Stringed Instrument Quotes

My first really good guitar was a Gibson J-45.

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.

The first musical sound I ever heard was from a banjo. My father played, and I was an infant in a crib, and something just stayed with me from those early days.

I learned how to play mandolin for 'A Mighty Wind!'

I own a '66 Jaguar. That's the guitar I polish, and baby - I refuse to let anyone touch it when I jump into the crowd.

Well, you know, the original banjos were all handmade instruments. Gourd - it would be made with gourds and whatever, you know, materials would have been around. And, you know, first hundred years of its existence, the banjo's known as a plantation instrument, as a black instrument, you know?

I started playing harp about fourteen years ago.

I'm not a 'guitarist.' I'm trying to be a bassist.

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.

My father had played the guitar when he was young, and my uncle Jack had worked for Kalamazoo, before the war, developing guitar pickups. So there was a kind of family thing about the guitar, although it was considered something of an anomaly then.

All gut strings. That's just the first kind of guitar I played, it was a nylon string guitar. And to me, it's the purest form of guitar making, and I just enjoy doing it.

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.

When I started learning the cello, I fell in love with the instrument because it seemed like a voice - my voice.

When I was a teenager, my mom got me a really nice baritone ukulele.

I still play that guitar. It's a Martin D-18 with a clear pick guard. I've played that guitar on and off my TV shows for nearly 50 years.

The only sliding I did was on the kind of instrument that you put on your lap; no Spanish electrics.

That first bass I had was an Eko, a very old thing with a thin neck, I had that for quite a while.

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

I don't really know why I chose bass except that it was different than guitar.

When they invented the mandolin, it was as if they were trying to come up with the least efficient means of extracting noise from a piece of wood.

I just loved the guitar when it came along. I loved it. The banjo was something I really liked, but when the guitar came along, to me that was my first love in music.

.. the guitar is just a wonderful instrument. It's everything: a bartender, a psychiatrist, a housewife. It's everything, but it's elusive

I shared guitars before I actually got one of my own and played a guy's Silver tone and played another guys Danelectro 12 string and it was at about age 17 that I actually started playing.

Banjos are funny instruments. They can get pretty irritating.

Some people play steel string beautifully, but I'm not exactly a world-class picker.