Acoustic Quotes

At the Muddy Waters thing, I played the first song by myself on an acoustic guitar. I thought that was great that y'all did that tribute to Muddy Waters. I had a real good time. ~ Gregg Allman

I was interested in the electric guitar even before I knew the difference between electric and acoustic. The electric guitar seemed to be a totally fascinating plank of wood with knobs and switches on it. I just had to have one. ~ Jeff Beck

player hummed for a second, then sweet sad acoustic guitar filled the air, arpeggiated cascades that transformed the cramped space of the room. The voice that followed was smoky and haunting, filled with loss: ~ John Skipp

I've just been recording mostly acoustic stuff, drums, and sax, and electric guitar. I'm just still writing songs and what not. ~ Phillip Phillips

I tend to write on an acoustic guitar or the piano. I have kind of a rule: if I can't sit down and play this and get the song over, I don't take it to the band, because most any good song, you can sit down and deliver it with a piano or a guitar. ~ Tom Petty

If you were a performer that only had an acoustic instrument, back in the day you couldn't hide behind your guitar pedals or the production or the vibe. There was performance and then there was the song, and that was all that you had. ~ Will Sheff

Sometimes we drop in and do an acoustic set somewhere, and that's really fun to take all these insanely loud songs, and to do them quiet. It's really a sight to see ... or to hear! ~ Michael McKean

Acoustic phonetics, which is developing and increasing in richness very rapidly, already enables us to solve many of the mysteries of sound, mysteries which motor phonetics could not even begin to solve. ~ Roman Jakobson

Now any person who plays an acoustic guitar standing up on stage with a microphone is a folk singer. Some grandmother with a baby in her arms singing a 500-year-old song, well, she's not a folk singer, she's not on stage with a guitar and a microphone. No, she's just an old grandmother singing an old song. The term "folk singer" has gotten warped. ~ Pete Seeger

Utilizing a unique acoustic blend never heard previously, the Aaron O'Rourke Trio has made a fine debut recording that is sure to please old and new grass fans alike. ~ David Grisman

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. ~ Johnny Winter

Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris in a table in the back, when I fell under the spell of Renée's bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star's Radio City. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song – the acoustic ballad Thirteen. She'd never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So naturally, I told her the same thing I'd told every other woman I'd ever fallen for: "I'll make you a tape! ~ Rob Sheffield

With my projects, I really like the extreme high-tech stuff, but I also like the other end, the acoustic things. So it seems like those meet on an iPad, where you make shapes but the sounds coming out of it are really acoustic. ~ Bjork

Did Muddy Waters play an acoustic? Well of course he did. But did he turn his back on being able to plug it in and play louder? No, he plugged in and turned it up and got miles and miles ahead of the game in one fateful act of just plugging in. ~ Billy Gibbons

Although the noise of the chattering clientele is much more significant than the topics of their chatter, it does finally constitute that type of social and indistinct expression that we refer to as rhubarb. The very particular volume in which people tell each other their news seems to generate all by itself that acoustic chiaroscuro, a sounding murk, in which every communication seems to lose its edges, truth projects the shadow of a lie, and a statement seems to resemble its opposite. ~ Joseph Roth

Playing acoustic guitar is like having sex with your clothes on. I mean you know how to do it, but it's more difficult. ~ Dave Mustaine

There is far more sensitivity in acoustic guitar players than could ever be compared to any synthesizer. That's a personal point of view but that's the way I see it. I think that's what it's all about. The drive, the fire, the passion - it all comes out on the guitar. ~ Jimmy Page

I've sung since I talked, when I'm two, but what I sang was ballads, because it's very hard to do a dance track with your little acoustic guitar when you're a kid. ~ Gloria Estefan

In acoustic culture, the world, like sound, is all around you, and comes at you from all directions at once. It is multilayered and nonhierarchical; it has no center or focal point. ~ David Byrne

I quite like American music, like The Fray - I'm a massive fan of them - and The Killers. I also like more acoustic stuff like Ed Sheeran; I like this English songwriter James Morrison and another singer called Ben Howard. ~ Louis Tomlinson

I do some solo, acoustic stuff, but I also like plugging in my electric guitar and playing loud with a band. ~ James Bay

Of course, we also have to play in concert halls. This is our dream when you are a musician - to play in a good, comfortable hall with a wonderful acoustic. ~ Gustavo Dudamel

If you can't play it on an acoustic guitar or a grand piano then it's not a song. ~ Christopher Cross

I'm just as comfortable performing solo with just my acoustic guitar and vocal as I am with a band. The main thing for me is that the performance remain rooted in the words and voice, that there be no place to hide. ~ Michael Gira

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

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. ~ Graham Coxon

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. ~ Adam Schlesinger

Inspiration and stealing are two completely different things. If somebody wants to make a song like "Stairway to Heaven" and writes a song on acoustic guitar, Led Zeppelin does not own every song that's on acoustic guitar for the rest of time. ~ Robin Thicke

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. ~ Britt Daniel

The hole on the face of an acoustic guitar is called the sound hole. The one of the face of its player is called the sincerity hole. ~ Dana Gould

Private listening really took off in 1979, with the popularity of the Walkman portable cassette player. Listening to music on a Walkman is a variation of the "sitting very still in a concert hall" experience (there are no acoustic distractions), combined with the virtual space (achieved by adding reverb and echo to the vocals and instruments) that studio recording allows. With headphones on, you can hear and appreciate extreme detail and subtlety, and the lack of uncontrollable reverb inherent in hearing music in a live room means that rhythmic material survives beautifully and completely intact; it doesn't get blurred or turned into sonic mush as it often does in a concert hall. You, and only you, the audience of one, can hear a million tiny details, even with the compression that MP3 technology adds to recordings. You can hear the singer's breath intake, their fingers on a guitar string. That said, extreme and sudden dynamic changes can be painful on a personal music player. As ~ David Byrne

I got my first guitar when I was 11. It was an electric, and I can remember just wanting to be Avril Lavigne! But I got annoyed with having to plug it in and play with amps and pedals and stuff. Then I got given a cheap acoustic, a Tanglewood, and I thought it was awesome because I could play it anywhere! ~ Gabrielle Aplin

We started very slow in America. It was small acoustic shows. We played places like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago and everywhere there has been a great reaction. It has been really lovely. They listen to the lyrics and the melody over there and the reaction has been fantastic. ~ Emeli Sande

Garcia had traded his Sears electric guitar for an acoustic model shortly after arriving in Palo Alto, and late that spring Barbara bought him a better guitar, and shortly after that, a lovely sounding Stella twelve-string. ~ Blair Jackson

My whole life, I have listened to people like Neil Young, or Crosby, Stills & Nash, and artists that have made a career out of the mellow, folky, acoustic dynamic. ~ Dave Grohl

There was nobody at the time who was playing slide guitar like Johnny, and nobody, or no white guys at least, that was playing country blues like that on the acoustic guitar. And it was at that point that I realized what Johnny had to offer. ~ Rick Derringer

A poetic form is essentially a codified pattern of silence. We have a little silence at the end of a line, a bigger one at the end of a stanza, and a huge one at the end of the poem. The semantic weight of the poem tends to naturally distribute itself according to that pattern of silence, paying especial care to the sounds and meanings of the words and phrases that resonate into the little empty acoustic of the line-ending, or the connecting hallway of stanza-break, or the big church of the poem's end. ~ Don Paterson

I'm proud of the fact that I'm at a point in my career that if I want to take a little bit of a left turn and make an album that is more hushed, more acoustic and more personal, that I can do it, ~ Kenny Chesney

The local music community here was dying for a place to record, so we started doing acoustic, folk and bluegrass and then did rock projects for other bands, as well as for my son Tal and my own work. ~ Randy Bachman

Dave and Serge...played the Fiddler's Elbow as if it were Giants Stadium, and even though it was acoustic, they just about blew the place up. They were standing on chairs adn lying on the floor, they were funny, they charmed everyone in the pub apart from an old drunk ditting next to the drum kit...who put his fingers firmly in his ears during Serge's extended harmonica solo. It was utterly bizarre and very moving: most musicians wouldn't have bothered turning up, let alone almost killing themselves. And I was reminded...how rarely one feels included in a live show. Usually you watch, and listen, and drift off, and the band plays well or doesn't and it doesn't matter much either way. It can actually be a very lonely experience. But I felt a part of the music, and a part of the people I'd gone with, and, to cut this short before the encores, I didn't want to read for about a fortnight afterward. I wanted to write, but I didn't want to read no book. I was too itchy, too energized, and if young people feel like that every night of the week, then, yes, literature 's dead as a dodo.

(Nick's thoughts after seeing Marah at a little pub called Fiddler's Elbow.) ~ Nick Hornby

I suppose I am a frustrated musician so I annoy my family by playing guitar in the house. I used to be into acoustic stuff but my son Joseph is learning drums, so now I have an electric guitar and we play Metallica. We have an amp and a PA in the garage with his drum kit. ~ Kevin McKidd

I'm looking forward to some more solo acoustic dates. That's a lot of fun for me, because I get to be alone with the song. And I get to hear every little nuance; if my instrument does something that I wasn't expecting, I get to chase that. Chase that down a little bit. ~ Bob Weir

Straining to hear, I can make out something acoustic. Coming from...the backyard?

I glance down from my bedroom window and feel my jaw fall open. Matt Finch is standing below my window, guitar strapped across his chest. I pull my window up, and I expect the song from that old movie - the one about a guy with a trench coat and the big radio and his heart on his sleeve.

But it's not that. It's not anything I recognise, and I strain to make out the lyrics: Stop being ridiculous, stop being ridiculous, Reagan.

What an asshole.

The mesh screen and two floors between us don't seem like enough to protect him from my anger.

"Nice apology," I call down to him.
"I've apologised thirteen times," he yells back, "and so far you haven't called me back."

I open my mouth to say it doesn't matter, but he's already redirecting the song.

"Now I'm gonna stand here until you forgive me," he sings loudly, "or at least until you hear me out, la-la, oh-la-la. I drove seven hours overnight, and I won't leave until you come out here."

(...) "This is private property!" My throat feel coarse from how loudly I'm yelling. "And that doesn't even rhyme!"

The guitar chord continues as he sings, "Then call the cops, call the cops, call the cops..."

I storm downstairs, my feet pounding against the staircase. When I turn the corner, my dad looks almost amused from his seat in the recliner. Noticing ~ Emery Lord

The main reason for the break was a combination of travel and going back to university, which drew me into theatre more than music. I did stuff on acoustic guitar when I was traveling, filed it away and made notes, without it being musical notation. Just taped the odd thing, did a sketch, stuck it on a cassette. I thought at some point, I'll go back to it. Some of it I did use in '84-'85 when I started working in the Free Theatre in Christchurch. So it might seem like I had given up after the Pin Group, but I just went into a different avenue. ~ Roy Montgomery

My grandfather gave me my first guitar, an old acoustic with palm trees and dancing girls painted on it. ~ Dan Fogelberg

There's some pictures of me playing hollow bodies, but I never last long. I always come back to the acoustic. ~ Dan Hicks

I tried when I was 13, when my grandparents gave me an acoustic guitar, and I tried for a year. It hurt so much to play. I mean, the fingertips hurt so much, I gave up. ~ Eric Clapton

In a way, as much as we love to be a big, loud rock band, the acoustic album was a lot easier to make than the rock records. I think because it was brand new territory for the band. ~ Dave Grohl

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror.
Speech is a social chart of this bog. ~ Marshall McLuhan

You just make different music on a computer. And you can make wonderful music on a computer, but don't pretend that the machinery is transparent. It makes as much difference to what you're doing as it does if you play an acoustic guitar as opposed to a kettledrum. You're not going to make the same music. ~ Brian Eno

Playing acoustic and line drawings are the two things I'm most competent at. ~ Robyn Hitchcock

I think I was around 10 or 11 years of age when I got my first guitar, but I can remember being as young as 3 or 4 watching my father jam on acoustic to his favorite rush and Jimmy Hendrix albums so I have always been around music. ~ Mike Powell

I really appreciate when someone can blow me away with live acoustic blues. ~ Johnny Winter

An electronic instrument is just harboring a natural element the same way that a guitar is harboring an acoustic element. It's all nature, really. ~ Patrick Wolf

I'm pursuing soundtrack work in the southern California area and down the line I plan to make a moody, intense acoustic album. Not all acoustic, but an acoustic - oriented guitar record that I've already written most of the material for. ~ Ronnie Montrose

I've always been fond of acoustic music. ~ Ian Anderson

When I was playing with synth players, I was still within a conceptual framework of playing music. When I started playing solo, I became much more aware of the acoustic phenomena that the instruments were producing. ~ Z'EV

When the album was done I loved it. It was a mixture of electric and acoustic solo performances with dubs. I called it Le Noise, after Dan. It was a French Canadian joke, a very English was of saying Lanois. I was doing a show that introduced a lot of the songs, and things were going great. I was very happy. ~ Neil Young

I'd love to do an acoustic album alright, just on stage. That'd be nice. ~ Damien Dempsey

I consider the guitar a tool for the most part. I do pick up the acoustic now and then, I certainly don't have any routine. Usually the only time I practice is when the band gets together. Hendrix has always been one of my favorite players, but I was a sucker for Nugent in the late 1970's. ~ Ian MacKaye

I have pictures of me sitting in the racquetball court in my pajamas with an acoustic guitar, and Wolfgang is probably just two-and-a-half-feet tall. I'll never forget the day I saw his foot tapping along in beat! I knew then, I couldn't wait for the day I'd be able to make music with my son. I don't know what more I could ask for. ~ Eddie Van Halen

I started playing bluegrass with my family, so there were the G, C and D chords. I was playing a Martin acoustic because that's what Carter Stanley of the Stanley Brothers played. Then I got into the really raw blues of Hound Dog Taylor and started on electric guitar. ~ Dan Auerbach

I'm still driving along on the pop freeway of life. Thinking even further into the future, I definitely want to make an acoustic record. I want to try lots of different things. ~ Katy Perry

If you play "I Don't Want To Know" by Fleetwood Mac loud enough
you can hear Lindsey Buckingham's fingers sliding down the strings of his acoustic guitar ... And we were convinced that this was the definitive illustration of what we both loved about music; we loved hearing the INSIDE of a song. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Actually, I think that a lot of the interviews and acoustic sessions and other things that artists fill their time with are really pointless and suck the energy out of the artist. ~ Marina And The Diamonds

This band - because this is myself on electric and acoustic guitars - we've done three tours together now and I really, really like it which is why I did the DVD as well. ~ Joan Armatrading

Any effects created before 1975 were done with either tape or echo chambers or some kind of acoustic treatment. No magic black boxes! ~ Alan Parsons

Bruce Marshall's acoustic set gets a big thumbs up from me. ~ Kenny Loggins

we did an acoustic set at CBGB on October 30, 1987, where we debuted "Patience. ~ Duff McKagan

After months of playing air guitar to 'Free Bird', what really got me into guitar was watching a documentary about Jimi Hendrix and picking up the Woodstock soundtrack. Listening to his version of 'Star Spangled Banner' and 'Purple Haze.' My brother played acoustic guitar and, idolising him, I thought, 'I'm going to get a guitar.' ~ Kirk Hammett

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. ~ Pete Townshend

Deafness, though it be total and congenital, imposes no limits on the intellectual development of its subjects, save in the single direction of the appreciation of acoustic phenomena. ~ Edward Miner Gallaudet

I actually think to some degree that people are down for longer shows with an acoustic show. ~ Chris Cornell

That's one of our biggest challenges is finding out how to do that. There are times when you have to scale back. You might be performing on a five-by-five stage in front of 12 people. That's an exaggeration but there are times when you have to turn the corner and do an acoustic set. ~ Alan Powell

My favorite music isn't necessarily the songs that One Direction come out with. That doesn't mean to say I don't secretly really love some of our songs, which I do. My personal tastes ... I actually like quite a bit acoustic and more mellow kinds of things. ~ Louis Tomlinson

The mall tour was right off of my second record, before it came out. It was very different. I did an acoustic performance every day in a different mall! One interesting thing I remember is playing 'My Happy Ending' a lot, and that song was so new that I remember getting emotional. ~ Avril Lavigne

I was very pleased when PRS presented me with my SE Angelus acoustic, a beautiful guitar of stunning quality. It was in response to the challenge of building a guitar that shared the integrity and attention to detail that the Alex Lifeson Private Stock Angelus possesses in a package more broadly accessible. The SE Alex Lifeson Thinline is that model. Carefully selected materials, expert craftsmanship and a smart approach to concept resulted in a guitar that is beautiful to look at and rewarding to play. ~ Alex Lifeson

In 1996, I was in was in an acoustic kind of rock band, we were called Feeble. We were just playing locally. ~ Travis Barker

Floating in the tank after a busy day's work brings a great relief. Suddenly all of the stimulation of holding one upright against gravity disappears. One realizes that a good deal of the fatigue accumulated during the day is caused by keeping one's body upright in a gravitational field. From a neurophysiological standpoint, one has immediately freed up very large masses of neurons from the necessity of constant computations (as to the direction of gravity, the programming by visual and acoustic inputs, by temperature changes, etcetera). For example, one's cerebellum is now freed for uses other than balancing the body. In summary, then, ~ John C. Lilly

My guitar playing is a synthesis of traditional American acoustic style and Urban Pop and R&B. ~ John Oates

The music you make is shaped by what you play it on ... if you feel that you're not getting enough out of a song, change the instrument - go from an acoustic to an electric or vice versa, or try an open tuning ... do something to shake it up ... ~ Mark Knopfler

I played recorder in assembly, then I became passionate about the guitar, I don't know why. I started on electric then moved to acoustic - my brother was playing bass in the next room. ~ Ellie Goulding

The Marie bit is easy enough to understand, then. The Laura thing takes a bit more explaining, but what it is, I think, is this: sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time. Marie's the hopeful, forward part of it – maybe not her, necessarily, but somebody like her, somebody who can turn things around for me. (Exactly that: I always think that women are going to save me, lead me through to a better life, that they can change and redeem me.) And Laura's the backward part, the last person I loved, and when I hear those sweet, sticky acoustic guitar chords I reinvent our time together, and, before I know it, we're in the car trying to sing the harmonies on "Sloop John B" and getting it wrong and laughing. We never did that in real life. We never sang in the car, and we certainly never laughed when we got something wrong. This is why I shouldn't be listening to pop music at the moment. ~ Nick Hornby

My music doesn't really sound like punk music, it's acoustic. And it doesn't really sound like folk music 'cause I'm thrashing too hard and emoting a little too much for the sort of introspective, respectful, sort-of folk genre thing. I'm really into punk and folk as music that comes out of communities and is very genuine and very immediate and not commercial. ~ Ani DiFranco

I play piano and guitar. Acoustic guitar. I tried studying classical guitar when I was 16 but it got really hard. I could never play a lead to save my life. ~ Kip Winger

I love the subtlety and tonal range of the acoustic guitar. ~ Dan Fogelberg

It's very important to have a good song - one where you can strip away all the production and just play it on guitar or at the piano. It has to hold its own. That's why I've put videos online with acoustic versions of my songs, so you can hear them in their original form. ~ Lights

That's what I love about Nashville and the music community - seeing kids around acoustic music and bluegrass picking parties is the best. ~ Dierks Bentley

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. ~ Tom Curren

Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual. ~ Marshall McLuhan

There are tons of people in the West who love fiddles, banjos and mandolins. If you got to any cowboy poetry and music gathering those are the instruments they use. It's acoustic music. We don't do that much modern country that has electric guitars and a lot of volume. It's a gentler form of music. It's from the land and comes from the ranchers and farmers. ~ Michael Martin Murphey

Going to high school in rural Florida, we always partied down in the woods. Somebody - one of the rednecks - would leave class and mow a path out to a field, and we'd drive out there. Dude, every party I went to was lit by a bonfire. Acoustic guitar. ~ Miles Teller

John Mayer and Jack Johnson are two of my all-time favorites. I love Colbie Caillat and really cool, beach-y, guitar, acoustic type music. ~ Halston Sage

I play these [folk acoustic] concerts and I ask myself, 'Would you come see me tonight?' - and I'd have to answer truthfully, 'No, I wouldn't come. I'd rather be doin' something else, really I would. That something else is rock ... The words are pictures, and the rock's gonna help me flesh out the colors of the pictures. (1965) ~ Bob Dylan

I did a smaller gig with an acoustic guitar and a drum machine. In one song, something wrong happened with the drum machine. I tried to cover up the mistake by playing faster and improvising a new song but it became crazy, and I had to admit it was all a mess. ~ Violante Placido

I was a grill cook at McDonalds for a little bit. I did landscape for a little bit. I played a lot in the bar scene, I played countless sets of acoustic songs in that arena. ~ Aaron Lewis

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. ~ Martin Gore

Since Pawlow and his pupils have succeeded in causing the secretion of saliva in the dog by means of optic and acoustic signals, it no longer seems strange to us that what the philosopher terms an 'idea' is a process which can cause chemical changes in the body. ~ Jacques Loeb

I'm gonna design my own fleet of trailers. No! I'm gonna record an album like Jennifer Lopez. It'll be an acoustic version of K.C. and the Sunshine Band. Then maybe I'll design a line of clothes like Puff Daddy, but all in synthetic fur. ~ Brad Pitt

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. ~ Dan Hicks