I'll get up there and I'll do my guitar solos in one of those space outfits.
Ace Frehley
I'm not into solos, I'm into lyrics.
Adam Jones
Music can be useful during training to help get you psyched, and I still listen to music on easy climbs or in the gym. But during cutting-edge solos or really hard climbs, I unplug. There shouldn't be a need for extra motivation on big days, be it music or anything else. It should come from within.
Alex Honnold
I love my climbing shoes. Virtually all of my big solos have been in the TC Pros. They are the most important thing when I'm soloing.
With solos, I don't like to be too prepared going in - I like to surprise myself.
Alex Lifeson
It was by listening to Goodman's band, that I began to notice the guitarist Charlie Christian, who was one of the first musicians to play solos in a big band set-up.
Alvin Lee
My solos are more tastefully conceived now. But I still get going in places. It's just that I build up to it now. I don't race off on a solo. I take my time.
I don't regard myself as a soloist. It's a color; I put it in for excitement. It's not great loss if a solo has to go. We've made songs without solos.
Angus Young
Most people can do what I do - they can do guitar solos - but they can't do a good, hard rhythm guitar and be dedicated to it.
Like, even going to Duke Ellington School of the Arts, like, they slept on me. I think they thought I was talented, but for whatever reason, they didn't want to give me a lot of solos or any type of just love like that. But I don't know. I think that's what encouraged me to grind so hard.
Ari Lennox
Nowadays I get complaints about long drum solos, but in those days they wanted me to keep on going so they could go over to the bar and have a drink.
Aynsley Dunbar
You can go crazy and play solos in the right place, and that's great because it can intensify and bring an emotional lift. But the thing is you don't want to get in the way of the song.
Benmont Tench
I didn't want to take the guitar solos down note-for-note, but more or less use them as a map, and keep all the hooks from the guitar playing, and let myself come through.
Brian Setzer
That was very flattering, meeting Steve Vai and hearing his stuff, because he was kind of a fan, even though we kind of dumbed down what he was doing and what people were doing in the '80s. We weren't doing solos; we were doing sounds and all this creepy, trippy stuff.
Brian Welch
Steve Van Zandt, the poor guy, doesn't get to play enough as it is with me hogging a lot of the solos. Steve has always been a fabulous guitarist. Back from the day when we were both teenagers together, he led his band and played lead and was always a hot guitar player.
Bruce Springsteen
I don't labour over my lead guitar solos; they're better just caught in the moment.
Bryce Dessner
That's the exact concept behind the music: to take that kind of, I guess whatever you want to call it, jazz sensibility - but not have it be about solos.
Charlie Hunter
I don't like drum solos, to be honest with you, but if anybody ever told me he didn't like Buddy Rich I'd right away say go and see him, at least the once.
Charlie Watts
In the '90s, guitar solos were dead.
Chris Daughtry
I used to hear all these guys on 78s at my mother's when I was a teenager... I used to daydream that I was onstage playing the solos; I'm playing with B.B. King, and I'm playing with Lowell Fulsom, Jimmy McCracklin. And I literally ended up being in a band that backed them up at different clubs.
Cynthia Robinson
Guitar solos bore the hell out of me. Only a few guitarists interest me, and it's not about the solos they play, it's about the grooves they create.
I don't dictate the solos and I don't dictate the vocal harmonies.
And I've also come to the conclusion that, as far as guitar solos and things like that are concerned, it's more important to complement the music rather than take away from it.
It's a magical thing, the guitar. It allows you to be the whole band in one, to play rhythm and melody, sing over the top. And as an instrument for solos, you can bend notes, draw emotional content out of tiny movements, vibratos and tonal things which even a piano can't do.
New Orleans cats don't play a lot of solos unless they got something to say. It's not an ego thing like it is with some other musicians. You say what you gotta say and then shut up.
When I was 13, I got my first guitar, and I could sort of play Ted Nugent songs, but I couldn't play the solos. But I could play along with entire Ramones songs.
A guitar solo in the same part of every tune - that's been done so much. I think solos shine more when you have them in specific and unexpected places.
Everyone knows deep in their hearts that the drums are the coolest instrument, and that a band is only as good as its drummer. So I'm all for drum solos. I'm all for drummers hamming it up. I'm all for drummers standing up and kicking over the kit.
I love Eric Clapton and what he did with Cream; 'Spoonful' and 'Crossroads,' those are probably the coolest solos.
Jimi Hendrix's 'Electric Ladyland' and 'All Along the Watchtower,' those solos are just so cool.
There's no doubt that prog rock has an image problem: many musicians hate the label, and too many people associate it with 10-minute drum solos and the weirder bits of JRR Tolkien.
There are two types of session guitar players. One reads and only plays what the 'dots' say. The other adds that something special and plays notes and solos you dream of. Big Jim Sullivan was such a player.
I can't see us getting into, like, long solos.
I kept on buying records and listening to them. Finally, I was able to hear the relationship between the jazz improvisers' solos and the underlying structure that it's based on, the chord progression. That was pretty easy to do in the swing era, y'know, when jazz was, like, pop music, you know. It had made the charts and everything like that.
All the time I was playing the flute, the lines, the solos, the riffs, the construction, were based on my guitar skills. I did not play the flute to exploit its natural faculties, but I used it as a surrogate guitar.
I love extended solos. I used to like them in the old days a lot, because it used to give me time to go to the pub for a drink.
He was very much concerned with logic and function, he always worked his solos out before playing them.
I've never been a huge fan of drum solos.
Listen to the great guitarists of the Fifties. They didn't do that nasty sort of industrial distortion. They played musical compositions as solos - Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, Django Reinhardt. There wasn't a bad note in any of those solos. I listened to that and stayed with those rules.
Sometimes when I do an overdub solo, they'll keep four or five of my attempts and then mix the bits that they like to make a solo up out of them. It's not against the rules, really - I can learn my own solos, then. But that's the whole beauty of multi-track recording, isn't it?
When you play a gig in Poland or Australia, or you play a gig in Toledo, they all clap at the same parts of the show. They're clapping for the solos in the exact same way.
I'm not technical. When I listen to music, I gravitate more toward the sonic aspect of it. The technical stuff of it, I get bored with it. These long solos? OK, already. You know your scales, big deal. I know it, too, but I don't want to do that.
Every time I listen back to solos of mine I'll hear something I like and then another phrase that I can't stand. You have to live with what you play. And the recording medium puts that on us. When I play live gigs I don't think so much like that.
With Zeppelin, I tried to play something different every night in my solos. I'd play for 20 minutes but the longest ever was 30 minutes. It's a long time, but whenI was playing it seemed to fly by.
From a technical viewpoint, I have certain things I'd like to present in my solos. To do this, I have to get the right material. It has to swing, and it has to be varied.
There should always be some sort of conclusion or climax to your solos.
I often use triadic arpeggio forms within my riffs and solos as a tool to create rich-sounding, poly-chordal sounds.
Your solos should be as interesting as any other part of the song.
I love classical music; I love the way it's worked... all those chord sequences so I often use that sort of effect in my solos.
Guitar solos, to me, should be a really articulate way to make fun of guitar solos.
