A Quote by Rostam Batmanglij

Yeah, I'd always wanted to do a song with finger-picked, nylon-string guitar. — © Rostam Batmanglij
Yeah, I'd always wanted to do a song with finger-picked, nylon-string guitar.
I'm not like other guitar players. In fact, I'm not even like most acoustic players because I use the nylon-string acoustic. I do play steel-string and the electric guitar, too, because I love rock 'n' roll and guitarists like Jimi Hendrix. But my bread and butter has always been the nylon-string.
For my 23rd birthday, I received a nylon string guitar. I told myself that if I could play Eric Clapton's 'Tears In Heaven,' then I could play the guitar. I practised every chance I got, driving my housemates insane, until several weeks later I had a shaky version of the song down. I wrote my first song on the guitar a few weeks after that.
I have some good books of Bach keyboard music transcribed for guitar, and there's always a nylon-string guitar hanging on the wall in my house and a bunch of classical guitar books to grab. I kind of do that just for fun.
All gut strings. Thats just the first kind of guitar I played, it was a nylon string guitar. And to me, its the purest form of guitar making, and I just enjoy doing it.
All gut strings. That's just the first kind of guitar I played, it was a nylon string guitar. And to me, it's the purest form of guitar making, and I just enjoy doing it.
When I came to the States, I still wanted to be an electric guitar player. But moved to Santa Fe in '86. And just decided that nylon string guitar is really what I wanted to do... And that really change my life totally as well... And Santa Fe is one of those really unusual places that is such an interesting mix of culture. There is a lot of from restaurants to music... I remember one of the first groups I saw playing there in the back of a restaurant, was a banjo player, a classical violinist, and a flamenco guitarist. And I thought to myself, "What? You know, this is great."
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.
Grab a guitar, put some kind of strings on it, a banjo string, then a violin string, then a guitar string, tune it any way you want, and make some noise, and see what you get. And work on it until you get something that you think is interesting. That's all there is to art for me.
I was in Jacques Brel Off-Broadway for many years, so I've always been a singing actress, but the songwriting was a complete surprise. I had never written a song in my life. We were on the road with Jacques Brel doing the national tour, and I picked up a guitar one day and I wrote a song.
For me, the guitar was just a tool to make songs. I started when I was 10 - I learned what I had to learn to get my ideas across. I always felt I was a weak guitar player, but now I realize with the finger-picking stuff, I actually know how to do what I do with my songs, but I couldn't step in and be an overall guitar player. But my guitar playing has always been driven by the need to write songs.
Nylon string is still a new love and I'm not tired of it yet.
Just like an ordinary guitar string, a fundamental string can vibrate in different modes. And it is these different modes of vibration of the string that are understood in string theory as being the different elementary particles.
My dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player. One of my earliest memories is him kind of forcing a guitar on all my brothers and me. You know, "You have to practice three hours a day!" I hated guitar at the time. I kind of picked up trumpet to spite him.
...he enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body--his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn't changed.
I do get labeled as a guitar band, but the only reason is that's the instrument I know how to play. The guitar is serving the song I'm writing. But I'm learning how to play keyboard better now so that'll start serving the song as well; it'll be another flavor. I'm not going to switch it up with big, fat drum machine beats and real swoopy synths, but yeah...
I picked up a guitar, and I knew what I wanted to do.
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