“Morricone brought the electric guitar to the western. The great thing, though, about the electric guitar in the western is that there were no electric guitars, but somehow he did it so committedly that nobody ever questioned it. It was only much later people started to say, ‘How come there’s an electric guitar part there?’ He needed that sound to show the grit and the machismo of the characters. There is really no other sound that can do it as well as an electric guitar, so, like the movies themselves, he took the zeitgeist of the late ’60s and put it into the 19th century.”

Hans Zimmer, “My Inspiration – Morricone”, Limelight, May 2011, p.28