Les Paul

We go in there and we work on altering those ideas and in many cases go in different directions.

When rock came in, people didn’t know what to do. Even Sinatra, he didn’t know what to do. The music was changing. And it’s changing now.

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist – whatever.

There’s millions and millions of people who think Les Paul is a guitar!

I wanted something very dense, something that would sustain long and more pieces of wood that would be soft, sweet, for more of a mellow sound.

I used my mother’s radio as a PA system. I’d take the telephone, the speaking part, and take those two leads off and lead them into the radio and the sound would come out of the speaker.

My dark sound could be heard across a room clearer than somebody with a reedy sound. It had more projection. My sound always seemed to fill a room.

Jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

They’re not particular whether you’re playing a flat 5th or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance.

There’s a lot of recreational Jazz going on, where cats learn a particular style and become sharks on somebody else’s language.

Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.

[Stratocaster vs Les Paul] It’s a totally different animal. One is for very subtle and, I would say, more musical things that you can distract and abuse. You can’t do that with a Les Paul. It’s too delicate. It’s got a very delicate tone; most people don’t ever realize that because they are plugged into monstrous amplifiers which completely, instantaneously covers up the unique sound quality it has. All those years of development go straight out the window when you overload the amp.

Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.

I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.

The hidden things, the subconscious that lies in the body and lets you know: You feel this, you play this.

For me, I started on a Les Paul and went through years of playing other guitars and just came back full circle to what was more natural to me.

Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of half-fast.

Always look ahead, but never look back.