Acoustic Guitar Quotes

I wrote all my songs on my main instruments, and the songs I would record in my bedroom were just acoustic guitar, mandolin, and sometimes bass. I really like the texture the mandolin added to my music, but my fingers were too big to play it… I could only do little riffs and whatever.

The classical guitar has a dynamic to it unlike a regular acoustic guitar or an electric guitar. You know, there’s times when you should play and there’s times when you gotta hold back. It’s an extremely dynamic instrument.

I started out in the folk music world only because of the way my songs were written and performed, with just an acoustic guitar, but I always related to the rock n’ roll lifestyle.

I love playing acoustic guitar because I strum with my hands to feel more connected.

When we did the ‘Skin and Bones’ tour I didn’t even own an acoustic guitar, I had to borrow one from my friend.

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

After Hurricane Sandy, my family and I stayed in our apartment in lower Manhattan before things normalized. We’re lucky enough to live on a bit of high ground, so we weren’t flooded… but it was intense. Since there was no light, water, or electricity, I spent a lot of time playing acoustic guitar in the evenings.

There’s something about approaching universal truths with the simplicity of the acoustic guitar. You can take it anywhere, and it helps me reach listeners of all ages and walks of life.

I normally write on acoustic guitar, although piano is the instrument that I actually studied. Occasionally, I’ll write on the piano or sometimes with no instrument at all.

Like, when I write a song, the song comes first before production. Everything is written on an acoustic guitar so you can strip away everything from it and have it be equally as entertaining and good without the bells and whistles.

But when I was 12 or 13, I found the acoustic guitar and got into guitar music ultimately, like Black Motorcycle Club, obviously Neil Young, Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Artie travels all the time. The rehearsals were just miserable. Artie and I fought all the time. He didn’t want to do the show with my band; he just wanted me on acoustic guitar.

In 2002 I did a big tour of Europe, by train, by myself, on foot, all the time walking from train station to the venue, in a weird town, in a weird country. I’d brought an acoustic guitar with me but it got broken somehow in transit.

I started on acoustic guitar after I heard Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy.

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.

My stuff was more of a folk coffeehouse thing, with more acoustic guitar, just me doing a single, and then adding on instruments and voices, with emphasis on lyrics and singing and light kind of acoustic jazz.

When I was younger and played acoustic guitar music, I got a lot of Sheeran comparisons, along with guys like Paolo Nutini and James Morrison.

One of the signature things about Heart was the acoustic guitar in a rock format, which you didn’t hear that often.

Much of the music I remember from camp was unofficial: the songs a counselor would play for us on acoustic guitar or that an older camper would sing after telling us a tale of his hard-knock life. We couldn’t get enough of ‘One Tin Soldier’ or ‘Cat’s in the Cradle.’

I’m an acoustic guitar owner – in the sense that I own them, and they sit at my house, and I never play them.

There have never been a lot of female guitarists out there, so most of my influences were male. Acoustically, I followed Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon. Also, John Lennon and Paul McCartney – both incredible acoustic guitar players.

I’m a really big fan of Andy McKee – I think he’s an amazing acoustic guitar player, and he’s taken the torch from where Michael Hedges left off.

I’m not good enough to be playin’ much acoustic guitar onstage. Man, you gotta get so right; I mean, the tones, the feel, the sound. Plus, acoustic blues guitar is just that much harder on the fingers.

And I only really like to play the acoustic guitar.

When I was small, my parents came back from Tijuana, and my dad bought me a very small acoustic guitar. I loved it. I started making up my own songs right away.

I was in Australia in about 1996 when I played some acoustic guitar for some guys at a studio down there. They were pretty happy with it, and mentioned doing an album, so about a year later I met some people who were interested in recording.

When I write a song, I always start on acoustic guitar, because that’s a good test of a song, when it’s really open and bare. You can often mislead yourself if you start with computers and samples and programming because you can disguise a bad song.

Dorsey played the upright bass and steel guitar, as well as acoustic guitar. Johnny played acoustic guitar and together they were fabulous songwriters and singers.

I write on the acoustic guitar, I write some on the piano, but I’ve been messing around with these guitar pedals and drum machines, educating myself in that world.

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.

My foundation is acoustic guitar, and it is finger-picking and all of that and sort of an orchestral style of playing. Lead guitar came later, more out of the necessity to do so because of expectations in a particular situation.

Sometimes we’d just play acoustic guitar and try out the parts and make a library. We’d use a double cassette player and make little edits.

I had different bands. I played with the Acoustic Warriors for the most part, without girl singers. It was the same kind of sound, acoustic guitar, bass, with violin and sometimes accordion, and the guys would sing, that kind of thing.

I practice on the acoustic guitar a little bit, but I think I have reached the peak of my talent.

I worked out the keyboard parts on the progressive rock classic ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ and somehow managed to play it all on acoustic guitar.

Every one of the songs was based around picking an acoustic guitar. That was part of the concept from the beginning, that the tempos were going to go from slow to almost mid-tempo.

As a producer, when I’m trying to make something soft, I start with a slow tempo. Then after that, it would be straight to acoustic guitar and vocals, or I’m going to go strings and just piano.

When you break out the acoustic guitar, the words are the focal point unless you’re the Jimi Hendrix of the acoustic guitar. So the words have to have meaning.

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.

The thing with One Direction songs is that you can probably break them all down to an acoustic guitar and vocal.

But the reality is when you write a song, you should be able to strip away all the instruments and just have a song right there with an acoustic guitar and a voice, and the song should be good.

‘Flying In A Blue Dream’ was quite automatic. I was working on another song, and I took a break and picked up my acoustic guitar, tuned it strangely, and instantly wrote the tune. It’s funny how you can struggle with one piece and write a better one in a minute. Usually, when things come easy, it means it’s good.

Up till now I wrote the songs on my acoustic guitar alone with the Lord. Then I would take the song and share it with my family and then we all would figure out instrumentation together.

At 13, I loved how so many of my peers sang and played acoustic guitar, so I started recording videos with covers of famous songs and posting them online.

I grew up in the suburbs and was raised on rap radio, so it took me a long time to stumble upon the acoustic guitar as a resource for anything.

In the early days, I had very little idea about arrangements, and I wrote songs a little flat, as it were, just on an acoustic guitar. They didn’t really have quite enough nuance.

I’d say it’s harder to play with an acoustic guitar strapped over your shoulder for a few hundred people than it is to play in front of thousands with an entire bombastic band behind you.

It all started in a local park in El Paso called Madeleine Park. At a ditch, a very small ditch, that everybody used to go skateboarding in. It was me and Jim Ward and an acoustic guitar. He and I constructed the very first phases of At The Drive In.

The best way to do that is to pick up a new instrument or an instrument that you don’t typically write on and see where it takes you. Whether it’s using an acoustic guitar, or piano, or electronics as tools, all of these lead to creating different types of songs and I used all of these methods for this record.

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.

In certain ways I still feel like I’m finding my way. I feel pretty comfortable playing acoustic guitar and singing, but then I feel pretty good sitting on a reggae groove as well.

When I was born, my dad was playing music, so I’m pretty sure he was singing to me in the womb. I was born into music, in a way, because he was playing acoustic guitar. I was around an instrument growing up.

I even played bass for a while. Besides playing electric guitar, I’d also get asked to play some acoustic stuff. But, since I didn’t have an acoustic guitar at the time, I used to borrow one from a friend so I could play folk joints.

My first time doing music was on acoustic guitar. I had a friend from Texas who taught me so much country, I entered a few country competitions. But eventually, I got tired of it.

To stand up on a stage alone with an acoustic guitar requires bravery bordering on heroism. Bordering on insanity.

I’m very much of that old-school mentality of believing that if it works with an acoustic guitar and a vocal, then it should work within any format – and especially when most of my live work is just guitar and vocals, so it really does have to work with only that.

My parents got me a $25 Kent steel-string acoustic guitar when I was around 12. The following Christmas, my parents bought me a Conora electric guitar. It looked almost like a Gretsch. It cost $59, and my mom still has it.

I was lonely as a young teenager and my only companion was an acoustic guitar. I would bring it with me on modeling trips.

For 20 years I’ve been screaming at these guitar companies, saying, ‘It’s abnormal to put your arm around an acoustic guitar that is about 6 to 8 inches deep.’ Your arm reaches over, and you start to strum, and then all of a sudden you get a charley horse in your back. The older you get, the greater the charley horse.

I remember writing Sunday Morning’ and Gwen wasn’t feeling well that day and I had an acoustic guitar and I started singing, Somebody is feeling quite ill ‘ and that became Sunday Morning.’

I find that I get nervous before I play. Even sound checks can give me anxiety and screw with my mind. But as long as I can play a little acoustic guitar backstage if I’m feeling nervous, so I don’t have to walk in there cold turkey, I’ll be fine.

Lately, I love creating ideas on my acoustic guitar. I sit in my living room for hours trying different chords.

People didn’t know I played guitar on all the hit records I had. I’ve never been in an acoustic guitar magazine and I’d put myself up against anybody.

I’m so used to knowing what to do with an electric guitar and amplifier, but with an acoustic guitar, it’s different, but I still have an amp and a whole bunch of pedals.

The transformation that happens when a young artist goes on the road – you put the acoustic guitar down and start to play the electric a little louder – it gets a little bit ragged.

Basically, I try to treat the electric guitar like an acoustic guitar. What you have to do is attack the instrument and know that your feelings aren’t controlled by the controls of your guitar.

I got this Christmas gift with the entire Beatles catalog. I had fun trying to duplicate what I was hearing on these records, only using the instruments I had at hand – an acoustic guitar, and that’s all. It was endlessly amusing to me to try to imitate John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s harmonies using the guitar.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a friend tell me, in this tender and discreet voice, ‘It’s just you and me bro, and I want to tell you the truth: make a record of you and an acoustic guitar. Please. That’s what everybody actually likes.’ That’s so funny to me.

More than any other instrument, the relationship between an acoustic guitar and a microphone is super-important. The kind of mics that you use and your placement of the mics to the guitar can radically alter your sound.

I learned tabla for three years when in school, then started picking up the basics of the acoustic guitar when in college.

It is really hard to write something high-energy and upbeat on acoustic guitar.

I got a toy guitar at a fundraiser and was trying to write songs with it that were ridiculous. After a week, my parents bought me a real acoustic guitar, and I started taking guitar lessons.

A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes.

My bajo sexto, a big Mexican acoustic guitar, comes from a shop in L.A. run by three generations of Mexicans.

When people say the words ‘singer-songwriter,’ I think they have an image in their heads of someone with an acoustic guitar who is a bit woe-is-me. I’d like to think that I’m not one of those. I’m quite a happy person.

I started out with acoustic guitar and loop pedal because I thought I wanted to be Ed Sheeran.

The early influences, in many ways, were in Baltimore. I was passing open windows where there might be a radio playing something funky. In the summertime, sometimes there’d be a man sitting on a step, playing an acoustic guitar, playing some kind of folk blues. The seed had been planted.

I played acoustic guitar so intensely, for so long – for nine hours a day as a 10-year-old, writing songs through the night, on tour constantly from when I was 19 – that I destroyed my arms and shoulders in the process.

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

It took me a while to get an electric guitar and a bass and amps and stuff. Playing the acoustic guitar was much easier and more affordable. But I was always listening to the radio and was interested in all the rock and pop music.