Guitar Amplifier Quotes

Dave walked closer to me, his dark eyes combing my every move. "Do you always hold your guitar like that?" I dropped my pick. "Do you always shop at Hot Topic?

I may not have written the song, but I could add my story to it. Everyone out there could. That was what made music so powerful.

Toward the end of his second decade in the airport, Clark was thinking about how lucky he’d been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin. And not just to have seen the remembered splendors of the former world, the space shuttles and the electrical grid and the amplified guitars, the computers that could be held in the palm of a hand and the high-speed trains between cities, but to have lived among those wonders for so long. To have dwelt in that spectacular world for fifty-one years of his life. Sometimes he lay awake in Concourse B of the Severn City Airport and thought, “I was there,” and the thought pierced him through with an admixture of sadness and exhilaration.

I was ten when I heard the music that ended the first phase of my life and cast me hurtling towards a new horizon. Drenched to the skin, I stood on Dunoon’s pier peering seawards through diagonal rain, looking for the ferry that would take me home. There, on the everwet west coast of Scotland, I heard it: like sonic scalpels, the sounds of electric guitars sliced through the dreich weather. My body hairs pricked up like antennae. To my young ears these amplified guitars sounded angelic, for surely no man-made instrument could produce that tone. The singer couldn't be human. His voice was too clean, too pure, too resonant, as though a robot larynx were piping words through vocal chords of polished silver. The overall effect was intoxicating - a storm of drums, earthquake bass, razor-sharp guitar riffs, and soaring vocals of astonishing clarity. I knew that I was hearing the future.

To those of us gathered here today, Matthew Connell filled a number of different roles in our lives. Matthew was a son, a brother, a father and a friend. Matthew's last days in his young life were bleak, suffering ones. Yet, we must remember the real Matthew, the loving young man who had a great lust for life. A keen musician, Matthew loved to entertain friends with his guitar playing... Renton could not make eye contact with Spud, standing next to him in the pew, as nervous laughter gripped him. Matty was the shitest guitarest he'd known, and could only play the Doors' 'Roadhouse Blues' and a few Clash and Status Quo numbers with any sort of proficiency. He tried hard to do the riff from 'Clash City Rockers', but could never quite master it. Nonetheless, Matty loved that Fender Strat. It was the last thing he sold, holding onto it after the amplifier had been flogged off in order to fill his veins with shite. Perr Matty, Renton thought. How well did any of us really know him? How well can anybody really know anybody else?

Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us--simpatico dudes that we are--while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time--while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works--but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns. Rock-and-roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us--as damaged and anti-social as we are--might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whetehr we want it to or not. Just because we're breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigree of delicate distinctions. And you can thank the wanking eighties, if you wish, and digital sequencers, too, for proving to everyone that technologically "perfect" rock--like "free" jazz--sucks rockets. Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but so you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we're trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock-and-roll works because we're all a bunch of flakes. That's something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that's all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising.

She suspected Primm operated a few decibels above the norm. Like an amplified electric guitar played with distortion. You liked it because power chords heightened the experience, making you feel life was being lived with higher intensity.

Turki al Bin ‘ali does the Islamic equivalent of smashing an electric guitar and kicking over an amplifier every time he steps up to the minbar.

While this signifier can be difficult to pin down with precision, it can clearly be heard in the records of Duane Eddy and many other guitarists of the period. It usually involves a relatively nondistorted electric guitar timbre articulated with a strong attack and a melody played on the lower strings. Reverberation is ubiquitous, and almost equally common were echo, amplifier tremolo, and use of the guitar’s vibrato bar. This overall guitar sound is often called a Fender sound, but that is a bit misleading, since Gretsch guitars were equally specialized for the purpose, and many other brands were also used. What makes the twang guitar interesting in topical terms is that it not only signified the western topic but also was key to a linked set of genres that intersect one another in complex ways: western, spy, and surf. Because these were all signified by overlapping musical features and in turn resemble one another in some of their broader connotations, we could speak of a twang guitar continuum: a range of topics that coalesced only shortly before psychedelia and were cognate with it in a variety of ways. Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida point out that the twang guitar, often in a minor mode with a flat seventh, was a common factor between spaghetti western and Bond/spy scores in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I would add surf guitar to the list, with its sonic experimentation and general relationship to fun, escape, and exoticism: “[The twang guitar] probably owes some of its immediate success as a spy sound to its similarity with various pre-rock ‘Viennese intrigue’ sounds like Anton Karas’s Third Man zither licks (1949). But in the 1962–64 period that produced The Virginian (1962), Dr. No (1963) and Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), steely Fender guitar was well on its way to becoming an all-purpose excitement/adventure timbre” (Tagg and Clarida 2003, 367).

MacKaye never varied his equipment: a Gibson SG guitar and a Marshall amplifier. “Even though I know that there’s a lot of options, I’m not interested in options,” he says. “I’m interested in how far I can take this simple equation, which is an amp, a cord, and a guitar, and how much I can do with it.

Of course, marriage in one sense changes who you are in certain ways, but it also simply amplifies what you are. Many people think that when they got married, they turned into selfish people. What actually happened is they plugged the guitar into the amp and turned it up to eleven, and the selfish tune they had been playing the whole time suddenly became audible.

An instrument such as an electric guitar, where the sound is produced mechanically and amplified and manipulated electronically, is not classified as an electrophone. An electric guitar is an example of a chordophone.

Flash!” Shit, what a record! All my stuff came together and all done on a cassette player. With “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Street Fighting Man” I’d discovered a new sound I could get out of an acoustic guitar. That grinding, dirty sound came out of these crummy little motels where the only thing you had to record with was this new invention called the cassette recorder. And it didn’t disturb anybody. Suddenly you had a very mini studio. Playing an acoustic, you’d overload the Philips cassette player to the point of distortion so that when it played back it was effectively an electric guitar. You were using the cassette player as a pickup and an amplifier at the same time. You were forcing acoustic guitars through a cassette player, and what came out the other end was electric as hell. An electric guitar will jump live in your hands. It’s like holding on to an electric eel. An acoustic guitar is very dry and you have to play it a different way. But if you can get that different sound electrified, you get this amazing tone and this amazing sound. I’ve always loved the acoustic guitar, loved playing it, and I thought, if I can just power this up a bit without going to electric, I’ll have a unique sound. It’s got a little tingle on the top. It’s unexplainable, but it’s something that fascinated me at the time.

Flash!” Shit, what a record! All my stuff came together and all done on a cassette player. With “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Street Fighting Man” I’d discovered a new sound I could get out of an acoustic guitar. That grinding, dirty sound came out of these crummy little motels where the only thing you had to record with was this new invention called the cassette recorder. And it didn’t disturb anybody. Suddenly you had a very mini studio. Playing an acoustic, you’d overload the Philips cassette player to the point of distortion so that when it played back it was effectively an electric guitar. You were using the cassette player as a pickup and an amplifier at the same time. You were forcing acoustic guitars through a cassette player, and what came out the other end was electric as hell. An electric guitar will jump live in your hands. It’s like holding on to an electric eel. An acoustic guitar is very dry and you have to play it a different way. But if you can get that different sound electrified, you get this amazing tone and this amazing sound. I’ve always loved the acoustic guitar, loved playing it, and I thought, if I can just power this up a bit without going to electric, I’ll have a unique sound. It’s got a little tingle on the top. It’s unexplainable, but it’s something that fascinated me at the time. In the studio, I plugged the cassette into a little extension speaker and put a microphone in front of the extension speaker so it had a bit more breadth and depth, and put that on tape. That was the basic track. There are no electric instruments on “Street Fighting Man” at all, apart from the bass, which I overdubbed later. All acoustic guitars. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” the same. I wish I could still do that, but they don’t build machines like that anymore.

You’ve always got something ringing against the note or the harmony. Chuck Berry is all double-string stuff. He very rarely plays single notes. The reason that cats started to play like that, T-Bone and so on, was economics—to eliminate the need for a horn section. With an amplified electric guitar, you could play two harmony notes and you could basically save money on two saxophones and a trumpet. And my double-string playing was why, in the very first Sidcup days, I was looked on as a bit of a wild rock and roller, and not really a serious blues player. Everybody else was playing away on single strings. It worked for me because I was playing a lot by myself, so two strings were better than one. And it had the possibility of getting this dissonance and this rhythm thing going, which you can’t do picking away on one string. It’s finding the moves. Chords are something to look for. There’s always the Lost Chord. Nobody’s found it.

(The unique echo sound of the Sun studio was achieved through the use of a tape-loop delay and a 7½-ips, instead of the more advanced 15-ips, two-track recorder. The added echo effect heard in Scotty Moore’s guitar relied on a custom-built amplifier, made in Cairo, Illinois, by a man named Ray Butts. Moore got the second amp that Butts built; the first went to Chet Atkins, the third to Carl Perkins, and the fourth to Roy Orbison. When he ceased working with Elvis in September 1957, Moore put the amp in a closet. Several closets later he withdrew it at Carl Perkins’s request and plugged it in for one of Carl’s Mercury sessions early in 1975.)

The Lesson Factory was like the Walmart of guitar lessons. It was connected to the Guitar Center and inside there were about ten soundproof cubicles, each equipped with two chairs and two amplifiers and your very own defeated musician recruited off Craigslist

I wanted to sustain a note like a singer. I wanted to phrase a note like a saxist. By bending the strings, by trilling my hand - and I have big fat hands - I could achieve something that approximated a vocal vibrato. I could sustain a note. I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions. By fooling with the feedback between my amplifier and instrument, I started experimenting with sounds that expressed my feelings, whether happy or sad, bouncy or bluesy. I was looking for ways to let my guitar sing.

fingers.” You can buy the same guitar, effects pedals, and amplifier that Eddie Van Halen uses. But when you play that rig, it’s still going to sound like you.

Mike plays around with a new toy. As he later describes the harsh rhythmic sound he comes up with: “I programmed that with the very first big Linn drum machine. And I did something the Americans would never do: I put it through my guitar amplifier, a small one, and I turned it up so loud that it was jumping up and down on the chair. What the English do well is take a sound and fuck it up. That’s a prime example. It’s just a horrible but great sound.” He’s not wrong. Straight away it works. We all fall in love with it and, inspired, I do my best John Lennon impersonation, and I also take a vocal cue from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” adding in the maniacal laugh. And that’s “Mama,” the lead single from the Genesis album. Our biggest ever U.K. hit, both of its time and timeless, and an enduring stage classic.