A Quote by Jose Gonzalez

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.
I absolutely remember when I decided upon playing Ernie Ball strings, and it was right then and there at the guitar store up in Seattle when I picked up my first guitar ever. They said, 'What kind of strings should we put on it?' And I just looked at the brightest color package and said, 'That one!'
For an electric guitarist to solo effectively on an acoustic guitar you need to develop tricks to avoid the expectation of sustain that comes from playing electrics. Try cascades, for example. Drop arpeggios over open strings, and let the open strings sing as you pick with your fingers. It's kind of a country style of playing, but it works very well in-between heavily strummed parts and fingered lead lines.
You have to understand that the bass guitar is the party instrument. It only has four strings. If you see a bass player playing five strings, take your shoe off and throw it at him.
I started doing all kinds of weird stuff on the guitar, which became part of my playing. I started doing harmonics and tapping on the guitar and pulling off strings and doing all this weird stuff that no one had ever done before.
The lute I use has 10 courses and 19 strings, which is quite a lot of strings and a quite different fingerboard width from a classical guitar. I use a combination of flesh and nail when plucking the strings.
There are two kinds of music. One comes from the strings of a guitar, the other from the strings of the heart.
When we first started, in the early Eighties, we had some crappy guitars - Japanese knockoffs that wouldn't hold standard tuning. Later, we'd shove drumsticks or screwdrivers under strings to scheme new noises, sure. But initially, open tuning was a technique used to make our cheap guitars sound better. It wasn't academic or conceptual.
I'll always leave the same set of strings on my guitars when I'm recording. If I break one I'll just replace it instead of putting on a whole new set of strings.
I had a guitar sitting around, and it just happened to have four strings on it, and I would sit around watching TV and playing it. I ended up writing bunches of songs around four strings.
The guitar to me, from the classical/gut-string guitar right through to Hendrix, et cetera, has all the range [of sound]. Within those six strings it is incredible what one can get sound-wise. It's just down to imagination, really.
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
I saw a band called The Electric Guitars, from Bristol. I described them to Roland, and he just started playing a riff on guitar and said, 'Do they sound like this?' And they did.
Let me explain something about guitar playing. Everyone's got their own character, and that's the thing that's amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up. Everyone's approach to what can come out of six strings is different from another person, but it's all valid.
Strings have been a part of my career and my albums since the very first day. 'Snowbird' had beautiful strings.
With a four-string, the middle range is less of an option. That kind of 5th that you play on those A and D strings isn't there. So a lot of traditional rock sounds, you can't play them. But to be honest, there was no particular intention when I started playing with four strings. It just worked out that way and it sounded cool.
I'd always loved strings. When I was in high school and saw strings playing on stage, an orchestra or a symphony, all those bows moving at the same time... wow.
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