Les Paul

My chops were not as fast… [but] I just learned more on what was in my mind than what was in my chops. I learned a long time ago that one note can go a long way if it’s the right one, and it will probably whip the guy with twenty notes.

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.

Paint pictures with sound. First, find your white-the deepest, roundest sound you can play on the guitar. Then, find your black-which is the most extreme tonal difference from white you can play. Now, just pick the note where you’ve got white, pick it where you’ve got black, and then find all those colors in between. Get those colors down, and you’ll be able to express almost any emotion on the guitar.?

I was walking down the street, and I saw a sewer digger on his lunch hour open his lunch pail, dig out a harmonica, knock out the cracker crumbs, and play a bunch of tunes on it. I was fascinated by that harmonica, so I stared the guy out of it. I just stared at him. He said, ‘Here, kid, take it. Get out of here.’

I have younger friends who don’t work and they aren’t doing so well. My secret is to keep going, keep working.

I’ll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I’d never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I’d never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn’t much like it at first.

Albert King wasn’t my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in Blues!

It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.

In order to complete your cycle, a musician needs to write; document what is going through your mind and where you are harmonically, theoretically, historically.

It could be my British need for discipline that makes me admire the American appetite for freedom and passion.

When I achieved what I thought the musicians were trying to do, the sound sort of bloomed. When it’s right, everything is beautiful.

Early on, I figured out that when the top of a guitar is vibrating and a string is vibrating, you’ve got a conflict. One of them has got to stop, and it can’t be the string, because that’s making the sound. So in 1934, I asked the Larson Brothers—Chicago instrument makers—to build me a guitar with a half-inch-thick maple top and no f-holes. They thought I was crazy.

It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.

You can’t copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, you’re working without any real feeling.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

The true musician is to bring light into people’s hearts.

If you dig it, do it. If you dig it a lot, do it again.

Music is the greatest communication in the world.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Your sound is you and what you really feel inside.