Allan Holdsworth Quotes

Whenever I feel my chops are slacking, I'll play some wide-stretch trilling exercises and take them up and down the neck as well as across it.

You can sightread better if you know your scales and arpeggios.

What I try to impart to a musician is to really try to practice the instrument in a really sincere way. Learn as much about music as you possibly can. Learn composition. Study to try to create compositions of your own and put your own personal touch on your music.

For me, theory has always opened things up to where I can walk into a room and just by hearing something I know exactly where to go on the guitar. I have a better time playing because I have a variety of colors to bring to the table.

I noticed a lot of guitar players neglected the rhythm part of rhythm guitar and decided I would try to focus in that. As my skill and knowledge of the instrument grew, I found lead started to come naturally. Sometimes I play guitar like a frustrated drummer. Ha ha!

Yeah, I can read music and I know the names of chords.

Certainly, as a guitarist, I was aware of descending chromatic lines and arpeggios long before 1968.

I've never actually learnt scales. I should someday.

I'll admit that I don't have a lot of discipline when it comes to practicing. I'm not the type of guy who sits at home with a metronome and runs through scales and stuff like that. But I do go through phases when I'll be more diligent, and I notice that warming up and working on some patterns will make my playing cleaner.

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.

I don't read music. I refuse to learn how to do that. I barely know half the chords I'm playing. I like being naive when it comes to that.

I learned to read music when I was 10 and did piano and took lessons.

Initially, I just used the guitar as a prop. I'd pose with it in front of a mirror in my Kiss makeup when I was skipping school. Then I figured out how to play the main riff to Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water' on just the E string. Next, my old man showed me how to play barre chords, and that's when things started getting really heavy.

As the chord changes go by, I don't so much think about a static chord voicing changing. I just see the notes on the neck change.

I had a drummer in my band who started teaching me tricks to come up with interesting rhythms. Because I don't come from a musical background, I've never studied music, and I don't know music theory at all, so a lot of stuff I discover on my own are things students would learn in the first grade of music.

Reading music has opened up me up so much. I've been experimenting for so long and trying to make sense of things just from my ears. It takes forever. Now I can get where I want much quicker.

For years, my actual listening activity has been governed by what I perceived to be good for me as a musician, almost like the way an athlete trains for a given sporting task. I'd listen to something if I felt it would improve my sense of harmony or counterpoint, or whatever I was working on.

I have a thing for major 7ths. They've got a very mournful, nostalgic quality to them.

Fundamentally, if there is any secret, it is about the need to find that peace and calm in our personal space with music, as most of 'learning music' is about listening to music and practicing over and over again.

I'm a real musician's musician: I get really geeky on chords and arrangements.

From the start, I held the pick in an unusual way. I used to bend my thumb way back in order to get a good angle for fast playing. I played that way for 10 years.

I play in tune like a cello player and use legitimate vibrato. There are no tricks; it's just all in the hands!

In order to become a well-rounded musician, you have to master the three major aspects of guitar playing: the technical side, the musical side and the creative side.

Before you can apply chromatic ideas to scales and arpeggios, you have to get the chromatic scale itself under your fingers. You should learn it up and down the neck, and become comfortable with the fingerings.

I used to be totally into Steve Vai and Joe Satriani and other shredders, and I tried to emulate what they did and really grow as a guitarist.