Acoustic Instruments Quotes

Mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It's all a bit boring, like ballet: a minority thing kept going by a minority group.

I got hooked into folk music by accident, because that's what white college kids liked when I was a child.

Anything can become a musical sound. The wind on telegraph wires is a great sound; get it into your machine and play it and it becomes interesting.

The darned thing about mandolins is they're really hard to turn up as loud as you would need to be to play with a drum set. They cease to sound like mandolins.

I like people writing great songs on guitar or piano or what have you. I miss people getting on stage with real bands and real instruments and expressing themselves that way instead of with computers and technology.

With my projects, I really like the extreme high-tech stuff, but I also like the other end, the acoustic things. So it seems like those meet on an iPad, where you make shapes but the sounds coming out of it are really acoustic.

I just love crafting and shaping sounds. Actually, many of the sounds that I work with start off as organic instruments - guitar, piano, clarinet, etc. But I do love the rigidity of electronic drums.

Once all the power goes out, there will still be human beings standing together around a campfire, playing acoustic guitars.

If you thought Stairway to Heaven was a long song, dear god you should listen to it played on a lute.

We were copying lots of bands, like Avett Brothers and Old Crow Medicine Show.

Folk music usually has an emphasis on the lyrics and melody. And those lyrics are usually relevant in some way. And it's populist in scope, which is also true of Bad Religion. So it's more meant to draw some parallels between the two. And I think even my voice and my delivery can be thought of as a little bit folky.

There was this big skiffle craze happening for a while in England.... Everybody was in a skiffle group..All you needed was an acoustic Guitar, a washboard with thimbles for percussion, and a tea-chest- you know, the ones they used to ship tea from India- and you just put a broom handle on it and a bit of string, and you had a bass..you only needed two chords; Jing-jinga-jing jing-jinga-jing jing-jinga-jing jing-jinga-jing. And I think that's basically where i've always been at. I'm just a skiffler, you know. Now I do posh skiffle, that's all it is.

When I think of folk music, I think of topical songs. And I don't write topical songs.

If you play the very subtle jazz tunes with acoustic pianos, acoustic bass and it's a dead standard, you are going to play very differently. It depends on the music.

The way I approach things is from an experimental folk music standpoint.

Electric guitars are an abomination, whoever heard of an electric violin? An electric cello? Or for that matter an electric singer?

I've been writing a lot of country music again. I've written some bluegrass material. I'm having a good time doing that.

I came through folk music simply because it was easy to get into it.

Mostly I listen to old-time music, some bluegrass, some Americana stuff, too many to name. But of the younger acts, there are The Freight Hoppers, who were big in the '90s, and The Foghorn Stringband from Oregon, and there's a lot of young string bands coming up now, basically punkers who play acoustic instruments forming new bands.

To me, recording with live instruments and tape takes things back to an older sound that I like but that's still fresh.

When you're onstage with an electric band going through a massive P.A. system, it's very artificial. You can't really hear your own voice as it comes out of your mouth.

That's what I love about music. It's immediate. There's a connection whether you are playing at Hyde Park or Chicago, and it's been happening since the beginning of time and the troubadours.

I like things that don't sound particularly processed or mechanical or made by machines. I like music that contains human elements, with all their flaws. There's air in it, and you can hear a room of a bunch of guys playing. Those are the magic parts.

There's nothing more exciting to me than using real instruments in the studio.

I'm an electronic guy, I'm a freak for electronic music but real instruments, the dynamic range of it, and the emotions, there's no comparison.