![Alex Skolnick play his silverburst ESP signature model [left] while Joe Satriani plays his JS signature Ibanez](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/VSVVnoyEgnFTvPoErusisi-1920-80.jpg.webp)
Joe Satriani changed guitar for good long before he got a deal and made it as a recording artist. Just think of all the players who studied with him back in the day.
There was the jazz guitar fusion ace Charlie Hunter, whom Satriani would later describe as a “genius,” Third Eye Blind’s Kevin Cadogan, David Bryson of Counting Crows – and of course the most-famous of all, his friend and now co-collaborator Steve Vai.
Metal guitar in particular owes a huge debt to Satch’s ability to translate booksmarts to streetsmarts. There was Larry LaLonde, of thrash pioneers Possessed and latterly of Primus, Rick Hunolt of Exodus, Kirk Hammett of Metallica and also ex-Exodus, and Testament’s Alex Skolnick.
No two of these players sound alike and yet they were all studying under Satriani at one point – and as Skolnick tells us, speaking to Music Radar over Zoom, this was one of the biggest things he took from his lessons with Satch.
Satriani helped Skolnick find his sense of musical identity, and that didn’t come easy.
“I was very young. I was 14, 15 while I was studying with him, and a lot of the things were over my head, but he definitely gave me a roadmap,” says Skolnick. “I wasn’t a quick learner for music theory. I actually had a friend at school that was quick, and he picked up on it really quickly – Geoff Tyson, who was in a band called T-Ride. Great Player. But it was a goal to shoot for, like, at some point, I should learn this stuff.”
Satriani’s ability to translate his musical booksmarts to streetsmarts was a big reason why students such as Skolnick got so much out of his tutelage.
“You can be an educated musician, but also have feel, and be a quote/unquote street player at the same time, I learned that,” says Skolnick. “And also, just finding your own identity, which I did not do right away; that certainly took some time – gust not getting too caught up in the current popular players, or whoever is getting the most press.”
When Skolnick started taking lessons from Satriani he didn’t know just what kind of guitar player he wanted to be – he knew which guitar player he wanted to be. Skolnick was in his early teens and there was only one player for any aspiring shredder at the time.
“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,” says Skolnick, with a chuckle. “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.”
It was like the equivalent of studying with a classical piano teacher or a classical violin teacher – except this guy played electric guitar
It would soon be Steve Vai. Malmsteen’s exit from LA hard-rockers Alcatrazz gave Vai the opening – and he didn’t look back, tracking Disturbing The Peace in 1985, and then being picked up by David Lee Roth to kick-off his post-Van Halen solo career. Satriani told Skolnick to forget the horse race. There was always going to be a hot player coming out.
“Before that, obviously, Eddie Van Halen was the player that was getting all the attention, Randy Rhoads after him,” says Skolnick. “Stevie Ray Vaughan, not in hard rock, but still… I remember Joe mentioning all these players, and there’s always going to be that player of the month, and then within a couple of years, Joe was the guy! It was amazing!”
Satriani wasn’t always the guy. That took some work to breakthrough, too, and looking back on it now, Skolnick says there was some disbelief among his students that almost put them off pursuing a career in music. Here was this player of abundant gifts, a player people spoke about with this reverence, and yet he was still teaching.
“People would say, ‘Oh, my God, if this guy is in the back of a guitar store, teaching, what does it say about the music business?’ But, of course, within a few years, everybody would know his name – as they should – and that was Joe Satriani.
Skolnick discovered Satriani via another of his guitar teachers, Danny Gill. Though the chances are that he would have heard about him one way or another. People were talking about him.
“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.”
I don’t pretend to have been Joe’s star student but he planted these seeds and it really started to blossom later
By Skolnick’s own admission, those lessons with Satriani took a bit of time to sink in. It wasn’t until he had joined local Bay Area thrashers Legacy that he could really put the lessons into practice. Legacy soon changed their name to Testament. The Legacy would be their debut album. And Skolnick, tracking leads that sounded good to him at Pyramid Sound Studios, in Ithaca, New York, was learning fast that the standard for pro musicians is set a little higher.
“Going in to record the early Testament records, just constantly being stopped by the engineer. ‘Stop, tune!’ All right. ‘But I’m playing great!?’ ‘There’s a tuning thing.’ Just getting in that habit of constantly checking your tuning, listening to the other instruments, not just yourself, it took me a while to absorb all this stuff,” says Skolnick. “It didn’t just happen. Getting out there and being on a stage night after night really helped as well.
“But I think, at a certain point, the lessons from Joe just started to kick in. By my late teens, early 20s, it really blossomed. So, yeah, I don’t pretend to have been Joe’s star student but he planted these seeds and it really started to blossom later.”
You can read our full interview with Alex Skolnick, coming soon to MusicRadar. Testament's new album, Para Bellum, is out now via Nuclear Blast.
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