Yngwie Malmsteen Quotes

Grid View List View
Quote of the Day Picture Quotes Top 100 Inspirational Quotes Top 100 Love Quotes Top 100 Happiness Quotes
Robert Frost Marcus Aurelius Deepak Chopra Thomas Jefferson Helen Keller Epictetus William Blake Albert Camus Rodney Dangerfield Paulo Coelho
Yoga Love Smile War Art New York Vacation Time Memorial Day Happy
  • Guitarist
  • born 1963
  • 70 quotes

Yngwie Malmsteen, a guitarist (born 1963), is quoted 70 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Guitar, Guitar Player, Substance and Gigs.

Quotes with a ready-made image come first, then the rest in order of how often they are read and shared. Open any quote to copy it, share it, or turn it into a picture quote.

My book is basically a love letter to America.

Fast is only cool if it's melodic and has substance.

I wasn't very big on going to school. I tried to get a gig as a luthier.

I'm working on guitars for free, because I love working on guitars anyway.

I've always been heavily influenced by classical music, mostly by baroque music.

I think that Zappa intentionally made his music weird, but did it with intelligence.

People who join my organization are usually very cool at first, but they become troublesome later.

I love all kinds of Indian music, and Indian food as well. If the chance arises for me to play in India, I'm there.

I don't think you can learn to be a complete musician. That has to come from within, and it entails a lot of sacrifice.

I wanted to learn how to play guitar so I could smash it up and burn it. I was only a little kid, so that was my incentive.

My mom really wanted me to be a musician so she gave me a guitar for my fifth birthday, but I didn't start playing till I was seven.

I think the singer in Pearl Jam should eat some Pearl Jam! He cannot sing to save his life! And the guitar player needs to seek help.

Steve Morse is a very good guitar player, but he's American, and he's using humbucker pickups. If you ask me, those two are not good.

When I was a kid, I played drums, and when I first got a 4-track, I would put down drumbeats and then do the rest of the tracks on top.

Every day has to be a day that counts. It can't be a wasted day. I'm very dedicated to always keep doing something that I would consider good.

What I think is the most important thing to learn about any instrument is the basics of music. Learn your ABCs before you write a Hemingway novel.

A lot of people don't realize that guitar playing is very much like singing or playing any of the glissando-type instruments - you have to do it in tune.

Everything that I think that a society should offer someone, which is nothing other than the ability to be able to do what you wanna do, is offered by America.

I am convinced that there are few, if any, American people that could even start believing or understanding what living in a socialist country does to a person.

My will power has always been very strong. If I want something, I'll get it. I've had no trouble keeping my head on my shoulders, nor do I have any chips on there.

There was an old acoustic in the house that my mother had given me for my fifth birthday. I took it off the wall and started jamming. I was seven years old at the time.

Using double coil pickups kills a lot of the guitar tone - you lose the acoustic mechanics. With my single-coils driven through the Marshalls and overdrive, it sounds massive.

The simple truth is that in order to become good, you have to be obsessed. You have to put in an awful lot of time and hard work and couple that with desire and unflagging perseverance.

Most Americans, I don't think, could fathom the society that I grew up in. It is a completely different philosophy from America's. You are basically told what you can be by the educational system.

People - myself included - expect a certain standard from me. I always have to elaborate or improve on my playing. My success hasn't made me at all laid-back. That relentless drive is still there.

It doesn't matter what you make - if you create a movie or build a car or whatever, it's the amount of blood, sweat, and tears and money and everything that goes into it that needs to be rewarded.

To get a feel for the right-hand picking technique, you have to let the pick 'fall' from string to string as if you were strumming a chord. It's important that you don't separate the pick strokes.

I'm very comfortable singing myself, first of all. Secondly, there's a certain disconnect when you write the song and you have someone else sing it for you. And it's kind of like a fakeness about it.

I've been playing for aeons now, but way, way back, I remember Eddie Van Halen came out ,and I loved his playing. He was amazing. But then everyone started copying his guitars with Floyds, and I didn't.

I've used Fender Strats with Marshalls since forever, though since I last played London, I've switched to my YJM Seymour Duncan pickups, and I also have a Fender YJM overdrive pedal, which is fairly new.

My fourth birthday, I was given a violin, and my fifth birthday, a guitar. I didn't start to play until I saw Hendrix on TV. They showed him setting his guitar on fire and burning it for the Monterey Pop Festival.

I don't work with anybody on the music, of course. But my God, some of the lyrics that other people have written were so shallow: 'Hey baby this, hey baby that.' I need substance to the words, you know? Give me depth!

Every other guitar player was just copying other guitarists. From the time I was 13 up until 18, I practiced at least eight hours a day, every day. My health suffered for it - I was losing sleep and not eating properly.

Just the whole thing of getting up in the morning - I love the sunshine, I love the palm trees. I'm that kind of guy. I like to drive around with the top down and just enjoy life. I never did that before, so it's a beautiful thing.

I emigrated to the U.S. on February 3, 1983, when I was 19 years old. I joined Steeler right away and recorded the album the following month. I'd been playing in bands in Sweden since the age of 11, but 'Steeler' was my first album.

What I do know is rock and roll and metal never goes away, ever. It took the back seat in America in the '90s. In Japan and South America, it was still really big. I never followed trends, so I don't know the exact function of them.

Sweep picking is when the right hand sweeps down and up the strings in succession. But when you do sweep picking, one note rings into the next, and it sounds almost like you're playing a chord, and that's exactly what you don't want.

I'd rather have people dislike my style than change it. If someone says, 'Hey, Yngwie, you play too damn much,' I don't care. They way I play is the way I like to play. If people like it, great. If they don't, it's still fine with me.

I'd love to perform in India, but I don't book the gigs. It's one of the few places I haven't played. One of the Indian instruments that I love is the sitar. I played it on some of my songs, including 'Pyramid of Cheops' and 'Crucify.'

I learned a lot from other people, and was inspired by what they did, but I didn't copy anyone. I put many different blocks together to become what I am. I don't know if that would have happened if everything was handed to me on a plate.

Because I write the music, I write the lyrics, I write the vocal melody lines - I write everything. Just because I let somebody sing something doesn't mean they're more important than the bass player or the keyboard player or the drummer.

My band's motto is 'Yngwie or the highway.' Do you think Leonardo Da Vinci allowed someone who came later to add to his paintings? It's impossible. That's the whole issue. I'm not a typical rock n' roll guitarist nor a simple band member.

'Spellbound' has a lot of guitar playing on it, obviously, but I wanted to keep it with a more straightforward beat. It doesn't have so many stops and things like that. Whereas if you listen to 'Majestic 12,' that's like a little symphony.

If you look at somebody like Bach, he didn't need collaborators to write for keyboards, cello, violin or anything else. I feel the same way about my music. The times that I have worked with other people, I've been very unhappy with the results.

I grew up in a family that was very musical, learned the blues and everything like that. And I became a little bit frustrated with the simplicity of rock n' roll and blues. I started listening to a lot of classical music - mainly Bach, Vivaldi.

At first, I didn't think playing guitar was the right thing for me to do. But after seeing Jimi Hendrix on television the day he died, I realized it was a really cool instrument to play and not wimpy at all, which was how I originally perceived it.

I'm very selfish. I make music that I love because I only live once, and I'm an artist. I don't try to revolt against anybody, and I don't try to please anybody. I feel very strongly that I if love it, someone else will love it - not everybody, though.

I had my own label, Rising Force Records, and made records, but had them distributed to the chains, to the retailers, but the retailers are gone - there's no physical sales anymore - so I'm not gonna make the CDs and have 'em put into trucks to go nowhere.

I joined Alcatrazz a month after I recorded 'Steeler.' The big difference between Steeler and Alcatrazz is that in Alcatrazz, I wrote the songs. When I went to the Alcatrazz audition, they had no songs and no direction. They also had a questionable drummer.

What I've done from the very beginning is play everything with extreme accuracy. I never said to myself, 'Okay, if I put my fingers this way, it's gonna result in this.' I've never taken a lesson. My way of playing the guitar was a fresh approach to the instrument.

Yngwie Malmsteen is quoted on

Share This Page