Rostam Batmanglij Quotes

I play a couple basic folks songs and break them down. I did that on a six string. I can't recall all the songs on it. There's some finger picking on it.

I really consider myself more of a rhythm guitarist than a soloist.

My father started me off on the guitar, and we learned classical guitar together.

It's just a favorite language to me, that country finger-picking guitar style.

Some songs are just going to be acoustic with just maybe some light background stuff going on and maybe violin or something like that. Or sax - I mean, I'm definitely having some sax. That's just what I love. It's going to be jazz-rock stuff. That's what I'm aiming for.

The more I got into playing guitar, the more I enjoyed music, and the broader my listening became. The instrument itself became important to me, and I started messing around with classical guitar and took classical lessons.

I mainly like to do singer/songwriter kind of stuff.

I noticed a lot of guitar players neglected the rhythm part of rhythm guitar and decided I would try to focus in that.

I approach playing acoustic guitar more of as a percussive instrument. It's fragile. I don't have a lot of finesse when it comes to my guitar playing.

I write almost all my songs on an acoustic guitar, even if they turn into rock songs, hard rock songs, metal songs, heavy metal songs, really heavy songs... I love writing on an acoustic because I can hear what every string is doing; the vibrations haven't been combined in a collision of distortion or effects yet.

I was 16 when I started playing. I borrowed a friend's acoustic guitar, and I had a Beatles chord book. I just taught myself that way.

I was just a punk-rock kid who never played acoustic guitar.

I'm more of a strumming guitarist, instead of a lead soloist guitarist.

I mean, there's times to rock and roll, and I love that too. But I think my first love is acoustic music.

I had sat in one day in Central Park with Bonnie and Delaney, and Duane was playing with them, so I asked if he wanted to work on an album. You never had to say to him how to play the guitar.

'Cruise Control' was the first track me and Wiz Khalifa ever did. I made the beat on that, and I played guitar on it.

When I write, I write the drum beat. Though sometimes I write on piano or guitar.

I'm not like other guitar players. In fact, I'm not even like most acoustic players because I use the nylon-string acoustic. I do play steel-string and the electric guitar, too, because I love rock 'n' roll and guitarists like Jimi Hendrix. But my bread and butter has always been the nylon-string.

I've always played a lot of Spanish music, but not as much as most guitarists do.

And I only really like to play the acoustic guitar.

Usually I write on guitar.

When I first started writing songs, I did play with my fingers, and I had these kind of weird strums. There's, like, three or four strumming patterns that seemed kind of unique to me.

Most of everything I've ever written actually was written on acoustic. 'Do You Feel' was written on electric. 'I'm in You' was written on piano.

All my songs were made at the end of the neck, 'farmer's corner' chords.

I think I'm much more of a guitar-songwriter than a singer. I start with chords and then test out melodies rather than improvising over it.