Eddie Van Halen Quotes

I still play Strat, I don't know nothing else. Strats and Telecasters.

I own a guitar, a piano, a bass.

I play bass. I play a bit of guitar. I've never been to a lesson, so my theory of music is non-existent in any instrument, but we always had guitars around.

I can play rhythm guitar. I know how to hold a guitar and strum it.

Yes, I love to play drums and bass and guitar and piano. Those are the main instruments I play. That is it.

Playing a Fender is an art itself. They're always going out of tune.

We had a music teacher in sixth grade, and I saw her tune her guitar. I said, 'Whoa. There's a certain way to do this.' I bought a packet of strings - some of mine were broken - and had her tune it for me. For a while, I just kept it like that. But I got the Internet finally, when I was 14, and started learning.

The bottom string is tuned to an open G.

A violin is tuned to a fifth. But a guitar is tuned to a fourth with a one-third middle. It is very perplexing to composers.

Nylon string is still a new love and I'm not tired of it yet.

Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark, what discord follows!

We're just musically and rhythmically retarded. We play so hard that we can't tune our guitars fast enough. People can relate to that.

All I want for Christmas is a rock n roll electric guitar.

About ten years ago, I knew three chords on the guitar. Now, in 1982, I know three chords on the guitar.

I practice all the scales. Everyone should know lots of scales. Actually, I feel there are only scales. What is a chord, if not the notes of a scale hooked together?

I've been playing piano my whole life but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand. I don't have professional pretensions. I've learned so much. So many things I've been doing in the visual, two-dimensional painting world parallel many of the inner working of music - how intervals resolve into each other, harmonic rhythm, tonal things - there's a whole vocabulary that overlaps. Sometimes people see pianos in my works - that I never think.

I'm into scales right now.

I don't want to discredit people's opinions of me, but you talk about the violin or the cello or lead guitar where you have to learn tons of chords, that's much more difficult.

Every once in awhile I'll call up Eddie (Van Halen) and ask, Found that fourth chord yet?

Theory and harmony broadened my mind in music. I know what music is made of.

The guitar is the coolest instrument in the world.

I've refined it since [ was living in Beaumont, Texas], but I was just obsessed with the guitar. I remember one day sitting in class and it just came to me how the neck worked. I was enlightened to the scales, and the runs. I just saw it and thought; now I understand it!

They flat their fifths, we drink ours.

There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.

God has a way of telling you when to change your strings.