Sometimes you want to give up the guitar, you'll hate the guitar. But if you stick with it, you're gonna be rewarded.
I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.
Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.
Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.
If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.
I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
A good player can make any guitar sound good.
All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.
If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying.
The blues appealed to me, but so did rock. The early rockabilly guitarists like Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore were just as important to me as the blues guitarists.
I'm not a really good classical guitarist by any means, but what I learned from this is a way of working very slowly on solo pieces and I enjoyed working on these pieces of John's. They were not written for solo guitar but a lot of them were easy to adapt.
If you're a guitarist, you should not be intimidated by using your instrument as a synthesizer, but you shouldn't feel that you have to own one, either.
When we started I wasn't the singer. I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs.
Usually, no one quite knew where Django Reinhardt was going to be, but I met his brother and about an hour later in walks Django with an entourage of friends. He always traveled with a large group-carried his own admirers with him, the most sinister-looking bunch of hoodlums you've ever seen. I walked up and offered to buy him a drink. That seemed to be the right thing to do... he was the first really brilliant solo guitarist I ever became aware of, I had records of his when I was 10 years old. It just blew my mind that anyone could play a guitar like that. Still does.
My folks were country music performers. They made records and even did a few tours with the Grand Ole Opry. There always were a lot of guitarists around.
Guitarists should be able to pick up the guitar and play music on it for an hour, without a rhythm section or anything.
People ask me to describe how I play, and the most obvious answer is that I'm a jazz influenced guitar player. But I'm not a jazz guitar player. Wes Montgomery was a jazz guitarist, Joe Pass was a jazz guitarist (laughs).
Over the years I hope I've become more of a musican and less of a guitarist.
The great British blues guitarists of the Sixties - people like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Peter Green - could play like virtuosos, but they also understood the importance of energy and intensity
There is no finer guitarist than Kenny Burrell
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