I just didn't expect an acoustic version of Rock'n'Roll All Nite.
Ace Frehley
The Smith Center is a theater where you want to keep the lights on. The acoustics are amazing, and this is a stage that was built for sound.
Ace Young
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.
Any effects created before 1975 were done with either tape or echo chambers or some kind of acoustic treatment. No magic black boxes!
Alan Parsons
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
From my earliest childhood, my attention was specially directed to the subject of acoustics, and specially to the subject of speech, and I was urged by my father to study everything relating to these subjects, as they would have an important bearing upon what was to be my professional work.
Alexander Graham Bell
To me, I don't see any difference between a synthesizer and an acoustic instrument. It's what's done on it that counts.
Allan Holdsworth
I love playing acoustic guitar because I strum with my hands to feel more connected.
Ananya Birla
My head is full of shifting patterns and polyrhythmic stuff; but I want to use all acoustic instruments and create this kind of tapestry of interlocking lulling parts.
Andrew Bird
Before, I was terrified on stage. I only play guitar during the acoustic songs. After a while, you can elicit certain responses from the crowd, like Elvis.
Andy Gibb
For me, it's always been about a mix of hip-hop, acoustic singer/songwriters, and piano rock. I pull all those together. Each song may lean more heavily on one than the other, but they all have all three pieces.
Andy Grammer
Of Montreal's early releases were loaded with playful but confessional acoustic tunes, but the band soon embraced glam-rock's freakier side on albums like 'Hissing Fauna Are You the Destroyer?' and 'Skeletal Lamping.' It was a shift fans might not have tolerated if it weren't for frontman Kevin Barnes' catchy, personality-driven songs.
Anthony Fantano
I learned tabla for three years when in school, then started picking up the basics of the acoustic guitar when in college.
Anupam Roy
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
The mall tour was right off of my second record, before it came out. It was very different. I did an acoustic performance every day in a different mall! One interesting thing I remember is playing 'My Happy Ending' a lot, and that song was so new that I remember getting emotional.
Avril Lavigne
There's no separation between electronic music and acoustic music. It's all one thing. Each song has its own heartbeat. Each song has its own soul.
Banks
I think the Flecktones are a mixture of acoustic and electronic music with a lot of roots in folk and bluegrass as well as funk and jazz.
Bela Fleck
John Martyn is my biggest hero. My mom got me into his music when I was a kid. I've looked up to him more than anyone as a songwriter. And Bert Jansch is one of the pillars of acoustic music, the holy grail.
Ben Howard
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.
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.
I seldom play in a trio, but acoustic music is likely to be lighter, quicker, and quieter.
I was in Redwood for almost six years. It was an acoustic trio that I still think was the best band I've ever been a part of. We do have a double CD of the Redwood stuff available called 'Lost But Not Really.' I'm very proud of the old Redwood stuff.
I'm also performing regularly in Southern California with two bands. As a solo artist doing acoustic sets and a member of the Jenerators, my rock n roll band that has been around for a long time now.
I really think the acoustics that Gibson's been making for the last ten years or so are as good as any the company has ever produced and that's saying a lot.
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.
The thing is, acoustic could be like a four-letter word to a lot of kids.
I like those older theaters - the acoustics are perfect, I mean, you just have that feel of there's been a thousand shows in there and now you get to be one.
Did Muddy Waters play an acoustic? Well of course he did. But did he turn his back on being able to plug it in and play louder? No, he plugged in and turned it up and got miles and miles ahead of the game in one fateful act of just plugging in.
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.
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.
How do I explain Neil Young? Great question! I explain Neil Young as, I would kill to see his acoustic shows.
I'm looking forward to some more solo acoustic dates. That's a lot of fun for me, because I get to be alone with the song. And I get to hear every little nuance; if my instrument does something that I wasn't expecting, I get to chase that. Chase that down a little bit.
A lot like Dave Matthews or John Mayer, I kind of stick with the acoustic genre.
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.
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.
I can't think of any punk who's put on an acoustic and hasn't just tried to sound like James Taylor.
The first time I saw 'Minecraft,' people wanted to have 8-bit style video game music. But I wanted to go around that and make something organic and partly electronic, partly acoustic, and see if that would be interesting.
I've always written songs that were confessional, acoustic, wordy - my writing style matches my personality. The music always has to match the mouth it comes out of.
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.'
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.
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.
Artificial lighting, air-conditioning, and automobiles, all powered by fossil fuels, swaddle us in our giddy modernity. In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel cubicles, we sit cozy as kings atop 300 years of flaming carbon.
I like to check out of reality for a little bit when I listen to music and kind of go somewhere, so I feel like the more broken-down acoustic songs tell stories to me the best.
I write alternative, folkie pop. It's very acoustic.
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.
Oftentimes, especially in the context of an acoustic song, I'm motivated to write by some amount of melancholy.
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.
An acoustic show is all about you, and any little nuance or mistake is amplified.
