Music that Tom Morello has never taken guitar lessons

Music that Tom Morello has never taken guitar lessons

Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave guitarist tells how he almost walked away from the instrument before he even started to touch him

The relationship between Tom Morello And the guitar was on a thread before it even started. The musician, acclaimed by the trajectory in bands like Rage Against The Machine and Audioslavealmost moved away from the instrument still in childhood.

The reason? He was traumatized with guitar classes.

In an interview with Warp Magazine (via Ultimate Guitar), the guitarist recalled this initial period of his involvement with the music and how he almost distanced it forever.

Tom Morello, from Rage Again The Machine, in 2025

According to him, it all started at 13, when he hated the first formal lessons with a guitar teacher:

“I had a guitar at 13, I did two guitar classes and it made me no longer want to play music. So I took the guitar again at 17, when I discovered Punk Rock. And that’s how I started my journey that led me to this interview.”

Morello says he wanted to play the songs he liked to listen to and not learn the theoretical part of the guitar. That’s why the initial classes were so distressing to him:

“I did two classes and wanted to learn songs from Kiss and from LED ZEPPELINand they wanted to teach me scales and how to tune the guitar. I thought that was so boring, I had no interest. “

Tom Morello Self -taught

This influenced, in a way, even his technique. Tom Morello has become a self -taught and tells that he sought to learn the tricks that he saw his favorite bands to do – at that time, already linked more to punk.

He recalls:

“When I started playing again, at 17, I was determined not to learn anything from anyone. It was that spirit of punk rock where – I don’t need classes, I don’t need a good guitar, I don’t need any of that. I just need a point of view, and that’s right.”

Even without formal instruction, Morello became one of the great names of the instrument. And guarantees that it still maintains as a rule number in its guitar vocabulary for creativity and ethos from it Yourself (“Do it yourself” in Portuguese):

“Between that time and now, I practiced guitar, I learned a few chords and a few notes along the way, but that starting spark of wanting to be creative for this expression without following rules is what I still have to be left.”

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+++ Learn more: ‘I miss Chris Cornell every day’, admits Tom Morello
+++ Learn more: the band that is ‘Rage Against The Machine today’, according to Tom Morello
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Source: Rollingstone

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