Music was my first love, and at Marlborough we put bands together and sang the pop songs of the day. Although I couldn't read or write music - I still can't - I taught myself to play the guitar and piano by listening to songs and working out the chords.

Chris de Burgh

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I guess I like minor chords better than major ones, in general.

I've had problems with my throat over the years, playing with loud bands for years, and I've had bruised vocal chords and nodules.

Aaron Neville

Yin Years Year

With 'Under the Pressure,' I just found two chords I liked, and built it up, did like a ten-minute drum pattern.

Adam Granduciel

Wit Us Up

When I was on the air a lot my throat and vocal chords got tired. If you don't vary your tones you can't get pretty tired of your own voice.

Alan Ladd

Your You Voice

I use a lot more chords than most organists and I'm careful to phrase them with the guitar.

Alan Price

Car Wit Use

Teachers want to teach you theory, and that's fine, but when it comes to rock and roll, you only need three chords. There's something comforting about that.

Alice Ripley

Teacher You Want

When I was first learning songs, I'd have a favorite song, and I'd take the chords and twist them around. I'd learn the chords and then play them backward. That was my first experimenting with writing a song.

Alicia Keys

War Men Learning

I knew if I wanted to improvise over chord changes, I'd have to figure out all the scales that went with all those chords.

Allan Holdsworth

Change Wit Wanted

We are the kind of people who obsess over one word... but we have only one shot to get it right in concert. It was hard the first time I practiced with them. I was so nervous that my vocal chords were paralyzed for about a half-hour.

Amy Tan

Time Word Wit

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

Andrew Bird

Poetry Write Words

I spent many years trying to write a lot like Ben Folds or John Lennon or Rivers Cuomo. I think that's healthy when you're learning to write and seeing how chords fit together and how songs take shape.

Andrew Dost

Learning Health You

As soon as you get off stage, that's the most dangerous time for a singer to kiss people because your vocal chords are receptive to any kind of germ.

Anita Baker

Time Anger Age

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords - philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

Anna Jameson

Poetry Love Art

After 40 years of not playing, I admit I'm totally in love with my guitar. It's a Froggy Bottom acoustic steel string guitar. All I have to do is hit a couple of clean chords and the endorphins are right there. It's like the top of my head has come off and stardust and magic have fallen in.

April Gornik

Love Yin Years

When I sing, I go somewhere else. Every time after I sing, I'll ask, 'Did I do OK?' Because I feel like it's like my soul squeezing out of my vocal chords. I don't sit there and think about 'I'm gonna do this next...' I just sing. I sing from my heart, and my heart's got a little lonesome in it.

Ashley Monroe

Time Art Where

I listen to everything and find parts about a song in the lyrics/melody/chords/production that I like and can be inspired by when I write my next song.

Astrid S

Art Write Very

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.

Autre Ne Veut

Music Good Art

I'm no good with chords. I'm horrible with chords.

B. B. King

Good Wit T

We have jokingly said if you've got good hair, can sing and know three chords, you can lead worship at First Baptist Houston or wherever. But that's kind of scary, putting somebody on stage just because they have a good voice. Do they know theologically and spiritually what they're saying and why they're doing it?

Bart Millard

Good Car Age

I don't know about five guys against the world. It's more like five guys against these three chords, and we're gonna wrestle 'em down no matter what it takes.

Benmont Tench

Wrestle World Three

Now, with the success of musical comedy like the Mighty Boosh, Flight of the Conchords and Bo Burnham, I feel vindicated.

Bill Bailey

I've had cysts on my vocal chords.

Bill Kaulitz

Elvis came along when I was 10. My father gave me a bass ukulele. I taught myself how to play from a book to play some chords, so I was laying down 'Hound Dog' and things like that when I was 10 years old in 1955. That's the way I was. My ear was glued to the radio. I knew right then what I wanted to do.

Bob Seger

I tend to be freer on the piano. I never took guitar lessons, so my reach exceeds my grasp - what I hear in my head I don't always know how to play. But I love to play over something else. I'm not a self-starter. I get kind of bored with the same three folk chords that I know.

Bonnie Raitt

The 'Muppets' were a very big part of my childhood, and 'Flight of the Conchords' definitely has elements of the 'Muppets' in it, specifically the way we mixed music and comedy.

Bret McKenzie

I like the sound of a Silvertone amp for myself. It's kind of cleaner guitar sounds when necessary, maybe a little less metal-sounding. But it really doesn't matter what amp I play through; it's really the way I voice chords and play guitar, how I strike the strings.

Brian Bell

My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.

Brian Eno

I've been diagnosed with what's called vocal tension dysphonia. The muscles around my vocal chords kind of constrict my vocal chords from doing what they should do. It's kinda like being a body builder and you have muscles that are so large that they don't allow you to have flexibility, if that makes sense.

Brian Littrell

See, we started out with a foundation of blues. But then we added people like Miles Davis and John Coltrane to the mix and gave rock n' roll a much more complex structure. It made it possible to play more than three chords.

Butch Trucks

I live in Nashville, and I don't know how many people there would call me country. I really started in punk and anti-folk, but one of the reasons I originally gravitated towards country music is because most of those songs only use three chords. That was the easiest place for me to start, but I'm always trying to expand what I do.

Caitlin Rose

I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.

Carla Bley

I love listening to Radio Head's 'Everything in its Right Place' because it's all major chords, it makes you feel really good. It's soothing, it's got a beautiful voice, crazy textures. When I'm down I listen to that song and it really makes me feel good.

Casey Abrams

My course is about really working on a sheet of music. You work out the chords, which note complements the other, and how they will make the feeling of tension, the feeling of resolution. It's all about harmonization. That's more of the theory of notation and everything rather than practical. I don't play any instrument.

Catriona Gray

A friend of mine, that I had known for some time, came up one day with an old guitar. I don't know where he got it, I don't know how long he'd had it, but he knew about two chords on it. He proceeded to teach them to me, and then we proceeded to go crazy over music.

Charlie Daniels

I don't sing now, because I had polio when I was 15, bulbar polio. This was when the epidemic was happening. And I was lucky that it didn't affect my lungs or my legs. It went to my face and kind of paralyzed my vocal chords, and I wasn't able to sing. And they said I was very lucky that I would get over it, which I did.

Charlie Haden

I came from being a singer going into jazz. And that's one of the things that polio did for me is it took away my ability to sing with a range because it paralyzed my vocal chords, so that was when I started playing. But I hear the music as if I were singing even when I am playing.

Charlie Haden

I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That's when I was born.

Charlie Parker

Whatever is original in my writing comes from my musical apprenticeship. I look for rhythm in words. I imagine words as if they were musical chords. Often I'll write something, read it, and find it musically unsatisfactory. There is a musical imperative in my choice of words.

Chico Buarque

I grew up playing the saxophone. I joined the jazz band in high school, but somewhere along the way I realized the guys who strummed acoustic guitars at parties were the ones who got the attention. So I asked a friend to show me a few chords, and when I moved to L.A. I spent a lot of time practicing my guitar.

Chris Carmack

Music was my first love, and at Marlborough we put bands together and sang the pop songs of the day. Although I couldn't read or write music - I still can't - I taught myself to play the guitar and piano by listening to songs and working out the chords.

Chris de Burgh

I studied and sang lot of jazz when I was growing up. I think that plays a little bit into some of the things I do vocally, notes that I pick in chords.

Chris Young

I am the consequence of a particular type of demographic movement, one that has always involved paying a high price. But I don't know much about styles or genres. I only know notes and chords.

Concha Buika

I always find that, when it comes to writing songs, if the melody and the chords are working, we're 90 per cent there.

Craig David

I grew up with a piano, and my aunt taught me chords. I played with bands in high school and I could do like, C chord, G chord, D chord; really simple, rhythm piano.

Cristin Milioti

It took me a month to get out of the mindset of O.J. But even now, still, I think it might have done something to my vocal chords. I went to see the doctor, and he was like, 'I don't see anything. You're fine.' But mentally, I might have broke a little bit.

Cuba Gooding, Jr.

I don't have dairy because I'm a singer and, quite frankly, I don't want to mess around with my vocal chords and how those behave, and dairy is an allergen for me.

Cynthia Erivo

You see people you identify with, and you take pieces of people you like and shape who you are. Like, I sound just like my dad. But that's literally my vocal chords. I can't sound like anything else... I sound like him, but I act like myself.

Damon Wayans, Jr.

I started playing bluegrass with my family, so there were the G, C and D chords. I was playing a Martin acoustic because that's what Carter Stanley of the Stanley Brothers played. Then I got into the really raw blues of Hound Dog Taylor and started on electric guitar.

Dan Auerbach

Sometimes, I'm driving along in my car, and a song from my high-school years comes on the radio: Springsteen's 'Thunder Road.' Just the opening few chords make me want to roll down the window and let the wind blow back my hair.

Dani Shapiro

In some types of music I'm working out all the chords one bar at a time - the whole structure, because it's about that. And there are other pieces which are really about - okay, the melody is going to start here and play through to here.

Danny Elfman