Acoustics Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

As his people positioned themselves in and around the pass, Arin though that he might have misunderstood the Valorian addiction to war. He had assumed it was spurred by greed. By a savage sense of superiority. It had never occurred to him that Valorians also went to war because of love.
Arin loved those hours of waiting. The silent, brilliant tension, like scribbles of heat lightning. His city far below and behind him, his hand on a cannon's curve, ears open to the acoustics of the pass. He stared into it, and even though he smelled the reek of fear from men and women around him, he was caught in a kind of wonder.He felt so vibrant. As if his life was fresh, translucent, thin-skinned fruit. It could be sliced apart and he wouldn't care. Nothing felt like this. ~ Marie Rutkoski

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 prefer to sing in the shower 'cause the acoustics are really, really good, I mean, when you're singing against the tile walls then you really hear yourself, hear your voice, you know, throwing itself back at you. ~ Thia Megia

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

Snack consumption was legal but Joe expected anyone dining on the distracting shit to synchronize chewing with car chases and shootouts regardless of the genre. The Popcorn Pig was treating the space like a pie eating contest. The buttery snack was his instrument and he was doing a sound check with the venue's acoustics. ~ Michael Ebner

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 think it's one of my favourite theatres ever, so quirky and wonderful and steeped in history. The space is wonderful and the acoustics are brilliant. ~ Louise Jameson

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

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

The granite complex inside the Great Pyramid, therefore, is poised ready to convert vibrations from the Earth into electricity. What is lacking is a sufficient amount of energy to drive the beams and activate the piezoelectric properties within them. The ancients, though, had anticipated the need for more energy than what would be collected only within the King's Chamber. They had determined that they needed to tap into the vibrations of the Earth over a larger area inside the pyramid and deliver that energy to the power center - the King's Chamber - thereby substantially increasing the amplitude of the oscillations of the granite.
Modern concert halls are designed and built to interact with the instruments performing within. They are huge musical instruments in themselves. The Great Pyramid can be seen as a huge musical instrument with each element designed to enhance the performance of the other. While modern research into architectural acoustics might focus predominantly upon minimizing the reverberation effects of sound in enclosed spaces, there is reason to believe that the ancient pyramid builders were attempting to achieve the opposite. The Grand Gallery, which is considered to be an architectural masterpiece, is an enclosed space in which resonators were installed in the slots along the ledge that runs the length of the gallery. As the Earth's vibration flowed through the Great Pyramid, the resonators converted the vibrational energy to airborne sound. By design ~ Christopher Dunn

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

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

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

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

The magic of film isn't just because of the big screen, or the acoustics, but the ineffable shared experience of going to the movies. ~ Fernando Perez

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

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

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

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

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

I prefer to sing in the shower because the acoustics make you sound great, baby. ~ Naima Adedapo

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

I'll say this for the celestial spheres, though: great acoustics. We're talking Platonic ideals here. Pythagoras would have smashed his corny little harp across his knee if he'd heard it. ~ Ian Tregillis

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

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

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

After tea, we discussed a variety of topics before the fire; and Mrs. Micawber was good enough to sing us (in a small, thin, flat voice, which I remembered to have considered, when I first knew her, the very table-beer of acoustics) the favourite ballads of "The Dashing White Sergeant", and "Little Tafflin". ~ Charles Dickens

We have traveled through space and time. We have been many places. Visited many worlds. And there is good news: the acoustics everywhere are terrific. ~ Libba Bray

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

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

In Hamburg, there are three major orchestras, an opera house, and one of the great concert-hall acoustics in Europe at the Laeiszhalle, in a town a fifth the size of London. And that's not unusual. In Germany, there are dozens of towns with two or three orchestras. The connection with music goes very, very deep. ~ Jeffrey Tate

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

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

At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features. ~ Roman Jakobson

See if you can spot the difference between these two statements:

(a) «Those trousers make your backside look fat.»

(b) «You're a repellently obese old hag upon whom I am compelled to heap insults and derision - depressingly far removed from the, 'stupid, squeaky, pocket-sized English women,' who make up my vast catalogue of former lovers and to whom I might as well return right now as I hate everything about you.»

Maybe the acoustics were really bad in the dining room, or something. ~ Mil Millington

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

The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox. ~ Rem Koolhaas

In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action. ~ Anais Nin

People think of songwriting as a very personal thing: A guy gets up there with an acoustic guitar and he sings his heart out, bares his soul. ~ Craig Finn

You know, there's times when you should play and there's times when you gotta hold back. ~ Steve Vai

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. ~ Taylor Momsen

Oftentimes the most produced and synth-tastic songs are the ones that end up sounding the best acoustic. ~ Emily Haines

I don't touch electric guitars. It's just not my thing - I stick with acoustic guitars only. ~ Dave Matthews

I do the protest stuff. I do country and western. I play both acoustic and electric guitar in a lot of different styles, from loud, psychedelic stuff to quiet finger-picking. ~ Eugene Chadbourne

I like music that is really pure and honest. For me, acoustic music, like a piece played on the piano, is very personal. ~ Shook

Neighbors are far better acoustic analyzers for determining the quality of their life versus any acoustic instrument left unattended by an expert. ~ Stephen Ambrose

Most of our songs were written on acoustic guitar before they made it to the practice stage. ~ Dave Grohl

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. ~ Mark Knopfler

I think the Flecktones are a mixture of acoustic and electronic music with a lot of roots in folk and bluegrass as well as funk and jazz. ~ Bela Fleck

I like those older theaters - the acoustics are perfect, I mean, you just have that feel of there's been a thousand shows in there and now you get to be one. ~ Billy Gardell

Although a crisp texture is the single most prized quality in an apple - even more desirable than taste, according to one study - crispness is more a matter of acoustics than of mouth feel. ~ John Seabrook

In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot. ~ Arthur Koestler

Ive also just come off a year and a half playing acoustic shows which is fantastic for the hands, and changes your head a little bit. ~ Andy Summers

If your going to learn to play lead guitar, get an electric guitar .. it doesn't have to be an expensive one .. acoustic guitars aren't good for learning lead, because you can't play up very high on the neck and they take heavier-gauge strings which makes it hard to bend notes ~ Eddie Van Halen

Martin explains that working with architects in the Arup SoundLab has led to improved collaborations: 'We can relate to architects much better. If we are brought on board at the ideal time, which is if we are brought on board at concept, we can sit with the architect and say...this is what you have to work with. They can hear and they can understand it. Then from their first ideas and concepts they are much more willing to work with us when we talk to them about shape and form. ~ Yanni Alexander Loukissas

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. ~ Billie Joe Armstrong

Write great songs that sound amazing if sung and played on the piano or acoustic guitar. Always encourage sing-alongs! Be prolific! Say "Yes" to new collaborations because you never know where it could lead. ~ Wendy Starland

I sit around and play acoustic guitar - usually acoustic, sometimes electric, occasionally piano, but more often guitar, just trying to come up with tunes. Ideas kind of pop into your head. ~ Colin Hay

When you have an acoustic bass in the ensemble it really changes the dynamic of the record because it kind of forces everybody to play with a greater degree of sensitivity and nuance because it just has a different kind of tone and spectrum than the electric bass. ~ David Sanborn

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. ~ Graham Parker

I've actually always wanted to make something like an acoustic record. ~ Katy Perry

As much as I love acoustic Neil Young - and I do deeply - I may be more passionate about the electric. Luckily it's not a contest, and we never have to make that choice. But Neil Young on an electric guitar - I feel like I've never seen or heard anything like it. ~ Jonathan Demme

When seas of state 1 or higher are noted, when traffic or industrial noise is apparent, or when other low frequency sound sources such as shifting bottoms, tidal currents, or noisy animals are encountered, sound reception in all, but the "deafest", fishes is probably impaired - the degree of such impairment being directly dependent upon the noise-level attained.

-- Arthur A. Myrbery, Jr. ~ John L. Fletcher

With a live performance, you feel nervous because there's a sense it could do well or badly based on how well you are performing, whereas the only variable with a film premiere is technical, which invariably you have very little control over, whether the sound is good, whether the acoustics of the room are good. ~ Richard Ayoade

I actually bought a travel guitar, and that guitar is really cool. You can actually fold the guitar, and you can plug headphones into it, but it's acoustic, or semi-acoustic. ~ Daniel Ek

Cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music. ~ Edith Wharton

He knew how the audition was going to affect their lives for the next ten weeks as she slowly lost her mind from nerves and the strain of trying to scrounge precious practice time from an already jam-packed life. No matter how much time poor Sam gave her, it would never be quite enough, because what she actually needed was for him and the kids to just temporarily not exist. She needed to slip into another dimension where she was a single, childless person. Just between now and the audition. She needed to go to a mountain chalet (somewhere with good acoustics) and live and breathe nothing but music. Go for walks. Meditate. Eat well. Do all those positive-visualization exercises young musicians did these days. She had an awful suspicion that if she were to do this in reality, she might not even miss Sam and the children that much, or if she did miss them, it would be quite bearable. ~ Liane Moriarty

Performing arts buildings are complex. The acoustics, the sight lines and all that have to just be perfect. So you begin with just making these things sublime as musical instruments. And if you fail there, you have failed it all. ~ Moshe Safdie

Sting I've seen a few times, and he really inspired me in the sense that he breaks the songs down a lot and will take a different approach. He'll take an acoustic approach to them; he'll rearrange them for the live stage. ~ Shania Twain

Stradivarius, in particular, was the most amazing craftsman and one of the great artists and scientists that ever lived because he figured out something with the sound and the science of acoustics that we still don't understand it completely. ~ Joshua Bell

I really enjoy playing solo acoustic. I think it's good for me as a songwriter to stay in touch with what it takes to make a song work by yourself. ~ Jeff Tweedy

Well, I have been playing electric guitar all these years and acoustic was something new to me. ~ Gary Moore

Believe me, I know all about bottle acoustics. I spent much of the sixth century in an old sesame oil jar, corked with wax, bobbing about in the Red Sea. No one heard my hollers. In the end an old fisherman set me free, by which time I was desperate enough to grant him several wishes. I erupted in the form of a smoking giant, did a few lightning bolts, and bent to ask him his desire. Poor old boy had dropped dead of a heart attack. There should be a moral there, but for the life of me I can't see one. ~ Jonathan Stroud

To me, Bill's musical heart is in Earthworks, in the jazz they are playing, in the acoustic kit. ~ Robert Fripp

Technology was something I avoided when I started out - I didn't even have electric guitars. Only played acoustic. ~ Beck

I collaborated with a brilliant young sound designer named Anthony Mattana, who enriched the sound of the total production with vocal effects, percussive and other sounds. He also mixed the sound effects and the music, using the theater's first rate sound system to complement the theater's acoustics. This completed my score. ~ Jeff Britting