Chris Thile Quotes

The lute is tuned differently than the guitar and of course it has many more strings.

It's hilarious, because my guitar has what's known as a tremolo bar or a whammy bar. And the whammy bar is probably the most alien thing on my guitar that could possibly relate to a classical guitar.

My favorite guitar now is my Martin HD-7 because it's got everything. It's got the jingle-jangle thing from the twelve string, it's got the flexibility of the six string, and the bass notes where you can do bass runs and that sort of thing.

I'm a farmer with a mandolin and a high tenor voice.

The range of the cello is so big, it can play as low as the double bass and as high as the violin. It has the perfect shape, and its sound is the closest to the human voice.

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

I love the subtlety and tonal range of the acoustic guitar.

The lute I use has 10 courses and 19 strings, which is quite a lot of strings and a quite different fingerboard width from a classical guitar. I use a combination of flesh and nail when plucking the strings.

In my eyes, and in my opinion, the guitar is strong and powerful and will never die.

Banjos are used in Celtic, English folk music and obviously American music. But not that much in pop music. But it's more versatile than people realise it to be. It's a beautiful instrument, very rhythmic and melodic. You can do anything with it.

The guitar is the most beautiful of all instruments.

My favourite guitar was - I can't remember if it was '50s or '60s - a pale wood Telecaster, and it made me a better player. It was beautiful, so easy to play.

I was two years old when I saw the mandolin for the first time, and I just loved it. I just loved the sound of it, the shape of it even, and the way it looks. And I still love it, which is a testament to something.

What is a harp but an oversized cheese slicer with cultural pretensions?

In accordance with the foregoing investigations on mathematical principles, let bronze vessels be made, proportionate to the size of the theatre, and let them be so fashioned that, when touched, they may produce with one another the notes of the fourth, the fifth, and so on up the double octave.

The acoustic guitar is my first love, I've been playing since I was a kid, and I feel the most at home when I'm sitting with an acoustic, I just love it so much. It changes my heart. I love the vibration and frequencies and the resonance.

I like to play acoustic slide. I like that. I just... I can do it, you know. But it ain't my cup of tea.

I have a Gibson Thinline that I designed the body shape of, which I used a lot on the 'Fanatic' album that I'm going to shake out.

When I feel like improvising, I always improvise on the guitar, never on the lute. It's as natural to me as breathing.

I didn't actually start playing the banjo until I was in high school.

The darned thing about mandolins is they're really hard to turn up as loud as you would need to be to play with a drum set. They cease to sound like mandolins.

Chromamatic' is actually about changing the strings on my guitar and tuning my guitar.

I suppose that when I started to play the lute it was fairly esoteric.

I don't know if, in a previous life, I was, like, the embodiment of a guitar, because any time someone plays a guitar with the licks, I just resonate to it.

When I was 12 years old I discovered Bill Monroe and my dad got me a mandolin.