Music drives you. It wakes you up, it gets you pumping. And, at the end of the day, the correct tune will chill you down.

Jamming with other people will create energy and excitement that you can feed off, and which will help push you to do things you'd never dream of doing by yourself.

I'm a spazzer, you know?

The worst advice I ever received from my dad was to play by the book.

Make your heart bleed! Put your soul into that damn thing. And try new things.

Of all the grunge bands to come out of Seattle, Alice in Chains were the greatest.

I love jamming with my band because the guys inspire me every time. We all get off on each other's playing.

With the right outlook, you can learn to entertain yourself and entertain each other so you can enjoy doing what you're doing. There's obviously gonna be highs and lows, and the trick to it is to be able to maintain composure and stay high even when you're in the lows. That way, when you hit the highs ,it'll be twice as killer.

My heroes were Eddie Van Halen - especially after Van Halen I, II, III, and IV - Randy Rhoads, Ace Frehley and dudes like that. My brother played drums and we jammed in the garage and started writing our own stuff.

If you wanna get out of a rut bad enough, it'll always happen. It's up to you, though. No one else is ever gonna do it for you.

The harder stuff has always done it for me. Man, if it rips, I'll give it a thumbs up!

All syncopation means is accenting beats that you don't normally accent.

Glen Tipton and K.K. Downing are the gods of double-guitar axemanship.

Losing control of your pick on stage sucks, so I scratch some deep X's into both sides of my pick with something sharp, like a dart.

We still get those kind of cats coming out to our shows. Once you're into it, you're into it for a lifetime.

I'm not gonna say it's all done, 'cause it ain't ever all done.

Musicians tend to get bored playing the same thing over and over, so I think it's natural to experiment.

Man, don't get me started on Pat Travers. That dude writes killer blues rock and roll riffs.

Every song is different.

My whammy system is set up so I can yank the bar up as well as do dive-bombs with it. This means that if I accidentally push down on the bridge with my palm, my strings go sharp and sound out of tune. I make sure this never happens by never resting my hand on the bridge when muting. I always do my muting just in front of the bridge.

Lessons didn't really work out for me, so I went to the old school, listening to records and learning what I wanted to learn.

I was mostly influenced by bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest - Metallica's 'Kill 'Em All' was also a hell of an inspiration.

Using string bends instead of just playing regular, unbent notes can definitely help give certain riffs a cooler, heavier edge.

People that love this form of music have loved it from way back - Sabbath, Zeppelin, the early days.

Spittin' blood, smokin' guitars, fire everywhere - Kiss is where I started.

I got food poisoning in Venezuela, and it sucked!

To me and my band, guitar riffs are what it's all about. We know that every time we jam on a great riff, we've got a fighting chance of writing a great song!

You can write every song on an album in E and not hurt a thing.

My first killer amp was a Sunn Beta Lead. It was solid-state, but that Sunn was incredibly loud. I used to say to my friends, 'Hey, check it out. It's only on two.'

Between the record companies being the way they are and the fact that people can just download one song instead of buying a whole album, it's hard to make a good living nowadays.

When I play live, I jump around like an idiot for an hour-and-a-half or more under a lighting rig that's hotter than hell.

Always have a collection of your favorite CDs with you.

Initially, I just used the guitar as a prop. I'd pose with it in front of a mirror in my Kiss makeup when I was skipping school. Then I figured out how to play the main riff to Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water' on just the E string. Next, my old man showed me how to play barre chords, and that's when things started getting really heavy.

I was lucky enough to get to see guys like Bugs Henderson, Jimmy Wallace, all those great Texas blues players.

I'm still the same cat I always was.

Whenever I feel my chops are slacking, I'll play some wide-stretch trilling exercises and take them up and down the neck as well as across it.

When I tried to play something and screwed up, I'd hear some other note that would come into play. Then I started trying different things to find the beauty in it.

If you improvise a riff and the crowd immediately reacts to it, you know you're on to something.

Towards the end with Pantera - although I was never unhappy with the music we were making - it became one-dimensional, and we wanted to open things back up.

My old man was a musician - that's what he did for a living. And like most fathers, occasionally he'd let me visit where he worked. So I started going to his recording studio, and I really dug it.

A lot of bands whine about the road and how tough it is.

I used to skip school and paint my face with Ace Frehley Kiss make-up.

Pantera is the only band I've ever been in, and at the start we used to play covers to make a living.

To get my sound in the studio, I double guitar tracks, and when it gets to the lead parts, the rhythm drops out, just like it's live. I'm very conscious of that.

It kills me when I see some metal band trying to pass themselves off as an 'alternative band.'

I would just listen to records and learn what I could, then just roll it over and over and over.

I was more influenced by players like Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen than by the guys in southern rock bands.

Washburn built me the guitar that changed my life.

I'm into sounds, man.

You can tune your guitar funky, and something's gonna come out. There's no secret to it - either you got it, or you don't.