Vintage Guitar Quotes

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.

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

I like the idea of having an old Gibson [guitar], but I don't have one. The Gibson has a different quality, but it's almost like you need both.

Gibson ES 125 was a real instrument, this was in 1956. I started learning; I had a vision of a sound.

In early '57, I bought a Fender Telecaster.

I got my first real bass guitar in my hands when I was 14 - a 1957 Fender Precision, which is still hanging on the wall in my front room. I loved the heaviness of it and the feel of the wood. I still do.

There are good '59 Les Pauls, and there are not-so-good ones. There are ones that are just OK, that don't sustain as well.

I'm playing a D-28 Martin that I've had about 20 years or so. I've got a '51 Martin and I thought I shouldn't be taking this on the road. So I went down to Gruhn Guitars in Nashville and kind of traded around and ended up with this one. This guitar sounded pretty good as new guitar.

A guitar is a guitar. Whether it was made yesterday or 51 years ago, if it's good, it will stand the test of time.

I went to Kalamazoo to get my first Gibsons back in '76.

I've been playing a Fender since 1963, and before that it was my dream guitar. I can't endorse it more than that.

I have a 1969 Grammer Johnny Cash acoustic guitar, and it's so inspirational.

Listen to the great guitarists of the Fifties. They didn't do that nasty sort of industrial distortion. They played musical compositions as solos - Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, Django Reinhardt. There wasn't a bad note in any of those solos. I listened to that and stayed with those rules.

The first guitar I ever owned was a Kay SG copy. That cost like $35. Man, that was a terrible guitar.

My father played one of the first electric guitars in England. He built his own in 1940, because you couldn't buy them in those days. He used three telephone pickups under the strings, which gave chronic distortion on chords but was quite good on single notes.

I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it.

I had a guitar when I was 6 or 7, a plastic guitar with the Beatles' faces on it. It would be a collector's item now. It would fetch a hefty sum, I imagine.

I suppose my little Martin acoustic guitar is quickly becoming a prize possession. It's a lovely guitar. I bought it at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2001 before I had cleaned up.

The first 12-string guitar I bought was probably around 1957.

I did splash out on a 1964 Fender Jaguar guitar in L.A.

The maplewood flat-finished Martin had represented the most outrageous luxury in her life when she bought it in 1971 for four hundred dollars. But Lonnie Slocum assured her the Martin was a good investment, even if she never learned to play it better than an acid head who was into heavy metal.

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.

My real interest in music was the old 78 records and the sound of the music. I loved it and began to realize that one of the main sounds on those old records I loved was the guitar.

I worked at a vintage guitar store, and the owner had ties with a lot of Japanese manufacturers and U.S. manufacturers that were beginning to pop up. So I was ordering parts and screwing them together and contacting local luthiers to finish and do frets and things, and I had put together two guitars, a red one and a black one.

The late-sixties Teles are the best value you can get for a vintage guitar.