I don’t read music. I don’t write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself. – James Taylor
All the time I was playing the flute, the lines, the solos, the riffs, the construction, were based on my guitar skills. I did not play the flute to exploit its natural faculties, but I used it as a surrogate guitar. – Ian Anderson
I never even held a guitar until I was 23 and living in California, but then loved it. I’m really not an accomplished instrumentalist. Maybe that has something to do with why I write and sing. – J. D. Souther
I’m not trying to be flippant here, but I just play the guitar, don’t I? That is my characteristic, and it’s my identity as you hear it. – Jimmy Page
And they kind of left to find a guitar player at the very end, so you know, I don’t really take it as any slight that I wasn’t able to play on the record. It’s flattering just to play with them period. – James Iha
I have a buddy of mine who’s a musician, and I play guitar and sing quite a bit with him. – Jensen Ackles
I bought a guitar CD-ROM because we had a new computer, but I had no attention span for that. I spent about three hours on it desperate to be brilliant. Eventually, I got some proper lessons. – James Bay
My first guitar was like a campfire guitar. And it was left at a house that my family had moved into… and the guitar was at the house. It was all strung up. It’s normally something that would be beyond a bit of rubbish. – Jimmy Page
I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but I’d always been singing. I had my first little acoustic when I was six. But I started being in bands when I was 13. – Jeff Buckley
The process of selecting the tone on the guitar is an aesthetic process like any other, so you try a lot of different things. – Jerry Garcia
I had done a fair bit of traveling during the holidays in my school days with my guitar and discovered that I could live on it. Admittedly, I traveled with a sleeping bag but I could always find somewhere to lay my head. – Jeremy Irons
I’ve always known from the time I was eight years old what I wanted to do. I would have been fairly content to be someone’s lead guitar player. – Brad Paisley
In OK Computer, the guitar was already moving towards a tone generator as well as a riff generator. – Colin Greenwood
You know, when Michael Jackson does the moonwalk, he’s showing off! When Prince or Hendrix do a guitar solo, it’s confidence! I would hate to be at a show and some nervous wreck is sweating up there and doesn’t feel like he deserves to be there. – Bruno Mars
Any guitar solo should reflect the music that it’s soloing over and not just be existing in its own sort of little world. – John Frusciante
I tried to connect my singing voice to my guitar an’ my guitar to my singing voice. Like the two was talking to one another. – B. B. King
A lot of people said to me, ‘Enough with the guest vocalists for a while. We want to hear the Mexican play the guitar!’ – Carlos Santana
I remember one of the first gigs I played with that amp was at a local church. They wanted someone to fill in with the guitar and my friend say, ‘Ah, he can play.’ And so I dragged the amplifier down and started playing and everybody started yelling ‘turn it down!’ – Angus Young
I started playing the guitar when I was 14. I’m not superstitious about guitars, but I do need strings to be old because that’s part of my sound, and I don’t like steel strings. – Jose Gonzalez
Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat, as James Brown and Prince can, has my eternal respect. Prince, who is a genius of the highest order, can come back up while singing and playing the guitar. – Bill Nighy
