it lends itself to a new way of looking at your songwriting.

My favorite thing about guitar, and the thing that always drew me to it when I was first learning to play it, was those moments when you think you know what it might sound like, but you don't, and then you hit it, and it's a total surprise. You hear it with really fresh ears. Alternate tunings, for me, they give that back.

The combination of experience and experimentation will ultimately yield a personal sound.

I'm not that knowledgeable with the guitar - I just find ways that are pretty creative, but it's all within the framework and the limitations of what I can do.

Andy Chase and I were keyboard players originally, and we became guitarists later. But it's fun for us to focus more on the keyboard stuff sometimes.

Motley never once sat down and said, 'Well, the music scene's changing. We need to make this record a little darker or heavier musically or lyrically.' It was just four guys sitting in a room like a bunch of 16-year-olds in a garage and jamming on riffs.

Growing up, I always liked so many different sounds from so many different genres - the different aspects they could bring.

Just based on the primary adage of the necessity breeding innovation, it was just like 'Well, what makes me the guitar player that I am?' and I feel like I listen to so much different music, and I'm a student of so many genres of music, and I feel like it's fun to apply those things and anything super applicable to any type of music.

To me it's all about textures, and that's the side of music that I'm finding really exciting. I feel like it's one of the only parts of music that mankind hasn't fully discovered yet.

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

I love trying new things and experimenting with instruments and sounds.

I was never a fan of open tunings, because some people will do that and fumble around. But that's not my jam.

If you look at these bands like The Beatles, they did something that was new for that time, whether it was shocking or just a new direction that they were going.

I get bored of music really easily, so I always try and make music that makes sense, but then it's just a little bit wrong.

I think I have the capability to make music different from what I have already released. There are ghazals and other songs that I can create. There is no stopping me though.

I'm doing this record called 'Epicloud.' Over the course of the full record, there's sort of new agey stuff, jazzy stuff, really heavy stuff. We basically cover the gamut.

I collect many ethnic instruments, and as a guitarist, I'm usually able to play any sort of instrument - as long as it has strings. That's why I like to experiment with different sounds.

I'd listen to a song and say, 'Hang on, I like that piano thing,' so I'd play the guitar like that and get the vibe from it, and it just evolved from the get-go. It was pretty obvious what to do; You don't think about rock n' roll: you just do it.

Branching out to other genres - I think it's why people put me apart from other guitar instrumentalists.