Joe Satriani could see it from the start. Steve Vai was going to be a special guitar player. There were only four years between them. Vai, a young teenager sought out Satriani for lessons as he just started acquainting himself with the electric guitar and what it can do. It was a life-changing experience.
Speaking to MusicRadar in 2022, Vai said the advice Satriani gave him stuck with him his whole life.
“Joe is a class act, and his musical sensibilities are inspired,” said Vai. “He has an ear like none other, and he is very precise and specific, and that has served me so well in my life. When I was a kid, he’d say, ‘No, don’t vibrate it out of tune! You’ll sound…’ Actually, I remember him saying, ‘You’ll sound like an idiot!’ When I was 13 years old! And I said, ‘Okay, I will never vibrate a note ever out of tune for the rest of my life.’”
Vai was as good as his word. But if that is what it was like to be taught by Satriani, then was it like to teach a young Steve Vai?
In a recent interview with Premier Guitar’s 100 Guitarists podcast, Satriani reveals exactly what it was like, and he says he could see Vai’s potential from the start.
“I would say that very early on, like, within the first year of teaching Steve, I knew that he was going to excel technically at picking and fingering,” says Satriani. “And he had already learned how to play a lot of stuff I had just learned better than me.”
These were two players whose stories were destined to be intertwined. They became fast friends, going onto become the two long-standing pillars of the Ibanez artist programme, developing some of the most successful signature guitars the Japanese company ever produced.
No matter how hard I push him, he comes back, eager to get pushed a little bit more
They became colleagues, sharing a stage together with Eric Johnson on the G3 Tour, and finally touring together as the Satch/Vai Band, and making it feel more official by actually getting into the studio to write and record music together.
Their first original release, The Sea Of Emotion Part One, took us back to the ‘70s, teenage Satch, teenage Vai, prodigiously talented but still finding their voice on the instrument. Yesterday, they shared new single, Dancing.
Satriani recalls Vai being a “goofy” Kiss fan who just wanted to learn.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this is really interesting. I’m watching this genius develop right in front of me, and he seems he has no physical barriers,’” he continues. “‘He’s got huge hands, crazy, goofy kid who likes listening to Ace Frehley, but he can play Lydian Dominant scales up and down the neck’. No matter how hard I push him, he comes back, eager to get pushed a little bit more.”
Satriani also taught Alex Skolnick, Kirk Hammett, Larry LaLonde, the jazz guitar fusion ace Charlie Hunter, Third Eye Blind’s Kevin Cadogan, David Bryson of Counting Crows.
In November 2025, Skolnick told MusicRadar that Satriani could mix street smarts with book smarts, recontextualising highfalutin musical concepts for the medium of rock guitar.
“I knew he had studied with this guitarist in in town that had this reputation of being, like, a serious musician,” says Skolnick. “It was like the equivalent of studying with a classical piano teacher or a classical violin teacher – except this guy played electric guitar. He could play rock ’n’ roll. But he had that seriousness and discipline of the classical artists. That was all I knew about him.”
If Vai credits Satriani for his attention-to-detail over vibrato, intonation with bending, Skolnick credits Satch for helping him find an identity.
“When I walked in to my lessons with Joe, I was obsessed with a new guitarist named Yngwie Malmsteen, and I really wanted help learning his stuff,” said Skolnick. “I wanted to know, ‘How do I play faster? How do I do Yngwie’s licks?’ And [Joe] did a great job of explaining that it’s good to learn from other players to a point, but you have you have to set limits and take from them what you can but not get too focused on one player. He explained that there is always a popular player of the moment, right? Then, it was Yngwie.”
Skolnick says those lessons took a bit of time to sink in. Once he started playing, out gigging night after night, it all made sense.
“By my late teens, early 20s, it really blossomed,” he said. “I don’t pretend to have been Joe’s star student but he planted these seeds and it really started to blossom later.”
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