'Flying In A Blue Dream' was quite automatic. I was working on another song, and I took a break and picked up my acoustic guitar, tuned it strangely, and instantly wrote the tune. It's funny how you can struggle with one piece and write a better one in a minute. Usually, when things come easy, it means it's good.
Joe Satriani
If you're always playing the correct notes, there's something wrong - you're not searching; you're not reaching for anything.
I loved that playing the guitar wasn't easy. It was pain, but it was my pain. And then it became joy. My joy.
I always think of the craziest idea first and then work backwards, because you never know: that person that you think would never return your call might be sitting at home with nothing to do.
For a little kid like me, growing up in Carle Place, you put on John Lee Hooker late at night, and it's a different reality. I try to feel that music from the inside out because I was really attracted to it.
Without so much as taking another step towards the field, I turned around, went back into the gym, and I told my coach, 'Jimi Hendrix just died, and I'm quitting the team to become a guitar player.'
I was blessed to have my son, ZZ, doing it; he managed to pull nothing but the truth out of me. Put all that aside, and you think how strange it is to watch a movie about some small, but important, part of your life.
What I noticed, in the short time I've been in Chickenfoot, we wound up doing a tour and a live DVD with basically that scoop sound. I was using OD2 for that entire tour. When we went out on this new tour and made the new record, I used the amp in an entirely different way. It was already modified.
When we play an outdoor venue, you'll see whole families - boys, girls, men and women - from kids to grandparents who somehow heard the music... Think about how hard it is for artists who can never get a gig at an all-ages gig. Who goes to hear music in bars? People who can get into bars; people who drink.
I'm definitely a fan of dance music. I guess we really call it 'dance' music because music seems to have become very functional. For years, people were trying to be everything. Now, musicians are becoming very specific.
I was a guitar player in a band that had two keyboard players, sometimes two other guitarists, a bass player, and a drummer, four or five singers, and percussion. We did a two-and-a-half hour show where the music spanned from the early Sixties to the present. Whereas the David Lee Roth thing was like, Now. Very big and intense.
I did tons of gigs where I didn't move around very much because I couldn't. There's a pole over here and wires and a monitor there.
It's important for me not to peak before I hit the stage. In other words, I save all of my creative and physical energy for when I walk on stage. If I can get 45 minutes of just easy going, playing rhythm, songs, stuff like that, then that's what I do to make sure that I'm all stretched out and ready.
I think you've gotta be smart enough to be competent, but you've gotta be crazy enough to go out there and just let it all happen. I mean, you can rehearse and still not be musical, be tight and not be musical; we all hated that.
I was a kid that grew up listening to The Beatles and The Stones and Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, and I wanted all of that in there. But at the same time, a large part of my playing is Tony Iommi and Billy Gibbons. I'm just a sum total of all of the guitar players that I think were really cool.
I started many years ago using the Boss DS-1 and then graduated to the Satchurator and putting that right into that clean channel, and that sounds great. I've done many tours with that setup. Then we took the next two channels that were part of the JVM sound in channel 1 and made them a little more subtle.
Instead of just hammering away at a song, I'll approach it from a million other angles. Sometimes I'll leave all my equipment set up and just turn on the TV for five minutes; sometimes I've gotta get out of the house. I don't think it every really leaves my head.
I personally am into the minstrel technique - if I hear someone playing a lute or playing a crumhorn, it just moves me. I don't know why.
Boy, if anyone wants to get visited from an alien, it's me. I'm dying, and I've been sending out that invitation to the universe ever since I was a kid. I don't believe in little green men. That's collective neurosis of society. So I don't believe that.
It's a funny thing, my relationship with Deep Purple. I already felt the pain and confusion of trying to replace Ritchie Blackmore, which is a difficult thing to have in your head - since the time when you were a kid, that guitar sound and approach is what you associate with Deep Purple.
I'm pretty sure I was about the only kid in school who knew who Jimi Hendrix even was. Through my older siblings, I was getting turned on to all the great music that was happening at the time, and I really loved Hendrix.
Rock music is a funny thing: You can actually take it too far sometimes, and then it's not rock music anymore - it's something else, but it's not rock.
I put together the idea for G3 because I felt isolated. The success of being a 'guitar hero' kept me away from all my friends who were guitar players. I thought it would be a lot more fun to play with them.
Here's something weird, though: I loved Jimi's music so much that I would never perform it for people. Throughout my teens and playing in various bands, I refused to play Hendrix songs. I know that sounds strange, but Jimi's music was so special to me that it was like works of art that shouldn't be touched or altered.
I think anyone who lays a long trail of creative work over the years can't help but look back and wonder, 'What was I thinking?'
When I started to write music that was completely divorced from any sort of idea of commercial success, the real me started to come out. Normally, a musician in a session for a pop record would have to discard a lot of ideas because they won't fit, because they're not commercial.
I prefer a heart player; I prefer someone like a blues player, like Jeff Healey. Jeff Healey I think is tremendous.
My first gig was at Carle Place High School, which is in Nassau County, Long Island, New York. I was 14, and I was invited to play with this band, and I was so excited, but I was really petrified.
I really dislike flavoured potato chips, and so I always insist on just potatoes and salt, y'know? But that's not weird.
Anytime you go to see a band with a guitar player, there's always a fear of guitar overkill! That's a funny question. If you went to a Taylor Swift concert or a Jay-Z show, people would think, 'Oh, my God, I hope I don't get guitar overkill.' People come to our show for guitar, and there can never be enough.
I worked at a vintage guitar store, and the owner had ties with a lot of Japanese manufacturers and U.S. manufacturers that were beginning to pop up. So I was ordering parts and screwing them together and contacting local luthiers to finish and do frets and things, and I had put together two guitars, a red one and a black one.
I love classical music, but I hated classical guitar. But I like flamenco, because there was something else there going on. It wasn't just the notes being thrown at you. And there were certain kinds of jazz that I really liked and other kinds that just went right over my head.
I walked into Relativity Records as a musician who could not be taken advantage of. That's why I wound up owning all my own publishing and making a deal that was quite advantageous for a new solo artist. But I really didn't think of myself as an entrepreneur.
Most of the time, I write songs with the arrangements all at once, in my head. There's the producer side of me that's always thinking sounds, like, 'Wouldn't this be a great sound if it existed to put in front of a song, to open it up, and then, when it did its thing, something else would happen?
Success came to me in my late 20s. I started touring when I was a teenager, so I had already seen the good, the bad, and the ugly side of the music business. Plus, setting up my own record company taught me a lot.
As the years go by, I realize how unique a style rock music is and how delicate you have to be with it sometimes; otherwise, you turn it into pop music or progressive rock or something else.
Hearing Jimi Hendrix as a little kid and falling in love with everything that he did on guitar rewired my basic nature. To me, that was a normal thing that you should do: you should strive to be as innovative as Hendrix.
You couldn't make a Steve Vai. That's a one-in-a-billion type of personality that comes out together with an incredible talent facility. You grow it; you help them grow it. Hopefully, it matures, and they don't hit any roadblocks along the way.
Mike is a genius guitar player and keyboard player. I realized that, with this group, I just joined Mike Keneally's band!
I was doing clubs when I was 16. I grew up in New York, so back then, you could do that.
The music industry the last 120 years has been insane. It's just continual chaos. So it's not unusual that something like the Internet comes around, but as one door closes another one opens, and that certainly is the case where now, artists can have a lot of control over how they display to the world, all at once, their new record.
All of the good things that surround art - you have to embrace the idea that it could be a complete disaster. I think that's what gives it its artistic sparkle is that it really could crash and burn at any moment because you're going out on a limb and being very personal.
Business always requires personal relationships.
I've always had creative freedom. Instrumental rock wasn't really a genre, but the success of 'Surfing With the Alien' legitimized my approach.
Guitar players I find kind of boring - and that's not meant as a dig. I find myself boring.
I think the main objective is to move people, make people think in their heart. I personally am not interested in appealing to other musicians. To me, it's more inspiring to move someone who doesn't know anything about music but has a feel.
You have to have a sound that inspires you to play because, if not, you won't be able to make the sound you have work. You won't be able to make magic with it if you're not happy with it, so it's important that you at least please yourself to the level where you can just relax and be an artist.
When I went into this, I knew that public life was going to be a very weird, fantastic and cruel sort of situation to be in. I think I'm ready for any lumps to come.
You always have to reset your volume for the venue you are in. Sometimes the tubes can have you scratching your head because they react differently at different volumes.
Distortion pedals are just fantastic for not only rehearsing quietly but also for all those moments when you are going to play in highly compressed environments like radio, television, or recording against compressed loops.
