If you're stuck at piano and you're not a lead guitarist or a lead vocalist, you're kind of at a nine-foot plank then and you should do something about it.
I'm kind of a one-note at a time, one finger keyboard player.
Mozart encompasses the entire domain of musical creation, but I've got only the keyboard in my poor head.
It's hard to say this about a guy like Eddie Van Halen, one of the greatest guitar players who ever lived, but he's really limited to a style and they're locked into it.
Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line.
You can't sing baritone when you're a soprano.
I think that open tunings are a trap really because it's really hard not to sound like an open tuning when your using one and that gets old as well as what you learn in one open tuning is going to stay there.
I can carry a tune with a three-note range. Once I'm out of that range, I'm in trouble.
I can write orchestrations, but I can't sight-read music and play at the same time. I don't have enough facility.
I don't play anything but the blues, but now I could never make no money on nothin' but the blues. That's why I wasn't interested in nothin' else.
Truth of the matter is, I can't even read or write music.
I can't sing.
A guitar riff played on a piano doesn't come close to the purity of it being played on a guitar but I faked it enough to get by.
I used to try and make up visually for what I couldn't play as a musician. I used to get into very incredible visual things where, in order just to make one chord more lethal, I'd make it a really lethal looking thing, whereas really it's just going to be picked normally.
Background scores allow me an absolute flight of the imagination, and I travel in my mind's eye. I do not like the scores to have vocal notes, because they act as a limitation to these flights of fancy.
I'd love to play bass with Parliament Funkadelic, but I can't play bass, so I don't think that's going to happen.
When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that's not something I could do.
The only one I can play like is Johnny Ramone. I would love to be able to play like other great guitarists, but my mind doesn't work like that.
I can't sing anything other than country!
There are only so many notes so there must be only so many melodies.
I stuck with that size because I could bend the strings so well, and somewhere along the line I must have gotten it into my mind that I had small hands, so I was thinking I'd never be able to play a full-scale guitar, but I also felt like I was cheating or cutting corners.
If I could sing like a Chaka Khan, an Aretha, a Kim Burrell, if I could do all these amazing runs and belt it out, I would. I've attempted that, and it's not something anyone would want to hear.
I wanted to be a musician. I just wanted to be famous because I wanted to escape from what I felt was my limitation in life... And I wanted to write music, and I didn’t know what I was doing and I never had the technique or understanding of it... But I’ve always played the piano and I can improvise on the piano, but the problem is that I can’t write down what I write. I can read music but I can’t write numbers.
