Top 50 Solos Quotes

In high school, I was Mr. Choir Boy. I had solos, I was helping out the tenors with their parts and our choir teacher would ask me what songs we should do.

I don’t dictate the solos and I don’t dictate the vocal harmonies.

With Zeppelin, I tried to play something different every night in my solos. I’d play for 20 minutes but the longest ever was 30 minutes. It’s a long time, but whenI was playing it seemed to fly by.

Hip-hop and jazz have always been intertwined. Even the G-funk thing. You listen to ‘The Chronic,’ there’s flute solos and everything. It’s always been there.

With my first high school band ever, we would have these breaks in the song for idiotic solos, solos that were un-tasteful and would be shredding, but I needed to put them in there, and I realize now it’s because we were playing shows with a whole bunch of bands that were all male.

Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Electric Ladyland’ and ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ those solos are just so cool.

I’ve never been a huge fan of drum solos.

I don’t like guitar solos that are like, ‘Look at me, look at me!’ I like guitar solos that are little songs within the songs.

I’m sure if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be doing classic guitar solos on YouTube.

That’s the exact concept behind the music: to take that kind of, I guess whatever you want to call it, jazz sensibility – but not have it be about solos.

With solos, I don’t like to be too prepared going in – I like to surprise myself.

I don’t regard myself as a soloist. It’s a color; I put it in for excitement. It’s not great loss if a solo has to go. We’ve made songs without solos.

I don’t like drum solos, to be honest with you, but if anybody ever told me he didn’t like Buddy Rich I’d right away say go and see him, at least the once.

New Orleans cats don’t play a lot of solos unless they got something to say. It’s not an ego thing like it is with some other musicians. You say what you gotta say and then shut up.

Sometimes when I do an overdub solo, they’ll keep four or five of my attempts and then mix the bits that they like to make a solo up out of them. It’s not against the rules, really – I can learn my own solos, then. But that’s the whole beauty of multi-track recording, isn’t it?

You can go crazy and play solos in the right place, and that’s great because it can intensify and bring an emotional lift. But the thing is you don’t want to get in the way of the song.

Guitar solos bore the hell out of me. Only a few guitarists interest me, and it’s not about the solos they play, it’s about the grooves they create.

Everything from the lyrics to the production, solos to the writing – it’s all democratic. At the end of the day, you know, when you’re all done with the grind – which it is always an incredible grind for us to write records – I think it makes it that much more special to hear the final product.

Most jazz players work out their solos, at least to the extent that they have a very specific vocabulary.

I try to look at most of my solos as a musical piece within the song, not, say, showing off.

Every girl is a singer. I wanted to learn the solos and play lead guitar. I would meticulously teach myself solos so when dudes were like, ‘Oh, you’re a girl, you can’t play guitar,’ I could rip these insane Telecaster blues solos and tell them, ‘Yeah, I can burn up a fret board.’

Nowadays I get complaints about long drum solos, but in those days they wanted me to keep on going so they could go over to the bar and have a drink.

There should always be some sort of conclusion or climax to your solos.

When you play a gig in Poland or Australia, or you play a gig in Toledo, they all clap at the same parts of the show. They’re clapping for the solos in the exact same way.

Our music is an answer to the early Seventies when artsy people with big egos would do vocal harmonies and play long guitar solos and get called geniuses.

Listen to the great guitarists of the Fifties. They didn’t do that nasty sort of industrial distortion. They played musical compositions as solos – Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, Django Reinhardt. There wasn’t a bad note in any of those solos. I listened to that and stayed with those rules.

I am not comparing myself to great artists, but when you see conceptual artists at work, on some level it’s reassuring to know they can paint figuratively. Likewise, when you listen to the ’50s jazz people who do these vast solos, you buy into it more if they open by playing a tune.

Most people can do what I do – they can do guitar solos – but they can’t do a good, hard rhythm guitar and be dedicated to it.

That was very flattering, meeting Steve Vai and hearing his stuff, because he was kind of a fan, even though we kind of dumbed down what he was doing and what people were doing in the ’80s. We weren’t doing solos; we were doing sounds and all this creepy, trippy stuff.

There are two types of session guitar players. One reads and only plays what the ‘dots’ say. The other adds that something special and plays notes and solos you dream of. Big Jim Sullivan was such a player.

World Play is very ’70s arena rock, very raw and in your face, and that’s what we wanted. We recorded it in a very off-the-cuff manner and didn’t really plan out how we were going to play. My solos are first takes.

I used to hear all these guys on 78s at my mother’s when I was a teenager… I used to daydream that I was onstage playing the solos; I’m playing with B.B. King, and I’m playing with Lowell Fulsom, Jimmy McCracklin. And I literally ended up being in a band that backed them up at different clubs.

All of my solos are blues based. Even though a lot of my songs get into pop, I wind up going back to the blues. Trying to escape it is like trying to run from the devil.

I’ve always done very ‘composed’ music and worked-out solos. But sometimes it’s fun not knowing where you’re going.

The instrumental stuff is a good challenge, and it keeps my fingers athletically tuned, but I’m totally happy to bang away on some chords, sing some harmonies and play some wailing blues solos after the second chorus.

I’ll get up there and I’ll do my guitar solos in one of those space outfits.

Music can be useful during training to help get you psyched, and I still listen to music on easy climbs or in the gym. But during cutting-edge solos or really hard climbs, I unplug. There shouldn’t be a need for extra motivation on big days, be it music or anything else. It should come from within.

I’m kind of a terrible musician. I’m a very functional musician. I play just about every instrument in a band setting, functionally. But I should not be taking solos.

Steve Van Zandt, the poor guy, doesn’t get to play enough as it is with me hogging a lot of the solos. Steve has always been a fabulous guitarist. Back from the day when we were both teenagers together, he led his band and played lead and was always a hot guitar player.

I love extended solos. I used to like them in the old days a lot, because it used to give me time to go to the pub for a drink.

When I was 13, I got my first guitar, and I could sort of play Ted Nugent songs, but I couldn’t play the solos. But I could play along with entire Ramones songs.

It was by listening to Goodman’s band, that I began to notice the guitarist Charlie Christian, who was one of the first musicians to play solos in a big band set-up.

My favorite solos are all very melodic. Those are the ones that are the most memorable.

The only thing I don’t write is the guitar solos, but even then I might suggest one or two things.

I don’t like piano solos.

I’d be very honored to be the ambassador to drum solos.

We don’t really have more than acouple of solos. It’s just the way our music is put together.

I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that it’s extremely predictable, it’s a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and there’s a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.

From a technical viewpoint, I have certain things I’d like to present in my solos. To do this, I have to get the right material. It has to swing, and it has to be varied.

Rihanna is so into rock, and she gives me an empty canvas to work with. I get to do wild solos and crunch up the rhythms. It’s rock, it’s R&B, it’s hip-hop, it’s funky – all totally up my alley.