A Quote by Beth Orton

I don't read music; I taught myself guitar. — © Beth Orton
I don't read music; I taught myself guitar.
Music was my first love, and at Marlborough we put bands together and sang the pop songs of the day. Although I couldn't read or write music - I still can't - I taught myself to play the guitar and piano by listening to songs and working out the chords.
I never really trained to be a musician, but I've been playing guitar since I was around, like, 13 years old. For me, the guitar has always been the instrument that I've played. I play a little piano. I taught myself everything by ear. I don't read music at all, which has not really been a hindrance.
In high school, I got into folk music, and I taught myself guitar. And when The Beatles came out, I got an electric guitar.
I taught myself how to play the guitar. I never studied music.
I started playing guitar when I was eight. Well, I started piano and really liked it but never practiced, but it taught me how to read music, and then my mom signed me up for guitar lessons, and I connected to that way more.
In high school, I decided I wanted to learn guitar, so I picked it up and starting teaching myself some basic chords and started playing with friends. Guitar inherently lends itself to be guitar music, especially when you're not good at guitar.
I taught myself how to play guitar - pretty badly, but I knew enough about music to start to figure it out.
I never actually had a guitar lesson. I taught myself the guitar from piano exercise books, which led me to have a pretty good technique on the guitar and allowed me to find different ways to do things.
The guitar is a means of expressing music, When you get into the emotional side of it, then it's not the guitar that matters so much as the music itself. But the guitar is the vehicle I use. It's how I express myself. As for the emotional side, music takes up where language leaves off. To try and verbalize what music says, emotionally and spiritually, is futile. Let me put it this way, Louis Armstrong once said if you've got to ask, you'll never know.
After I found out that I was playing music and that I'd have to learn how to read and write music, I started doing that about two years later. Finally, I said, "Oh, that means what I really want to do is to be a composer." But when I was coming up in Texas, there was segregation. There was no schools to go to. I taught myself how to read and how to start writing.
I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.
I play the piano and that's how I learned about music. I then taught myself the guitar, drums, percussion and various other things, such as the bazooka, the mandolin, the Theremin, the alpine horn, the didgeridoo.
My dad, who plays guitar and piano and was in cover bands, along with my older brother, Matt, taught me guitar and stuff. I started writing acoustic songs and playing by myself in 7th grade.
I taught myself to play guitar and sing. I ended up writing a lot of music and had a band and was playing in bars and pubs all around Sydney, going on tour. I played with some pretty big bands in Australia.
We're so tribal in Britain about music. But my music - my guitar playing, the rhythms, et cetera - just express my personality, because I'm self-taught.
I just read everything I could get my hands on. I taught myself to read or my mother taught me. Who knows how I learned to read? It was before I went to school, so I would go to the library and just take things off the shelf. My mother had to sign a piece of paper saying I could take adult books.
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