Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

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.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

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.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

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.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

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.'

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

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.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

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.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

I listened to all those blues records. They were great - Clapton, John Mayall. Then eventually I heard Genesis with Peter Gabriel, and I didn't really understand the difference then, but something struck me about the inversions and the diminished chords... they weren't as bluesy, and I loved it. I found out, that was very baroque-influenced.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

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.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

When I play guitar, it's automatic. I don't try to do something; I just do it. And it's already so ingrained in what I do, I don't think about it. I don't try to do something - I just do it. And the more I do it that way, the more I surprise myself. And if I surprise myself, that's the best thing.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

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.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

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.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

When the glam metal thing of the late '80s became too glammy, then instead of having two bottles of hairspray in your hair, it became better not to wash your hair at all. To me it's all trend stuff. I don't follow that stuff. I just do what I feel is the right thing. I don't know what the reason is for that. It's not fashion.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

I remember when I was a kid, if you had your name on a piece of vinyl, man, you were, like, in the halls of Valhalla; all of sudden, you were hanging out with Odin and being at the table of the gods. You were the real deal; you weren't some guy struggling in a garage somewhere.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

When Alcatrazz played in Japan in early '84, the record label offered me the opportunity to do a solo album while continuing to play in the band. I wanted the whole album to have vocals, but the record company didn't want that. Initially, the album was released solely in Japan.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

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.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

When I was first getting into the guitar, I played it incessantly. I lived it, breathed it, ate it, and slept it. I was also extremely self-critical, so from early on, I made sure to develop good playing habits - I constantly strove to sound in tune and have a great tone, and to play cleanly and in time.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

I always wrote everything - I wrote all the lyrics, I wrote all the melodies, everything; it's just somebody else sung it. And to me, the singer is nothing else than a different... like a bass player or a keyboard player - they're not more important than any other musician.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

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.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

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.

Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen

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.