I normally write on acoustic guitar, although piano is the instrument that I actually studied. Occasionally, I'll write on the piano or sometimes with no instrument at all.
Adam Schlesinger
The acoustic guitar is my first love, I've been playing since I was a kid, and I feel the most at home when I'm sitting with an acoustic, I just love it so much. It changes my heart. I love the vibration and frequencies and the resonance.
Adrianne Lenker
When I was born, my dad was playing music, so I'm pretty sure he was singing to me in the womb. I was born into music, in a way, because he was playing acoustic guitar. I was around an instrument growing up.
My parents got me a $25 Kent steel-string acoustic guitar when I was around 12. The following Christmas, my parents bought me a Conora electric guitar. It looked almost like a Gretsch. It cost $59, and my mom still has it.
Alex Lifeson
I love playing acoustic guitar because I strum with my hands to feel more connected.
Ananya Birla
I learned tabla for three years when in school, then started picking up the basics of the acoustic guitar when in college.
Anupam Roy
Mumford & Sons have really opened up everyone's ears to music with instruments again, acoustic-based music... it's reassuring for people like me who have been brought up on acoustic guitar.
Ben Howard
We didn't leave home until we graduated high school, but when we did, we genuinely left. We went out into the world with 50 bucks, backpacks, and acoustic guitars.
Benji Madden
I approach playing acoustic guitar more of as a percussive instrument. It's fragile. I don't have a lot of finesse when it comes to my guitar playing.
Billie Joe Armstrong
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.
Billy Squier
When I was a kid, we had acoustic guitars, a piano in the house. I made a drum kit out of buckets in my garage.
Brendon Urie
I was 16 when I started playing. I borrowed a friend's acoustic guitar, and I had a Beatles chord book. I just taught myself that way.
Britt Daniel
Much of the music I remember from camp was unofficial: the songs a counselor would play for us on acoustic guitar or that an older camper would sing after telling us a tale of his hard-knock life. We couldn't get enough of 'One Tin Soldier' or 'Cat's in the Cradle.'
Carrie Brownstein
I grew up in the suburbs and was raised on rap radio, so it took me a long time to stumble upon the acoustic guitar as a resource for anything.
Cass McCombs
It all started in a local park in El Paso called Madeleine Park. At a ditch, a very small ditch, that everybody used to go skateboarding in. It was me and Jim Ward and an acoustic guitar. He and I constructed the very first phases of At The Drive In.
Cedric Bixler-Zavala
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
When you break out the acoustic guitar, the words are the focal point unless you're the Jimi Hendrix of the acoustic guitar. So the words have to have meaning.
Chris Cornell
When I started writing songs for Temple of the Dog, I went to my room with my acoustic guitar, and I was happy staying in that mode. It was more chordal based and more lyric driven. I enjoyed not making riff-based songs built around a guitar idea.
If you can't play it on an acoustic guitar or a grand piano then it's not a song.
Christopher Cross
In certain ways I still feel like I'm finding my way. I feel pretty comfortable playing acoustic guitar and singing, but then I feel pretty good sitting on a reggae groove as well.
Colin Hay
I write almost all my songs on an acoustic guitar, even if they turn into rock songs, hard rock songs, metal songs, heavy metal songs, really heavy songs... I love writing on an acoustic because I can hear what every string is doing; the vibrations haven't been combined in a collision of distortion or effects yet.
I love the subtlety and tonal range of the acoustic guitar.
My stuff was more of a folk coffeehouse thing, with more acoustic guitar, just me doing a single, and then adding on instruments and voices, with emphasis on lyrics and singing and light kind of acoustic jazz.
I had different bands. I played with the Acoustic Warriors for the most part, without girl singers. It was the same kind of sound, acoustic guitar, bass, with violin and sometimes accordion, and the guys would sing, that kind of thing.
Up till now I wrote the songs on my acoustic guitar alone with the Lord. Then I would take the song and share it with my family and then we all would figure out instrumentation together.
I was just a punk-rock kid who never played acoustic guitar.
What resonates with me now is the acoustic guitar and piano.
I can't tell you how many times I've had a friend tell me, in this tender and discreet voice, 'It's just you and me bro, and I want to tell you the truth: make a record of you and an acoustic guitar. Please. That's what everybody actually likes.' That's so funny to me.
When I was small, my parents came back from Tijuana, and my dad bought me a very small acoustic guitar. I loved it. I started making up my own songs right away.
For 20 years I've been screaming at these guitar companies, saying, 'It's abnormal to put your arm around an acoustic guitar that is about 6 to 8 inches deep.' Your arm reaches over, and you start to strum, and then all of a sudden you get a charley horse in your back. The older you get, the greater the charley horse.
The transformation that happens when a young artist goes on the road - you put the acoustic guitar down and start to play the electric a little louder - it gets a little bit ragged.
People didn't know I played guitar on all the hit records I had. I've never been in an acoustic guitar magazine and I'd put myself up against anybody.
But the reality is when you write a song, you should be able to strip away all the instruments and just have a song right there with an acoustic guitar and a voice, and the song should be good.
I have pictures of me sitting in the racquetball court in my pajamas with an acoustic guitar, and Wolfgang is probably just two-and-a-half-feet tall. I'll never forget the day I saw his foot tapping along in beat! I knew then, I couldn't wait for the day I'd be able to make music with my son. I don't know what more I could ask for.
If you play acoustic guitar you're the depressed, sensitive guy.
I tried when I was 13, when my grandparents gave me an acoustic guitar, and I tried for a year. It hurt so much to play. I mean, the fingertips hurt so much, I gave up.
When people say the words 'singer-songwriter,' I think they have an image in their heads of someone with an acoustic guitar who is a bit woe-is-me. I'd like to think that I'm not one of those. I'm quite a happy person.
I suppose my little Martin acoustic guitar is quickly becoming a prize possession. It's a lovely guitar. I bought it at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2001 before I had cleaned up.
In the early days, I had very little idea about arrangements, and I wrote songs a little flat, as it were, just on an acoustic guitar. They didn't really have quite enough nuance.
At the Muddy Waters thing, I played the first song by myself on an acoustic guitar. I thought that was great that y'all did that tribute to Muddy Waters. I had a real good time.
I know how to play the acoustic guitar, but I'm learning to play the electric guitar now. I'm sure it will be a wonderful experience.
When I was younger and played acoustic guitar music, I got a lot of Sheeran comparisons, along with guys like Paolo Nutini and James Morrison.
But when I was 12 or 13, I found the acoustic guitar and got into guitar music ultimately, like Black Motorcycle Club, obviously Neil Young, Crosby, Stills and Nash.
I most enjoy sitting down with the acoustic guitar and just fiddling around and trying to come up with something like a hook or some sort of melodic line. That's something that I do habitually.
The thing with One Direction songs is that you can probably break them all down to an acoustic guitar and vocal.
My first synthesizer was the VCS3. I got it in Bristol in the late Sixties, long before Pink Floyd used them. I had to sell an acoustic guitar and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to raise the money. You can do fantastic things with modern computers, but you cannot use them in the same intuitive, spontaneous way you can a VCS3.
The early influences, in many ways, were in Baltimore. I was passing open windows where there might be a radio playing something funky. In the summertime, sometimes there'd be a man sitting on a step, playing an acoustic guitar, playing some kind of folk blues. The seed had been planted.
There's something about approaching universal truths with the simplicity of the acoustic guitar. You can take it anywhere, and it helps me reach listeners of all ages and walks of life.
Once all the power goes out, there will still be human beings standing together around a campfire, playing acoustic guitars.
Dorsey played the upright bass and steel guitar, as well as acoustic guitar. Johnny played acoustic guitar and together they were fabulous songwriters and singers.
