Steve Vai and Joe Satriani had begun work on their first studio album together some 50 years ago, only they didn’t know it at the time.
The two became fast friends when Vai started taking guitar lessons from Satriani. The Long Islanders shared a passion for the electric guitar. Satriani, two years Vai’s senior, was getting a burgeoning reputation as a guitar talent. He had some tricks to share.
As Satriani remembers it, he was 14, Vai was 12 (the press release says 13, but this was not yesterday). He couldn’t believe how talented his young friend was at guitar. Vai was raw, a novice. But he had potential.
“When I saw this 12-year-old kid with so much talent, I just thought, ‘I have to show this kid everything I know, because he is gonna go places,’” says Satriani, joining MusicRadar over Zoom.
The parallels between Satriani and Vai’s careers are uncanny. Where do you begin? Perhaps at the fields across from Carle Place school, where all the kids would goof off and do teenage stuff, hanging out, talking guitars and rock music, maybe even sharing dreams of making it.
They called these fields The Sea Of Emotion, and it gave their album its title. But there’s more. There is the Ibanez signature guitars, the high-profile tours, the fact that both have transformed guitar in their solo careers, each having their own distinct style and yet somehow seem spiritually and artistically connected, as though they were searching for the same answers and arrived at different conclusions.
“Yeah, absolutely. There are so many parallels in our careers, professionally and personally – the most amazing things,” says Vai, checking in from the Beat tour in Montreal. “Like, we both moved to California. We bought houses right near each other in Lake Tahoe – it wasn’t planned, it just happened. And there are so many things like that. We both had a child at the same time. And [then] they had children at the same time. There are so many shared phenomena – it’s just remarkable. And luckily we just remained friends through the whole thing.”
And what is remarkable is the fact that Vai had the presence of mind to record them fooling around on guitar during one of their lessons, and this reel-to-reel recording found its way onto the intro to the three-part title track's final instalment. Not that they can remember who was playing what, not that it was intentional, but there it was: the seed was planted.
That was the ‘70s. They are not the same players in 2026. This album might be born of sentiment, a nostalgia for the analogue era and the irresistible rush of discovery that we can only have as teenagers. But it might be the least nostalgic nostalgic album you will hear. It is the sound of two of guitar’s great frontiersmen daring each other to push the instrument forward in search of new horizons.
They had a rule: both had to like a song. But that didn’t necessarily mean they would be able to play what each other came up with. This was something they discovered when out on the Satch/Vai Band tour together.
There’s no way that I can play the things that he can play
Joe Satriani
“There’s no way that I can play the things that he can play,” says Satriani. “When we started this last run, and we were playing on each other’s songs, we really had to be honest with each other at certain times, saying, ‘I don’t think I can do that and be comfortable. Can I do something else when I’m playing this song with you?’
Satriani and Vai have made a lot of albums but this one was a little different. They scheduled the Satch/Vai Tour before making the record. And then there were all the side missions, with Vai hitting the road with Adrian Belew and Beat to play Robert Fripp’s King Crimson guitar parts, while Satriani had the task of learning Eddie Van Halen’s guitar parts – and somehow replicating his tone – while out on the road on Sammy Hagar’s Best Of All Worlds Tour.
“That went on for a couple of years, and in between that was when we’d sit at home and exchange the parts,” says Vai. “But then, when you’re making a record like that, I’ll speak candidly, you have a lot of psychological dynamics going on in your head. It’s like, is what I'm doing working? Is it good enough? And you’re focusing on things. Is it out of tune? Is it out of pitch? Okay, how does it fit here? And this goes on through the whole process.”
Vai worked at home in Los Angeles. Satriani was in San Francisco. Any time they had to spare they’d write riffs and melodies and send them by email to each other, then wait. They’d wait a week, maybe even two weeks before they got a reaction. Or they’d be exchanging iMessages with producer and keyboardist Eric Caudieux to work on something in real-time.
The deadline for the record came and went. The label wanted to know where it was. But some of these ideas were so far-out that they needed some time to chew them over.
“Steve would send me something that was very much completed,” says Satriani. “I’d be thinking, ‘What am I gonna play on this!? I need to sit back and just think about this, and not react like I’m in the studio and there’s a clock on the wall telling me I’ve gotta perform something in the next hour.’”
Zoot Suit Riot was a track like that. Pure Vai. Bonkers. It sounds like it has to have been recorded late at night, after hours. Satriani had to send him back something good.
It’s like he kept raising his bar. And when you’re working with somebody doing that, it compels you to want to raise your bar
Steve Vai
“That’s one of the crazier Steve Vai ideas,” says Satriani. “When you jump on that train, you realise, ‘Okay, this is a crazy train, and I’m just gonna have to be as crazy as what he’s doing.’ But I had a great time with that. I definitely shocked Steve with my guitar solo on that one.”
“We were constantly surprising each other,” adds Vai. “Whenever I got an email from Joe with a solo, I would just be like, ‘Okay!’ I’d have to prepare myself. And it was just magnificent. It’s like he kept raising his bar. And when you’re working with somebody doing that, it compels you to want to raise your bar.”
With so much touring going on, neither of them had their A-line rigs to hand. Their amps and gear would be somewhere across the States, so they used guitar plugins. Vai was sceptical at first, but Satriani was a digital convert.
They tracked guitars using IK Multimedia’s AmpliTube and Tonex suites, Neural DSP plugins, SansAmp, and there was a real benefit to recording direct. Caudieux and mix engineer Greg Koller could adjust their tones to complement the drums and bass that would be recorded later.
They could grab a guitar track from Pro Tools, add compression or EQ, before sending it back into Pro Tools, and all this time Vai and Satriani never had to worry about mic placement or what they were hearing in the room.
“It was complicated, and it was stretched out over a year and a half, but it turned out to be great, because we never got bogged down with having to decide on a guitar sound while we were supposed to be being creative,” says Satriani. “It might seem counterintuitive to some people who’ve made records like myself in the old days, but, wow! What a relief to think about the creativity first before you have to worry about mic placement, and tubes, and the amp, and all that kind of stuff.”
The one occasion when both were in each other’s company was when recording I Wanna Play My Guitar. The only vocal track on the album, it features a guest appearance from former Deep Purple bassist and vocalist Glenn Hughes.
When we talk about The Sea Of Emotion and that feeling of nostalgia, Hughes’ presence – someone who actually played on Deep Purple's Burn – right there in the studio somehow consecrates it, makes it real. “The guy came in, take after take, each one of them was just, like, ‘How do we pick?’ He was so cool,” says Vai. “He helped to authenticate the song.”
After the slide guitar and whammy abuse of Bronco Freight Train, the anarchic fusion energy of Zoot Suit Riot, and the woozy night-time psychedelia of Old Sins Have Long Shadows, I Wanna Play My Guitar arrives to set up the three-part title track that closes the album out.
As Vai explains, it embodies the spirit of the album. I Wanna Play My Guitar? That’s all these two have wanted to do, play the guitar, and see where their musical curiosity will take them next.
And right then, in the studio with Hughes, the Voice of Rock, cutting take after take, that musical curiosity was taking them back to a time when life was a lot more simple, and the music was so…
“Classic,” says Vai. “It was Led Zeppelin, Queen, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple. It was just great. We didn’t have cell phones or internet or email, we just had our guitars and each other, and that was such a glorious time to be a teenager, and play the guitar, and have all that great inspirational music. There’s no emails in that song! [Laughs] That song is reminiscent of what it felt like when we were teenagers in the ‘70s.”
- The Sea of Emotion is out now via earMUSIC. Order the album at www.satchvaiband.com
