Jules Shear Quotes

My first instrument was a little blue ukele.

The only instrument I play myself is the ukulele.

It is difficult to understand the fortunes of an instrument. There was music written for the guitar until the mid-19th century. Then the instrument declined in popularity.

I started playing guitar because of instrumental guitar music.

The sitar is a really difficult instrument to play. Physically it's taxing because of the cross-legged sitting position, the length of the neck on the shoulder, the thinness of the strings. There's a lot of pain, especially at the start.

I want to see the guitar in a non-linear sense that encompasses tones, arrangements, songwriting, audio production, and everything else - you have to do it all.

To sustain and become a musician of a certain calibre, you need to know and understand music completely. You need to have a good taste in music and should know your good music from mediocre ones.

I had piano lessons when I was five or six years old, so my mom got me this little keyboard in my room. And then it progressed from that to classical guitar and drums and oboe.

There are a lot of cases where I'm using, if not an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar more as a rhythm instrument. Rather than blasting away, I use it to create more of an acoustic feel.

When I was 12 years old I discovered Bill Monroe and my dad got me a mandolin.

Both of my mom's parents were music teachers, so I got a lot of knowledge about everything from classical music to jazz to musicals.

I love jazz. I still do. Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz are so good. I took a notification course in Jazz Orchestration. It wasn't a grandiose as you'd think but I did have to to go to Los Angeles to do it and get an understanding of the keyboard because the keyboard became my tool and I used it a lot in transposing and composing. All the flats and time values. I spent a year doing that because in those days you had to be able to write your own music and read sheets.

I play an instrument that has four strings, and I'm still trying to get it right. What I've tried to do in the process of playing these four strings is to try and understand the people I meet, the stories they have to tell. And then become an advocate for them and their stories through music.

I see the hitter when he's moved in the box, like when he's moved closer to the plate or changed his stance. I see when the batter has moved his feet, and then I make my own adjustment.

So lots of respect for all you boys and girls out there who tab out songs like all the time. You bring rock and roll music closer to the people. Gratefully yours

A guitar is something you can hold and love and it's never going to bug you. But here's the secret about the guitar - it's defiant. It will never let you conquer it. The more you get involved with it, the more you realize how little you know.

If I'm not in an environment where I can record, it's great to be able to write something down, to be able to know how to do that, to be able to write notation. You grab a piece of paper and there it is. It's the cheapest recording equipment you can buy: a piece of manuscript paper and a pencil!

Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.

I can't read or write music. When I want to remember something, I try to remember all the keys on the piano. Which is what I still do. I put the numbers on the keys. And that's got to become music again.

I learned so much about music by playing this little, miniature songwriting machine [ukulele], especially about melody. The motto is less strings more melody.

With some of the songs, we brought the pitch down to alto.I'm older, so naturally my voice is lower now.

What is a harp but an oversized cheese slicer with cultural pretensions?

I had to get the voice back, the precise pitch of Sid's voice and I'd forgotten that I'd pitched him higher than my regular voice, so that was a little difficult to begin with. It was especially hard because we started recording in the morning so I had to warm up a lot and my usual voice is a little more gravelly.

FIDDLE, n. An instrument to tickle human ears by friction of a horse's tail on the entrails of a cat.

I'm a self-taught musician so how I read music is kind of very weak and I kind of read my own version of tablature, I write my own crappy reminders on what I'm playing.