We are not even half-way through 2026 yet so it’s a little early to be talking about the electric guitar tracks of the year, but if we could be so bold as to make a prediction, let’s just say that Matteo Mancuso’s Solar Wind, featuring Steve Vai, is going to be right up there by the year's end.

The opening track on Mancuso’s bravura sophomore album, Route 96 – a title that just so happens to be inspired by Vai – brings together two greats of the instrument, one who has been extending guitar’s musical possibilities ever since he joined Frank Zappa’s outfit in 1980, the other who is only just getting started, having released his debut just three years ago.

But then Mancuso is on some sort of elevated trajectory right now. He is blowing everyone’s mind; Tosin Abasi, Eric Johnson, Joe Bonamassa, and yes, Steve Vai, too, and the young Sicilian has jammed with the likes of jazz-fusion icon Al Di Meola and acoustic guitar virtuoso Tommy Emmanuel.

With Vai declaring that the evolution of guitar was safe in Mancuso’s hands, it was only a matter of time before they worked on something together. And, as Mancuso reveals, joining MusicRadar from his hotel room in Munich, it was initially Vai’s idea, and he pitched it to Mancuso when they were playing together at the 2024 Steve Vai Academy in Orlando, Florida.

“That was the first time I met Steve in person. We played a lot there. We played almost every night,” says Mancuso. “I was one of the teachers at the camp, and every night, there was a different teacher on the stage.”

On the last night of the event, Vai had a proposal.

“He told me that if I had something, like a song or something to work on it, he will be happy to collaborate,” says Mancuso.

He did not. But there is nothing like the offer from one of instrumental guitar’s O.G. figureheads to inspire you to pick up the guitar.

“I immediately started to work on the song,” he says. “In fact, Solar Wind was the first song I finished on the record.”

By November, Mancuso had the music together and sent it to Vai. In the confines of the Harmony Hut, Vai tracked his parts remotely in the New Year 2025. Unlike his Polyphia collaboration, Ego Death, which Vai provided a solo for before Scott LePage and Tim Henson had actually finished the song, and ended up editing into place, this was all laid out just waiting for Vai. And Mancuso had left plenty of room for him to manoeuvre.

“I immediately knew from the start that this song was Steve’s song,” he says. “I wanted to have the most Steve Vai song possible on the record. That’s why even I’m playing some stuff that maybe you can associate with Steve, some legato runs or some of the sounds that I used on that song in particular are very like Steve Vai-sounding in a way. I wanted to build an environment where Steve was comfortable to play on it. And that was very important to me.”

Solar Wind is an exercise in restraint and audacity. It’s is the most Steve Vai tune Mancuso could have written, and yet it has his fingerprints all over, that leitmotif of always contrasting something super complex with something super simple, and vice versa.

And there is some sleight of hand with the time signature that makes if feel like the melody is being ferried atop a gust of electrons and protons, this great heliospheric phenomenon beyond our ken, a cosmic realm where Vai’s most at home.

“The solo section is… I don’t want to say strange, but it’s simple and complex at the same time,” says Mancuso. “Because he has odd-time signatures and chord changes going on, not too complex but still… then it goes to 7/8 on the next section. It was complex and simple in some ways but I knew that Steve was going to like it.”

What you won’t hear is Mancuso cutting lose. Whenever he has a guest guitarist on the record, as on the Latin-inspired gypsy jazz freakout Isla Feliz on which Antoine Boyer plays with this preternatural speed and grace on the acoustic, Mancuso doesn’t want it to turn into this two-hander between soloists.

On Isla Feliz, he plays his lead guitar on electric to contrast Boyer’s fleet-fingered acoustic. There was no way Mancuso was soloing on Solar Wind.

“Yeah, I didn’t want it to be the classic guitar battle. And if you listen to the song, I don’t do any solos,” he says. “I only do the main melody; I have just one fast run at the start of the song, but I didn’t want to solo over that song, because I didn’t want any comparison between me and Steve. I just wanted a song where Steve was playing, and that’s it. I don’t want to do this guitar battle thing. It’s one thing that I really don’t like about the guitar world.”

Also, Mancuso is showing a little mercy to the audience. He didn’t want the arrangement outstaying its welcome.

“I think Solar Wind is already a great development, and it’s already a long song,” he says. “I added another solo, maybe a solo of mine, it will be really too long, so that’s why I kept it like that.”

The challenge for Mancuso now is how to play Steve Vai’s parts live onstage with his trio. Because [spoiler warning] Solar Wind is in the setlist.

“Oh yeah, yeah, it’s a challenge,” says Mancuso. “First of all, because you always have Steve’s solo in mind, and of course when I have to play it live I have to do Steve’s solo section.”

Just don’t expect the same thing night after night. Mancuso comes from the jazz guitar school of fusion; he likes to leave some room for improv.

“I don’t play exactly the same notes as Steve,” he says. “I try to play something different every night. But that’s the challenge. I like to have these kinds of challenges, especially when I’m playing live. It’s always good to try to stretch and improvise over these sections.”

Time spent in the company of Vai is always an education. He might give you some rock history, share an old war story from his Frank Zappa days. He might give you a guitar playing tip. But he always gives you something.

Spending a few days in Florida with Vai taught Mancuso a valuable lesson.

“Well, there was one thing that told me at the end of the camp, and it was, ‘Play what excites you the most about the instrument.’ And it’s one thing that I always think about,” says Mancuso. “Because guitar has so many ways it can be played. You can play like Tommy Emmanuel. You can play like Yngwie Malmsteen. You can play like Allan Holdsworth.

“There are so many different techniques. You have tapping, legato. You have sweep [picking]. And that is why it’s such a personal instrument. You project a lot of your personality in it; you can play it in a really personalised way.”

And it wouldn’t be a conversation with Vai if there wasn’t a little philosophical wisdom being imparted, too, a way to think about life itself, the whole creative endeavour of making music. This might be the best advice we’ve heard all year.

“And another thing that Steve said to me, because we live in the internet era, where you have everything available, you have tons of inputs available, sometimes it’s better to just shut down everything, grab your guitar, and be alone,” says Mancuso. “Just you and your guitar, or your instrument, to go into an introspective journey to really know what excites you the most about music and guitar in general.

“That’s something I’m still working on because it’s a hard thing to discover things on guitar, and the more you play, the more you know about yourself, not only as a musician, also as a human being. It’s always a journey to try to discover yourself; the more you know yourself, the more your music will be personal and not derivative.”

Oh, and one more thing, if Route 96 sounds particularly hi-fi through your speakers, again, we’ve got Steve Vai to thank. It was Vai who told Mancuso to mix and master it in 96kHz (hence why it’s called Route 96).

Does it make a difference? The jury is out. Mancuso wasn’t going to argue with Vai, though.

“Well, I will be completely honest with you, but the reality is that I only switched to 96kHz because Steve told me to do it,” he says. “And I never questioned it. Like, okay, sometimes I really listen to things in 44, and I don’t really hear that much of a difference, to be honest. Maybe the stereo image is a little bit more wider, but… The thing is that because Steve told me to do it, I just did it, because I wanted to record like Steve.”

And if Steve Vai tells us to do something, well, we do it, right?

“Yeah! That’s my philosophy,” says Mancuso.

Route 96 is out now via Artone Label Group/Music Theories Recordings.

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.

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.”

Brian May has given Steve Vai the gift of a lifetime. It’s a Red Special replica, custom built by Andrew Guyton, with some signature Vai-style twists on the Queen guitarist’s DIY custom electric guitar – not least a change of colour, reimagining the O.G. Red Special as the ‘Green’ Red Special.

“I own a lot of guitars, but this one stands alone. Its soul and history are baked into it and topped with a healthy smattering of love,” says Vai, writing on his Instagram account. “I will treasure it for the rest of my life, and yes, I’m taking this one to the grave with me.”

Vai is not the only high-profile recipient of a Guyton-built Red Special replica from May. Just before Christmas, Tony Iommi received a Red Special built to the exact specifications as May’s original, only with the neck profile based on Iommi’s Jaydee Old Boy SG-style electric.

Vai’s ‘Green’ Red Special is a more radical take on the instrument, with the jumbo EVO-gold frets, yin-yan inlays on the birds-eye maple fingerboard, and that translucent Green finish revealing all the eye-popping details in its quilted maple top.

But like Iommi’s Red Special, perhaps the most significant update to the Red Special formula is the neck, with Guytone giving Vai’s instrument a mahogany neck that’s shaped a little more like those he would find on his Ibanez signature guitars – and this is definitely for the best, because Vai has a little history with the Red Special.

“In the 1970s, when I was a kid in Carle Place trying to figure out how to play anything in tune, Brian May was one of my absolute heroes,” writes Vai. “His tone and touch oozed of rock and roll class, and the songs he wrote and the notes he chose dug deep into my psyche and helped shape a future fantasy image of myself in my mind.”

The Red Special played a starring role in this fantasy. Vai even entertained ideas of making his own guitar. A “total lack of expertise” put paid to that. But still, the Red Special was the one. More than a guitar, it was “a mythical object, an alchemical wand built by a young genius and his dad”. Growing up, Vai studied everything about it. Little did he know he would get his hands on it, and sooner rather than later. He got his chance not long after moving from to the West Coast in 1980.

“At 20 years old I move to LA, landed a tiny apartment at Fairfax and Sunset, start working with Frank Zappa, and one night I walk into the Rainbow Bar and Grill and see Brian just standing there. Alone. Like a normal human,” says Vai. “I thought I was hallucinating.”

He was not. And being a 20-year-old kid Vai said hello. May being May, i.e. a mensch, he “did the unthinkable” and invited Vai to Queen’s rehearsal, where he got to see the Red Special up close.

“Sitting in a room with the entire band was already unreal enough, but then I saw the Red Special. I pointed and said, ‘Is that it?’ Brian said, ‘Yup. Want to try it?’ Time definitely slowed down,” recalls Vai.

This was his chance. But as is often the case, our imagination doesn’t meet reality. The Red Special is like Thor’s Hammer, an Excalibur built from the ground up and tailored to May’s unique playing style. It felt weird in Vai’s hands.

“After idolising that guitar my whole youth, holding it was seismic,” continues Vai. ‘I thought, ‘This is it, I’m finally going to sound like Brian May.’ But much to my chagrin, I didn’t of course. I sounded like me. And between the gauge .08 strings, ultra-low action, and a neck the size of a small tree, I played it like a baby giraffe on roller skates. Still, it was heaven.”

Vai never forgot that moment. Neither did May, though he did forget some of the details. In 1991, when the pair were playing Guitar Legends in Spain, May was recounting the story of when one of Zappa’s young protégés came to a Queen rehearsal and played the Red Special, “who who played amazingly well”. Vai kept his powder dry.

“I let him tell me the whole story and then said… ‘Brian, that was me.’ This stands as one of the most satisfying full-circle twists the universe has offered me,” writes Vai.

And now he has another, a ‘Green’ Red Special, one of one, “beyond beautiful” – and a guitar that Vai finds a little easier to play.

“It somehow honours the spirit of the Red Special while allowing me to feel completely at home inside it,” writes Vai. “Must be the green.”

Guitar hero Steve Vai has paid tribute to legendary rock singer David Coverdale in a Facebook post celebrating their friendship and their time together in Coverdale’s band Whitesnake.

Vai joined Whitesnake in 1989 and played on the album Slip Of The Tongue after the band’s Dutch guitarist Adrian Vandenberg suffered a wrist injury that prevented him from playing on the songs he had written with Coverdale.

Vai’s Facebook post comes after Coverdale recently announced his retirement.

“David has shaken the earth for over half a century with a voice that could level a mountain,” Vai states. “With impeccable instincts for song, melody, swagger, and attitude, his music always gave the rest of us something to feel gloriously cool about.”

Vai also reminisces about Whitesnake’s tour in support of the Slip Of The Tongue album, on which he and Vandenberg starred in a line-up that also featured bassist Rudy Sarzo and drummer Tommy Aldridge.

“That band was absolutely smokin’,” Vai recalls, “and sharing the stage with that kind of power was one of the true highlights of my career. It was a magical time in the music business, and I’m endlessly appreciative for that Whitesnake experience.”

One of the highlights of Vai’s time with the band was the Monsters Of Rock festival at Donington Park on 18 August 1990, when Whitesnake headlined a bill also featuring Aerosmith, Poison, The Quireboys and Thunder. The event drew and audience of 72,000.

32 years later, Coverdale invited Vai to jam with Whitesnake at the Hellfest event in France. This turned out be the very last show of Coverdale’s epic career.

At Hellfest, Vai joined the band on stage to play the classic hit Still Of The Night, of which he now says: “I’ve always loved playing that tune ... and to be back on stage with David, unleashing that historic monster of a track with the band, was an honour.

“Who could have guessed it would be the band’s final performance — and that I’d get to play that last song with them? There’s something beautifully poetic (and outrageously cool) about that.”

Vai’s tribute to Coverdale ends on a personal note: “So, Brother David ... After my own 50 years of being a professional musician, here’s one thing I know for sure: the success is great, the stages are fun, the riffs are loud — but it’s the people you meet along the way, and the friendships you forge, that end up meaning the most. And for our friendship, I’m deeply grateful.

“And friendship aside… your golden pipes remain this guy’s all-time favourite rock voice to ever grace the planet.

“You’re a class act. You came, you conquered, and you delivered, and we are all grateful.”

Steve Vai has spent much of this year tearing it up on tour with his old friend and former teacher Joe Satriani, with the super-gifted Pete Thorn playing rhythm for the Satch/Vai Band.

On the G3 and Generation Axe tours of yore, Vai has shared the stage with the likes of Eric Johnson, Tosin Abasi, Nuno Bettencourt, Zakk Wylde, the irrepressible Yngwie Malmsteen.

He made his bones as a teenager playing with Frank Zappa; Vai can hold his own in any company and he will elevate the jam.

But as the latest guest to appear on Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan’s superlative YouTube show/podcast, The Magnificent Others, Corgan put the question to Vai, that, if players were gunslingers, which would be the one whom he’d look at and think ‘nope, not today’?

Vai had no hesitation: that would be the late English jazz fusion trailblazer Allan Holdsworth.

For Vai, Holdsworth is the one, a player who was simply wired differently. Corgan is intrigued. Holdsworth was the one of the players who blew Eddie Van Halen’s mind, too. But why?

“Growing up in the generation that I did, I’m in the guitar magazines, I’m reading about you,” says Corgan. “And I’m hearing all these things and everyone would talk about Holdsworth like he was this kind of spinning deity. But as a kid, you go grab that record, put it on, and I think, for me Holdsworth still remains a bit of a cypher.

“I certainly understand the influence, and the technical mastery – and even the fluidity in his playing, if that’s a fair thing to say – but I never found that emotional connection to his work.”

Vai’s answer explains all, but it also reminds us of what Vai told us about the two competing impulses in his creative brain.

One is pulling towards rock, as practised by Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin et al, the other towards “high-information music” – and Holdsworth was the doyen of the latter.

“Yeah, it’s more of an intellectualised sophistication,” says Vai. “Sophisticated listening, and for me it tickles a particular part of my brain, because it encompasses all of these elements.

“The thing that I love most about someone like Allan Holdsworth – or Jeff Beck even – they’re craftsmen. Allan Holdsworth, the reason why I am so attracted him is because his musical mind is unique.”

Like Zappa, Vai got to know Holdsworth as a teenager, newly arrived in California and available for all kinds of electric guitar related services. Both wanted Vai for his transcription skills, which were considerable. Zappa ended up recruiting Vai. Holdsworth needed Vai’s help to finish his book.

“When I moved out to California in 1980, I was doing transcriptions to make a couple of bucks, and he called me,” says Vai. “He was writing a book on his wild chords, crazy things, but Allan didn’t really know traditional music.”

This goes a long way to understanding just how Holdsworth came to sound so different to anyone else, as though he arrived here via meteorite.

“He had his own vocabulary,” says Vai. “He had his own way of constructing chords. His own understanding of how they go on the neck.”

For Corgan, the Holdsworth story begins to make sense.

“That helps me understand him a little bit, because I could never understand why someone of your calibre would point at him,” says Corgan. “Even Eddie Van Halen would talk about Holdsworth.”

“This is just his musical mind,” continues Vai. “He didn’t even understand how to translate that into conventional notation, to write this book, so that was what I was helping him with.”

Maybe Holdsworth wasn’t of this world. Holdsworth made his own sense of music and sound to create something no one else could get close to. Putting Holdsworth's material down on staff notation gave Vai a deeper appreciation of his genius.

“In the process I got to recognise a person who is almost like, if you left people on a desert island and just gave them a couple of tools, the real brilliant one built things,” says Vai “That’s what Allan did. His way of approaching notes, to a lot of people, it sounds like crazy notes going around the place, but if you’re into connecting the musical dots of music theory and melody...”

...Then you’ve got a rabbit-hole to go down.

Corgan recalls his father – also a player – talking about seeing Wes Montgomery and realising deep down that he couldn’t touch that. No way he was ever playing like that. Vai can relate.

“That’s how I felt when I watched Joe Pass play, or Allan,” he admits.

There is another connection between Pass and Holdsworth. Pass, similarly, did not have what we might call knowledge of traditional music theory.

“That’s why it’s so inspired,” argues Vai. “Insipid jazz playing is people who know the chords, and then what you hear is ripping arpeggios – but there’s no soul in it. It’s more mental than coming from a soulful place, and that’s fine, that’s a process. Not someone like Allan – or a great jazz player, who doesn’t even know anything about it…”

And it becomes magic. When Vai told Music Radar the 10 guitarists who blew his mind in 2017, he demurred on the notion that anyone could be the best. But if pushed, he said, it would have been Holdsworth.

“I very rarely agree with the term best guitar player. It just seems so obscene to put something so subjective into a best category. But if I had to say there was one, I would pick Allan Holdsworth," said Vai. “The way he uses the whole tone scale is like his own baby shoes – it’s so easy for him. His thought process was phenomenal.

“I can hear any guitar player and I know what they’re doing – I might not be able to play it – but I can see it in my mind’s eye. But I do not know what the fuck Holdsworth was doing at all.”

Holdsworth died in 2017. Paying tribute at the time, Vai said Holdsworth’s contribution to guitar was “unquantifiable”. Holdsworth had a prolific solo career, one that got off to a false start in 1976 with Velvet Darkness, an album culled from rehearsal performances and released without the musicians’ consent.

Holdsworth disowned it. But there were some hints at what was to come. I.O.U. marked him as a jazz-fusion player to watch. Metal Fatigue (1985) positioned him as a revolutionary of the art.

“I remember him saying to me once that his goal was to create a catalog of music that was undiluted,” said Vai, in 2017. “Well, that he did…. Dear Allan, you were extraordinary and from all of us who you’ve touched so deeply with your brilliance, we are grateful.”

• "I have tremendous problems with some of my own tunes, unless they’re particularly simple": Remembering the musical mind, self-deprecation and wisdom of Allan Holdsworth

When Whitesnake’s album Slip Of The Tongue was released in 1989, singer David Coverdale made an extraordinary claim about the band’s newest recruit Steve Vai — comparing him to the greatest guitarist of them all.

Referring to a masterpiece by The Jimi Hendrix Experience from 1967, Coverdale declared: “Steve Vai has woven the finest tapestries since Axis: Bold As Love.”

It was hyperbole, of course — but there was no doubt that Vai completely revolutionised Whitesnake's guitar sound on Slip Of The Tongue with high-energy shred and death-defying six-string antics. It's not that the guys who played in Whitesnake before him weren't awesome — it's that Vai, Ibanez in hand, sounded like he’d arrived from outer space.

For bassist Rudy Sarzo, who played alongside Vai on Slip Of The Tongue, it was an experience never to be forgotten.

“I love playing with musicians that challenge me,” Sarzo tells MusicRadar. “I want to play with people way better than me, just so they kick the shit out of me, and make me kick back.

“I’m not gonna just stand there — I’m gonna rise to the challenge and let it make me a better musician. And while playing with Steve, I definitely learned something.”

The funny thing is, Steve Vai wasn’t even supposed to be on Slip Of The Tongue.

The guitar scaffolding for that album was built by Adrian Vandenberg, who had taken over guitar duties in the band following the departure of John Sykes.

But after Vandenberg had written the bulk of the album’s songs with Coverdale, he sustained an injury to his wrist — to the point where he could barely play. It was at this crisis point that Coverdale decided to bring Vai into the band.

According to Sarzo, the demos for Slip Of The Tongue harkened back to Whitesnake’s roots as a blues-based hard rock band in the late ’70s and early ’80s. But with Vai onboard, things changed.

“Steve brought in more of a progressive direction with the guitars,” Sarzo explains. “And at the end of the day, I think it works. There are still some roots of blues rock in the rhythm section, but Steve just adds some modern layers on top of that.”

Recalling the drama of the period when Vandenberg suffered his injury and Vai saved the day, Sarzo insists: “It wasn’t a crazy time. It was a situation where there was a sense of maturity within the camp.

“Nobody was going to freak out. We said, ‘This is going to get done. We just need to find the right person to join the family.’ And we got Steve Vai, thank God.

“I loved spending those years with Steve in that band. It was a wonderful experience.”

Prior to joining Whitesnake, Sarzo had played alongside Randy Rhoads — first in Quiet Riot and then in Ozzy Osbourne’s band. Sarzo sees a similarity between Rhoads and Vai.

“With Randy I was working with a musician who had such incredible integrity,” he says. “And Steve was a very educated musician coming from the Frank Zappa family, and I loved that.”

As for Vai’s impact on Slip Of The Tongue, Sarzo says: “At the core of it, Whitesnake was a blues-rock band. The roots of that band go back to Deep Purple, because David was in that band before forming Whitesnake. And then, Whitesnake became its own musical entity, and eventually it was a hit.

“Slip Of The Tongue would have sounded very different if Adrian had not gotten injured — if he had done most of the guitar work on the album. But with Steve Vai on that record, he brought more of that modern edge to it, and I don’t think the average Whitesnake fan was ready for that.

“I grew up listening to prog rock and fusion, so I loved what Steve was playing. But Adrian had laid down the basic tracks, and then Steve came in and painted a whole different picture on the guitar. I definitely would have played differently if I had started pre-production with Steve.”

Slip Of The Tongue was a top 10 hit in the US and the UK and all across the world. It was also arguably the last truly successful album of the hair metal era.

The tour in support of the album included a headlining appearance at the Monsters Of Rock festival at Donington Park in 1990.

Coverdale would subsequently put Whitesnake on ice to record an album with Led Zeppelin legend Jimmy Page.

“We knew that the band was ending,” Sarzo says now. "David had given notice that it was going to be the end of Whitesnake — or that version of Whitesnake. He announced that two or three days before the tour began in January of 1990.

“So every show was basically part of a countdown toward the end of that era. And at Donington, in my mind it was like, 'Am I ever going to experience this feeling of playing with such great musicians, and headlining a show like this again?’

“With Donington, there was a lot of emotion going into that show," Sarzo recalls. "But this was not something that you carried onstage — because once you get on the stage, it’s all about what we do as a band.

“So there was no time for reminiscing. When we were onstage, it was all about what we were creating that night.”

Joe Satriani making music and touring the world with his old friend and former student Steve Vai is one of the biggest feel-good stories in the history of electric guitar, and the pair have just debuted the video for their second single, I Wanna Play My Guitar.

Satriani’s son, ZZ Satriani, directs the video. Ibanez, as ever, provides the high-performance signature guitars. And the ‘Voice of Rock,’ Mr Glenn Hughes provides vocals.

The track will be manna from heaven for anyone who holds a ticket for the forthcoming tour of the recently inaugurated SatchVai band. And even the stars of the show themselves admit that this really is something of a dream come true.

“This song depicts all that Joe and I used to think about as teenagers,” says Vai. “All of the things we loved about pounding rock and roll and the glorious guitar. It is an absolute phenom for us to be able to present to you now our teenage aspirations in this song.”

We’ve had a taste of Messrs Satriani and Vai’s teenage nostalgia before. Their debut track, The Sea of Emotion, Pt 1, was inspired by the kind of hang-out spot that would be familiar to any kid growing up, listening to rock music in ‘70s USA. It is Dazed And Confused, the guitar remix.

This time around, the boys don’t get into their ‘70s clothes. I Wanna Play My Guitar is shot on location, an industrial setting, shot in close-ups, with kinetic cuts, probably on digital because it would be a fire hazard to have nitrate film stock near the heat from those tube amps and that dual-tapped solo [yes, they use polyester-based film stocks nowadays – ask ZZ, that’s his department].

“This is such a cool video of Steve, Glenn, me and the boys rockin’ a fun song, looking all chill and natural,” says Satriani, senior.

Like The Sea of Emotion, I Wanna Play My Guitar is a hard-rocker, and you can expect more where that came from. The principals involved with the SatchVai band have formidable rock bona fides.

There’s the redoubtable Kenny Aronoff on drums, a regular collaborator with Satriani. “No other drummer has the sound, feel, time, groove and swagger like Kenny,” said Satch. “He’s an exceptional human being too. He’s supernatural!” We have Marco Mendoza on bass guitar. And just in case they were running low on guitar talent onstage, Pete Thorn will be up there too.

I Wanna Play My Guitar nearly had Justin Hawkins from the Darkness on vocals. Satriani had invited Hawkins and Hughes to share the mic. Hawkins couldn’t make it.

If you are based in the UK and Europe and have some gaps in your calendar this summer, maybe you can make it along to one of their upcoming shows on their Surfing With The Hydra Tour 2025. It kicks off in York, England, on 13 June. See SatchVai Band for full dates and ticket details.

On this day (21 March) in 1995, Steve Vai’s E.P. Alien Love Secrets was released. And it features what is arguably the guitar virtuoso’s greatest song - Tender Surrender.

Looking back on the 30th anniversary of this landmark track, Vai tells MusicRadar: “I guess I’m not considered much of a blues player in the conventional sense.

"But I’ve always been rock/blues oriented," he adds, "because I’m a huge Page, May and Blackmore fan. None of them were strict blues, though.

“As for how Tender Surrender expands, well, that was a deliberate thing. It called for a bluesy touch.

“I don’t know why, but throughout my career, I’ve made a psychological point of veering away from anything too pentatonic. I like to find my most unique voice.

“So what are you going to do? Will you try to sound like something that’s already been done and still being done by people who are better at it than you? Where are you going? Where are you right now?”

Tender Surrender could very well stand as the greatest composition to be found in Vai’s storied career.

There’s a jazziness to the opening lines that show him treading new ground, and from there he builds and builds, showing a great amount of restraint by teasing the listener in closer and closer until he finally erupts with a mesmerising overdriven crescendo that’s guaranteed to make any guitar player’s hairs stand on-end before masterfully bringing it all back down.

This is Vai at his most poetic, digging in deep into his soul to tell a story that warms the heart of anyone who hears it.

The Alien Love Secrets E.P. is in many ways a continuation of the otherworldly brilliance documented on Vai’s classic 1990 album Passion And Warfare.

There was, of course, the Sex & Religion album released in between Passion And Warfare and Alien Love Secrets.

But Sex & Religion was more of a band situation, with a young Devin Townsend on lead vocals.

As far as instrumental guitar goes, Alien Love Secrets is a creative masterpiece that follows on from Passion And Warfare and can match it toe-to-toe in terms of sheer genius.

And while Tender Surrender is its crowning glory, there is so much to enjoy in the E.P.

There’s the playful shuffle of Juice. The evocative melodies of Die To Live. The mind-melting funk of The Boy From Seattle. The joyful Ya-Yo Gakk – a father and son duo featuring a very young Julian Vai on lead vocals. And there’s the metallic ferocity of Kill The Guy With The Ball.

And of course there is one of Vai’s most famous tracks, Bad Horsie, in which he uses his wah to add extra cut to bluesy lines in C Minor and his whammy bar to make his Ibanez scream like a horse bolting from the barn.

Vai recalls how this classic track came to be.

“Back in the ’80s I received a call from Ry Cooder to perform on the soundtrack for the movie Crossroads,” he says. “I read the script and saw there would be a duel.

“It said the person I was playing, Jack Butler, would make his guitar sound like a locomotive. I knew how to do that immediately, I would tune down and go ‘Guh guh, guh guh!’ There was something about the riff that I liked, I ended up turning it into Bad Horsie.”

Steve Vai had a great time in the ’80s, playing guitar for ex-Van Halen singer David Lee Roth and with former Deep Purple frontman David Coverdale’s band Whitesnake.

But as Vai admits to MusicRadar, it’s a risky business when you’re up on stage strutting your stuff, night after night.

You’re walking a tightrope - and sometimes you can end up flat on your back.

As Vai says, “One of the worst things that can happen to any guitar player is that your rig goes down and they don’t know what it is and can’t fix it right away.

“That’s only happened to me on a few occasions, but it’s never fun. I just leave the stage and say, ‘Sorry, something’s not working, I’ll be back when it’s fixed!’

“But there have been other challenges,” he says. “Playing when it’s snowing is not fun, because you can’t move your hands.

“And I remember two situations with the two Daves…

“One was with David Lee Roth. I was playing a big arena somewhere and people throw things occasionally.

“When you see them coming, not a problem, you can play with it and dodge. You can even catch it.

“So, I saw something coming at me and was about to catch it, then it blew up about six feet in front of me. There was a huge explosion and I went up in the air. I could see my feet and then I was totally out, unconscious on my back.

“I opened my eyes in front of 25,000 people and Dave was standing over me going, ‘Dude! Dude! You okay, man?’ And when I said I was okay, he told me not to get up.

“Dave always knew how to keep things interesting…

“They carried me to the back [of the stage] and Dave said, ‘When you walk out there, act all fucked-up before throwing your hand up in the air!’

“Everyone in the audience was dying to see what happened. They were wondering if I was okay and if the show going to carry on?

“So I did this funny walk, looking all messed up, and put my hand up. I gotta tell you, the place came apart and it was brilliant. And then we did Jump!”

Vai recalls a similar incident on stage with Whitesnake and the band’s singer David Coverdale.

“It wasn’t too different,” Vai says. “Fast forward a couple of years and I was playing Jones Beach Theater with Whitesnake, playing that big heart guitar in the rain.

“I usually do pretty good footwork. I never go down. You get this foot radar, knowing where the pedals are, so you can act like a rock star.

“I was backing up and knew the monitor was behind me, so I was moving to step over it, but I had these spurs on my boots.

“The spurs caught the monitor and again I was up in the air, staring at my feet and landing on my back, completely out.

“And this time I had this giant triple-necked heart-shaped guitar on top of me!

“I opened my eyes and this time it’s David Coverdale standing over me saying, ‘Steven, darling, are you okay? Are you alright?’

Vai says: “It’s funny what can happen to you on stage every now and then.

“You can call this The Tale Of Two Davids!”

Steve Vai was the guitar-playing sidekick for David Lee Roth in the late ’80s, appearing on the first two albums that the singer made after leaving Van Halen - Eat ’Em And Smile and Skyscraper.

But as Vai tells MusicRdar, one of the best things about working with Roth was the chance to perform classic Van Halen songs in concert.

“I mean, every one of those songs was a classic!” Vai says. “Have you ever tried playing along to those parts? They’re so fun!

“Panama, Unchained, Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love... they’re all incredible. That band had written so many great songs.

“For a guitar player, those parts were so much fun. They’re like little orchestrations that fit really well together.

“It was all so well-organised. They were put together in such a cool and appropriate way that made them speak. It was fun, heavy and rock ’n' roll.

“I could play the same parts that Edward played - anybody can within reason. But it never sounded like him.

“At the time I knew not to even try because that would have been a dead giveaway I didn’t have anything to offer.

“That would also piss the fans off, because you are inviting comparisons and trying to fit into somebody’s shoes, as opposed to saying, ‘Hey, well I wear a different pair of shoes!’

“I guess if I had to pick a favourite, it was probably Panama, because I loved all the chords.

“Hot For Teacher was great, too," Vai says. "We would also do Pretty Woman, and I loved playing that.

“Such great tunes to play. Every young rock guitar player would be bound to enjoy going through all that stuff.”

Steve Vai recently visited Guitar Center to shoot some promo for his new signature Spark Mini Vai 10-watt smart guitar amp when he dropped some solid-gold advice for any player who is looking to improve their electric guitar tone – especially beginner players.

What Vai says is a great reminder that it is not just your guitar, your brand of strings, thet amp you use or which overdrive pedal you have on your ‘board. Yes, the gear matters, but paying attention to how we play is what really matters.

“People say, the tone is in the amp, the tone is in the guitar, the tone is in the neck, the tone is in the the body or the pickups. On one level, yes. There is a tone in all of those things,” says Vai. “But you’re the boss of the tone, because you’re the one playing it, and you’re the one hitting the note.”

This isn’t just for shredders in training. Vai’s wisdom is relevant for players of all styles. Before going through a cavalcade of amps, he advises us to think about how we are addressing the strings. It all goes back to the old maxim “the tone is in the fingers”. But what does that mean?

It is all about the intensity you play with. How you hold the guitar pick. Vai says we have to take all of these things into consideration. Technique and tone go hand in hand.

“The tone of the note has so many moving parts to it,” says Vai. “One of them is just where you hit the string.”

This is an invaluable detail for beginner players to keep in mind. Pick near the bridge for a more trebly sound. Pick near the neck and you get more bass. Some styles of music might call for you to switch it up. Be mindful of how hard you are fretting a note. Pushing down too hard on the strings and you’ll sound sharp.

Good intonation might begin with how your guitar is set up but it is also a function of how clean your technique is. Vai’s fellow Ibanez signature artist Martin Miller is a big stickler for intonation. So too Vai’s teacher, friend and collaborator Joe Satriani.

“Joe Satriani has an ear like none other,” said Vai, speaking to MusicRadar in 2022. “When I was a kid he would say, ‘No, don’t vibrate it out of tune. You’ll sound like an idiot!’”

These are words to live by. In blues guitar, where a solo is all about tension and release, and the little details that establish personality and tell a story, adjusting your picking position and playing around with the tone – again, without touching a dial on the amp or guitar – can be an invaluable dynamic.

“It’s the way you pick,” says Vai. “How hard are you holding the pick? The intonation is dictated by how hard you push, how hard you pull this way, what your vibrato is like… All of these things go into discovering your unique tone.”

It was around 1983 when Vai changed his picking style completely, all because he was unhappy with the sound he was getting.

“I just was getting tired of not having a great tone,” he says. “I went through all these amplifiers. I was searching for something that sounded like some of the things I was hearing at the time. Edward van Halen had hit the scene. You had Yngwie. So many players. And I could never figure out why don’t I sound good?

“I started to experiment with the way that I where I pick, how I pick, the angle, all of these things. You get to a point where you hear it and you know it, and then the work starts.”

And that is the key, says Vai. Let your ear decide whether your technique is serving your tone.

The Spark MINI Vai is out now priced $249. See Positive Grid for more details.

It was rock’s version of the heavyweight championship of the world. In one corner, Van Halen. In the other, the band’s former singer David Lee Roth.

It was 1986, and there was outright hostility between the two camps after Roth quit Van Halen and was replaced by Sammy Hagar.

Van Halen landed the first blow. Their album 5150 was released on 12 March 1986, and was an instant hit.

But Roth had assembled a stellar backing band for his debut solo album Eat ’Em And Smile - drummer Greg Bissonette, bassist Billy Sheehan and guitarist Steve Vai.

Vai was Roth’s most potent weapon - an emerging guitar hero whom Roth felt might beat Eddie at his own game.

And when the first single from Eat ’Em And Smile dropped in June 1986, it was like a bomb going off.

The single was Yankee Rose - and its stunning intro featured Roth and Vai talking to each other, Roth with his voice and Vai with his guitar.

With Yankee Rose, Steve Vai’s status as a guitar hero was sealed.

And as he now tells MusicRadar, his inspiration for that song went all the way back to his childhood.

“It’s funny,” Vai says. “In some ways, it was a reflection on something that my sister Pam said to me as a little boy. She said, ‘One of these days, you are going to make your guitar talk!’

“It kinda stuck, I guess.

“With David Lee Roth, you are always reaching for the absurd – things that live on the cusp of cool and crazy. And I approached that project just like any other situation where I had to take the place of another guitar voice.

“I did that with Frank Zappa’s band. And with Dave’s band, it was Edward [Van Halen]. Whenever you hear Dave’s voice, you immediately hear Edward’s guitar playing.

“My goal was to not sound like what was there before me. Of course, there’s a wheelhouse you play in, but my goal was to always bring something new.

“When I set out to do that Eat ’Em And Smile record, I was an Edward fan, of course. But I knew I didn’t sound like him and wasn’t going to try.

“Instead, I wanted to bring in my own voice. I’m a little quirky, there’s a quirkiness to what I do sometimes. And when you’re hanging out with David Lee Roth, that stuff will come out.

“We were in the studio working together and you have to remember Van Halen were one of the biggest rock bands in the world and Dave had just quit. They were making another record and so was Dave.

"These guys were all trying to do the next big thing. And I was like a colourful fly on the wall watching it all go down and enjoying it very much.

“We wondered how to open the record – what could be interesting, fun and totally ridiculous to grab everyone’s interest. I said ‘I’m going to make my guitar talk!’

“And with that I was able fulfil my sister’s prophecy!”

The BEAT Tour is a musical high-wire act. Here was Steve Vai, Tool’s Danny Carey and King Crimson alumni Adrian Belew and Tony Levin performing ‘80s-era King Crimson classics Discipline, Beat, and Three Of A Perfect Pair.

Nothing about that is easy. Vai had most of the songs down pat but even he couldn’t get to grips with the Frame By Frame riff at first, and had to reach out to Robert Fripp for advice. Following the tour, Belew had to get surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome – and what does that say about the material?

This was a very special kind of tour with a very special set of demands. Accordingly, it also required a very special rig, and in a video segment for Sweetwater’s YouTube channel, Vai reveals all, offering a guided tour of his epic pedalboard, the dual guitar amp setup that runs behind it, plus the guitar synthesizers needed to present that classic King Crimson material onstage. And, he says, his meticulously put together pedalboard was all the work of his long-serving tech Doug MacArthur.

“I don’t have anything to do with this,” says Vai. “I just say to Doug, ‘I would like that. I would like that. I would like that. And all of this beautiful looming and construction – the colour – he built everything. It is beautiful, but even more so, it’s clean and it works great, and it does everything I need.”

This footage should come with a warning. You will want to rewire your pedalboard after watching this. You might also be in the market for a new pedalboard power supply. Vai gives his CIOKS DC7 the highest commendation.

Of course, most player’s – even those performing live night after night – won’t require a ‘board like this. It’s not that Vai's is necessarily complex; it's that he has some powerful hardware on it.

Many of Vai’s stompboxes are commonly found, such as his trusty Dunlop Cry Baby wah pedal and the Xotic EP Booster. Vai admits he was late to the party with the latter.

“This little EP Booster, I have never used it before except for this tour and I am so surprised by how often I’m using it,” he says. “It gives you a boost but it accentuates everything above 4kHz in a way that’s not painful, so that’s nice!”

There’s also an MXR Phase 90, his ever-present DigiTech Whammy, a Universal Audio UAFX Max preamp and dual compressor pedal and most intriguingly a custom-made MXR overdrive pedal that has no name as yet but it is finished in a Vai-friendly shade of green. Could this be a coming signature pedal, a take on his favourite green box, the Tube Screamer, or is it just a custom-job pinch-hitter? Watch this space.

That, however, is that as far as outboard pedals go. You’ll notice there are no notable absentees. There are no Boss digital delay pedals here. Typically, Vai would have two in his setup, each set to a different delay time.

Here, however, his Fractal Axe-Fx III amp modeller is driving the bus as far as effects go, with the centrepiece of MacArthur’s epic ‘board build a Fractal FC-12 MkII foot controller. And it’s really down to Vai’s discretion should he choose to use it and do the switching himself.

“Doug navigates it. He has another pedal like this right over there. And it’s quite a pleasure because throughout the whole show I don’t have to touch it. Doug does it. And there’s like what? 50 switches per song. That’s really nice. That, you can’t buy.”

Compare and contrast this rig with his usual touring setup, or with the stripped-down rig MacArthur put together in 2023 for Vai’s dates with the Metropole Orchestra, and you’ll find a lot of differences. But one thing remains constant. The most important footswitch of them all is the one that turns on Vai’s fan.

Check it out above, as Vai explains why he needs not one or two of his Synergy preamp units but four, all running in tandem with a Roland Jazz Chorus, and why this gig called for two Roland guitar synthesizers and a laptop onstage to program them. You can subscribe to Sweetwater’s YouTube channel here.

For all the progressive rock aficionados out there, the ongoing BEAT tour has been a source of unimaginable excitement.

It features two former members of King Crimson - guitarist Adrian Belew and bassist Tony Levin - performing Crimson music from the ’80s with two other legendary musicians, drummer Danny Carey from Tool, and guitar hero Steve Vai.

The first run of BEAT dates took place last year and you can bet there’s more to come.

And as Steve Vai tells MusicRadar, he’s relishing the challenge of playing this unconventional music with such gifted musicians.

First, Steve describes the experience of playing alongside Danny Carey.

“I’ve been aware of Tool since the early 90s,” he says. “I didn’t personally know anybody in the band but I’d seen them play.

“When the BEAT thing happened, I met Danny for the first time at a Tool show. We hung out backstage and I have to say he is an absolute sweetheart. But to play with him, oh my god!

“He can do all the difficult stuff but with this incredible feel. He knows how to move. We don’t play to a click, everything is very fluid, it has to be with this kind of music.

“Danny does this solo every night on Indiscipline and it’s always remarkable. He never repeats himself.

“You can tell when a musician is connected and really in the moment of what they’re doing. Things will come out that feel magical and unexpected. That’s what Danny does every night. It’s a miracle!

“Adrian and I would be watching and then look at each other as if to say ‘How?!’ He’s an astonishing musician.”

Steve then talks about performing with Adrian Belew, another legendary guitarist who has, like Vai, a connection to Frank Zappa.

“I can’t say enough about Adrian. I knew about his work with Zappa, but that didn’t show me all of his brilliance.

“You need to hear him flexing his muscles in different situations to discover the breadth of the man’s abilities. There are his contributions to David Bowie and Talking Heads, but what he did on those ’80s King Crimson records was monumental.

“Together we’ve merged our sounds in a way that creates a really dynamic show.

“I would say Adrian is underrated in the echelons of guitar. Nobody plays like anybody else, nobody can play like me, but they can get sort of close. Honestly, there’s no-one close to Adrian.

“There’s a special way he’s crafted his own dimension of sounds. To see him play this complex polymetric music while singing at 75 is unbelievable. He still hits the notes with that silky voice. He’ll talk and joke around while I have to keep my head down. The man is a marvel!”

Steve uses a Roland synth rig for BEAT shows. It could be his most avant-garde rig yet…

“I’ve played around with synths before but I’ve never had to include them as part of the war chest,” he says.

“I’ve used Roland gear on various records. There’s a song I wrote called Upanishads where I used almost every setting for something unusual. But with BEAT I had to go back and listen to how the synths were being used, because Robert [Fripp] and Adrian were the first to do that.

“They had the GR-300, which was odd and clunky, but it worked great for the music. Adrian brought his back. Synth gear has evolved since then, so I’m using the SY-1000 and GM-800.

"On Sartori In Tangier, most of the effects are coming from the Synth block in my Axe-Fx. It’s quirky because the notes jump around, you have to be delicate. For Industry, I built the fattest patch to do this huge cloud solo.

“I set out to honour the parts, because I’m a fan and want to play the exact notes. Robert and I are different beasts. Most of it was fine, I could hit the notes, which is great because that’s my job. If you come to see Steve Vai in BEAT, you get to see Steve Vai working! You come to my solo shows, it’s another thing entirely.

“Robert wrote beautiful parts, but the techniques didn’t come naturally [to me]. It’s different to what I do.

“There was a time in Zappa’s band when I was a heavy picker. That stuff was hard because Frank didn’t write on guitar, he would write on piano and then give it to you. His parts were so un-guitaristic! I had the chops and focus back then. Some of this Beat stuff took months to get under my fingers.

“There were things I had to reorganise a little. There’s a part in Waiting Man with this impossible picking thing that Robert does in fourths at quick speed. I had to drop a whole step with my Whammy pedal and work out a hammering riff using open strings.

"Then there’s Thela Hun Ginjeet, which has this obtuse picking part. The way I was doing it didn’t have that funky swagger. In the end I decided to strum it, which wasn’t conventional.

“And then there’s Three Of A Perfect Pair. Jesus, that was hard! But I got it.

"At my age, after everything I’ve done, I welcome the challenges," he says. "But when it came to Frame By Frame, it was relentless. There’s a cross-picking riff, it’s quite simple but it just never lets up. I could kinda do it, but it didn’t feel consistent.”

As it turns out, Robert Fripp had some words of wisdom to offer and helped point Steve in the right direction, encouraging him to put his own stamp on the twitchy 1981 masterpiece...

“I figured I could double pick it,” Steve says. “I didn’t have much choice. It was working but it didn’t fulfil me.

"It like I was cheating a bit. In the back of my mind, I was thinking, ‘Why not hammer this?’ I couldn’t get the part exactly right, it was awkward. And, god bless him, Robert has been helpful. He saw a video from our second show online, and sent over a suggestion.

“He said, ‘Why not hammer it all and then improvise away, before coming back for the chord changes?’ I was warming up backstage, saw his email and did it that night as suggested. It was easier and totally within my wheelhouse.

“The only other thing I changed was Elephant Talk. I chose to hammer a section because I liked how it rolled.”

Steve Vai has never been one to sit on his hands for too long, but looking at the American guitarist’s schedule over the next 12 months, you could almost say right now is the busiest he’s ever been.

He’s currently promoting the G3 Reunion Live release, documenting the sold-out 2024 tour with the original line-up of him with Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson.

Then there’s the upcoming SatchVai record with Joe Satriani – his first time collaborating with another instrumental guitarist.

And, of course, there’s always new solo material being composed because, as he’s proven time and time again, this man’s imagination never ceases to run wild.

“I have this thing I call my ‘infinity shelf’, which is a hard drive with snippets of guitar ideas,” Vai tells MusicRadar, speaking to us from The Harmony Hut, his home studio in Encino. “I’m talking about thousands of riffs that will one day get turned into real music. I’m always adding to it.”

This notion of evolution and progression is more than evident in the latest G3 live release.

You’ll find classic cuts that were on the debut G3 live record of 1997 – masterpieces like Johnson’s Desert Rose, Satriani’s Summer Song and Vai’s most famous track For The Love Of God. But more importantly the setlist is reflective of just how far each player has come in the near-three decades since.

There have been various incarnations of G3 over the years, including legendary virtuosos Yngwie Malmsteen, John Petrucci and Paul Gilbert, but many might argue the original G3 is the most definitive.

The fact that Vai, Satriani and Johnson have such varied approaches to tone and composition is what makes this package work so damn well.

“We sort of play in the same backyard, but different parts of the playground,” Vai says. “Occasionally we get together by the monkey bars!

“I gotta tell you, this reunion felt special. As a musician, you are a different person every day but that first G3 tour feels like a lifetime ago. Bringing it back felt great. I’m there with my friends, I love playing with them and we resonate well together.”

Eric Johnson pays tribute to Jeff Beck in the form of Freeway Jam – a beautiful yet poignant reminder that we are now in the post-Beck age…

“Very true,” Vai says. “And it’s such a classic jam song. I was playing that in my basement as a 15 year-old.

“Jeff played a huge role in my musical upbringing. There was always something about his touch, notes choices and bulletproof way of navigating things. His performances were otherworldly.

“One thing that joined us at the hip was a love for the whammy bar. You can hear various influences in my music: Beck, a little bit of Holdsworth, and Satch. Everyone in G3 has their own distinct DNA… it’s a prerequisite for a G!”

We’ve heard one track from the SatchVai album so far: The Sea Of Emotion, Pt.1.

What else can we expect from this album?

“Craziness!” Vai says, laughing. “I’ll see an email from Joe and think, okay, here we go! That first listen is always interesting.

“I’ve never done anything like this – we are co-creating, so there are sketches of melodies and arpeggiation. At the beginning, Joe sent me two parts of The Sea Of Emotion. They sounded fantastic and I could immediately hear how I would contribute.

“Then I had the idea of taking a riff from an old tape when Joe was giving me lessons and turning it into part three. I got a solo back recently and he’s kicking ass, man! Joe is on fire.

“What better inspiration can you get? Him saying ‘Here’s my solo, now it’s your turn, go!’ I have to deliver, reach into my deep zone and be more Steve Vai than ever.

“I’m not going to try and sound like Joe, because I can’t, I don’t want to and people won’t want to hear that.”

Guitarist Pete Thorn has more than a few stories to tell and, in a new interview with Guitar World he gives fans the inside track on his illustrious past, playing with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell and his new gig alongside his heroes, Steve Vai and Joe Satriani.

But life hasn’t always been on the up for Thorn. Following Cornell’s untimely death in 2017, Thorn, Cornell's touring guitarist, found himself at an all-time low. But after the tragedy and with an invite from a friend to come along to the 2017 Malibu Guitar Festival, Thorn resolved to shake off his blues.

“It was two days after Chris Cornell had passed,” he recalls. “A friend who did some work for Steve invited me to get me out of the house. I really was in a funk, obviously, super-sad, but I decided I should go. After Steve played, I was summoned to come to the little backstage area."

The two had met briefly and started a friendship a few years earlier following Thorn’s extensive work with everyone from Melissa Etheridge to Don Henley and, most prominently, Chris Cornell.

“Steve motioned for me to come over, then sat with me and proceeded to say, and I'm paraphrasing a bit, ‘I know you lost your friend, and I just want you to know that you can still have a relationship with him, it's too soon now, but the time will come where you think of them, and it'll be good thoughts, happy, good memories.’

“I will never forget that,” Thorn continues. “Here, I'd lost a close friend and collaborator, and a hero of mine, from the time I was 11 years old or so, took the time to console me… And that's Steve.

"He has an amazing ability to make you feel seen. I believe he genuinely cares about what others are doing and what they are up to. He always asks about you and how you are every time.”

And now, more than a hero, mentor and friend, Steve Vai is now Pete Thorn's bandmate. Following much conjecture about who would be joining the lineup of Joe Satriani and Steve Vai’s new StatchVai Band project, Thorn landed the gig.

Thorn provides rhythm guitar alongside Marco Mendoza on bass, and Kenny Aronoff on drums.

There is not much that Steve Vai can’t play on the electric guitar. Few have done more to extend what is possible on the instrument, and yet, even the greats sometimes struggle with another great’s playing. Even Vai gets flummoxed.

Speaking to Guitar World, Vai has admitted that there is one riff that King Crimson’s Robert Fripp wrote that just boggles his mind, so much so that he had to find a workaround when performing it live with Crimson alumni Tony Levin and Adrian Belew on their recent BEAT Tour.

“A lot of the guitar parts were totally within my ability, but there were a couple that I just couldn’t navigate,” said Vai. “One of them was Frame By Frame. It’s a simple riff; it’s only four notes, but it’s this cross-picking riff that’s fast and relentless. He just doesn’t let up.

“I didn’t have the confidence that I could do it perfectly every night. It was done by a 35-year-old Fripp at the top of his game. And 64-year-old Steve Vai doesn’t really work that technique very well!”

There are all kinds of licks that we could file under unplayable. But if we have learned anything from the history of guitar is that nothing is unplayable. It just takes time. Today’s unplayable is tomorrow’s rite of passage, a staging post in our musical development. Vai has contributed more than his fair share of unplayable moments – nailing For The Love Of God would be many players’ idea of their musical Everest. For him, Fripp’s “holistic” approach to guitar was what attracted him to the BEAT Tour in the first place. Vai wanted the challenge, and that’s what he got.

But what was he to do about Frame By Frame, one of the tricksier tracks from King Crimson’s 1982 studio album Discipline? Vai’s first thought, to double-pick it, ultimately wasn’t what he was looking for. Luckily, he had some help from the man who wrote it. Fripp might not be taking part in the BEAT Tour, but he is fully in support of it, even giving it its name, and he had some tactical advice for Vai to help him get Frame By Frame under his fingers.

“I navigated it by double-picking it. I wasn’t happy with that,” said Vai. “But two days after the first show I got an email from Robert, who’d watched a video. He said, ‘Why don’t you hammer Frame By Frame? Grab the initial notes and then improvise on it. Then go to the next chord and do that.’

“That was something I’d thought about doing initially, but it would take it far away from the original part. But when it came from Robert as a suggestion, I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s my wheelhouse.’ I did it that night at the show, and it worked beautifully. It’s unique to me – yet it was birthed by Robert and Adrian, you know?”

There is a nice irony in Vai’s story. He tells Guitar World that it was when he was on tour his old friend (and former teacher) Joe Satriani when he first started preparing in earnest for the BEAT Tour. He took the music with him, all transcribed, and would work on it backstage, and Satriani could surely relate, having taken on Sammy Hagar’s Best Of All Worlds tour, with Satch having to play Eddie Van Halen’s parts night after night, and nail the tone. He even had a custom amplifier designed by 3rd Power for the gig.

Vai and Satriani will take their Satch/Vai Tour to the UK and Europe in 2025, kicking off at the Barbican in York, England, on 13 June. Vai promises a “powerful celebration” of the electric guitar.

“He is my favourite guitarist to jam with, and now we have another opportunity to take it to the stage,” he said. “I feel as though we are both at the top of our game, and the show will be a powerful celebration of the coolest instrument in the world, the electric guitar!”

See SATCHVAI Band for full dates and ticket details, and stand by for more original music from the pair in 2025. In the meantime, you can always pick up the G3: 25th Anniversary Reunion Tour album, which is out on 31 January through earMUSIC, and collects all three live sets from the original G3 lineup, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson, and the three of them jamming together.

Joe Satriani and Steve Vai have put a band together and are headed to the UK and Europe for an epic 2025 tour – and it might not be long before we hear some new music from the two titans of the electric guitar, too.

The SATCHVAI Band (all caps because this is officially a BFD) will kick off their Surfing With The Hydra Tour on 13 June at the Barbican in York, braving the UK’s hay fever season and uncooperative summer weather before heading out across Europe. Over two dozen dates have been announced. More are coming.

The pair, who have been friends since they were teenagers, first toured together on the G3, but only officially appeared together onstage this year, string of blockbuster US dates, releasing their first co-written single, The Sea Of Emotion Part One, promising more music to come.

“The SATCHVAI Band Tour is happening! I’m so looking forward to sharing the stage with Steve again,” says Satriani. “Every time we play together, it takes me back to when we were teenagers, eating and breathing music every second of the day, pushing, challenging, and helping each other to be the best we could be. I guess we’ve never stopped!”

Vai can attest to that. He was a former student of Satriani’s and told MusicRadar that the New Jersey virtuoso was unsparing in his criticism.

“When I was a kid, he would say, ‘No, don’t vibrate it out of tune! You’ll sound like an idiot!’ When I was 13 years old!” said Vai. “And I said, ‘Okay, I will never vibrate a note ever out of tune for the rest of my life.’”

And as far as we can tell he has stuck to that. Vai says touring with Satch is a “pleasure and an honour” and you can be guaranteed that they will be holding nothing back when they hit the stage.

“He is my favourite guitarist to jam with, and now we have another opportunity to take it to the stage,” says Vai. “I feel as though we are both at the top of our game, and the show will be a powerful celebration of the coolest instrument in the world, the electric guitar!”

There are few details as to the release schedule for new music but we will hear the second instalment of The Sea Of Emotion by the time they hit the stage. The song is a trilogy, with the third part written from a recording that Vai made of the pair when they were teenagers.

Speaking to Derek Thomas on the Masters of Shred YouTube channel, Satriani says it came from an old reel-to-reel recording of 20-minute practice jam of him and Vai as teenagers, playing the same thing over and over again. Vai adapted this for the new track.

“Steve kept the tape,” says Satriani. “He transferred it, got it cleaned up, all digitised, and he still has it, so the beginning of part three is actually that recording when we were just kids playing together and then he built the song around that, so it has been a crazy couple of weeks of this beginning collaboration, and that is what we are going to be unleashing on the world.”

Tickets for the Surfing With The Hydra Tour 2025 will be available via a pre-sale on 11 and 12 December, opening for general sale on 13 December. See SATCHVAI Band for full dates and ticket information.

The new G3 live album featuring Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson will be released on 31 January 2025.

Reunion Live was recorded earlier this year during a sold-out US tour by the three guitar legends who first joined forces in 1996.

The first the first G3 release in 20 years, Reunion Live features a full album-length set from each artist plus an encore jam of Hendrix, Clapton and Steppenwolf covers.

As Vai says: “A G3 tour is always an electrifying experience, and this particular G3 tour with Eric and Joe was a career highlight for me. To be able to hit the road with old friends and be in that lit-up environment of the stage and communicate on the deepest musical levels with friends is a privilege and honour, especially with such incredible players as Eric and Joe, who delivered magnificently at these shows.”

The deluxe edition of Reunion Live features a different coloured vinyl for each artist, a special splatter LP for the encore jam, and a 64-page photo book, divided into artist and jam chapters, with the full program also on 2 CDs.

It is also available in a 2CD digipack with a 16-page photo booklet and, 4 LP gatefold and digital download.

Steve Vai’s guitars and the story of his groundbreaking Ibanez signature guitar, the JEM, is to be documented in a truly epic coffee-table book with a heavyweight 1,000-plus page count – and Vai describes it is “a masterpiece”.

Wire & Wood: The Guitars Of Steve Vai is the work of Michael Mesker, who took five years to complete the book. The task took Mesker around the world in search of some of the more obscure instruments in the Vai canon. Many of these electric guitars were no longer in Vai’s possession.

Vai says he had no doubts that Mesker would be able to track them down, let alone shoot them and get the in the book.

“I was approached by Rufus Publications back in 2019 with an interest to create a high-end and compelling book of 100 of my most unique and used guitars,” says Vai. “I knew there was only one guy that could do this job most effectively and that was Michael Mesker, who was eager to do it. There isn’t anyone who knows the history of my guitars, nor has the artistic overview of photography and forensic attention to detail as he does.”

Vai says Mesker’s presentation of his guitars will “blow your mind”. Even Vai had forgotten about some of the guitars featured in the book.

“He scoured the globe to find many of these guitars, as I had given many away or sold them through the years, but he tracked them down and got the necessary shots,” says Vai. “The results are stunning and the book is a masterpiece.”

Published by Rufus Publications, with preorders open now for a late March 2025 release, Wire & Wood is available in three editions, all of which are super high-end – the Ultra Edition especially so.

The Standard Edition, available at the reduced pre-order price of £277/$360, and comprises a two-volume hardcover book that’s contained in a slipcase, with pages measuring 9.5” by 13.5”. The Deluxe Edition is similarly on a pre-order price special at £538/$699, and is limited to 500 copies, each signed and numbered by Vai, and with a larger A3-sized format.

But if you are a Vai super-fan looking for a super-collectible book and an über high-end electric guitar to go with it, the Ultra Edition is for you. It partners the Deluxe Edition with a Jem77WFP in White Floral Pattern. This truly is a gem of a JEM, limited to 14, with each guitar named by Vai, and including a signed certificate of authenticity.

The spec is on the money, with Tree of Life inlay in green, a set of Vai’s signature DiMarzio Evolution pickups, the five-way switching that makes it capable of almost any electric guitar tone you can imagine, and you’ve got that Lo-Pro Edge vibrato unit nested atop that Lion’s Claw trem cavity. It even comes with a handle. Hey, don’t underestimate how useful the Monkey Grip comes in.

Vai is the latest high-profile guitarist in recent years to release a book celebrating his guitar collection, following superlative releases from Johnny Marr (Marr’s Guitars) and Slash (Slash: The Collection). Vai said he was surprised by what he saw.

“I didn’t realise how diverse, eclectic and innovative my guitar collection was until I saw this book,” he says. “Besides the documenting of various models, this book is the penultimate definitive word on the history of the JEM and the guitars that were part of its evolution. It’s magnificent and I’m blown away.”

Wire & Wood: The Guitars of Steve Vai is available to pre-order now. Head over to Rufus Publications for more.

Steve Vai and Positive Grid have joined forces for a signature edition of the Spark MINI that ships with four custom presets designed by Vai himself, and a design inspired by his legendary custom Ibanez Hydra triple-necked electric guitar.

Dressed in burgundy Tolex, with a Mandala grille clothe design – and shipping with a signature guitar cable with Vai’s logo on the plug barrel – this Spark MINI is unmistakably a Steve Vai production, and if you purchase during the preorder period there is a chance you will get your hands one of 100 of these little feature-packed guitar amps that have been hand-signed by Vai. 

They will have been well-tested by Vai, too. He admits that he is a longtime fan of the Spark Mini and has a few of them with him when he is out on tour. As practice amps go, they're tough to beat.

“I gotta tell you, I don’t go anywhere without it,” says Vai. “I really don’t. It sounds great. I have one backstage. I have one on the bus. And I have one for my hotel room. I am so in love with it and I use it so much, they asked, ‘Hey, you wanna sprinkle a little Vai fairy dust on it?’ And here it is.”

Like previous Custom Artist Series editions with Paul Gilbert and Zakk Wylde, the Vai Spark Mini’s big selling point is the fact that it comes pre-loaded with presets that Vai has designed. 

There are four in total: Fresh, Mild, Hot, and Dirty, and each can be edited on your smartphone or mobile device via the Spark app. Vai’s presets cover the main four food groups of his tone. 

Fresh is clean, with a slap of delay on it. Mild has “a little more rock ’n’ roll of a tone” while Hot is similar to what Vai would use onstage for his “rhythm/dirty” tone. 

Fire? That’s for solos, and you can see from the demo video that it has all the gain and power you need for working your way through the Inviolate tab book.

And this being a Positive Grid product, there are plenty of ways to interact with the extended Vai guitar universe, with the Spark Mini affording players the opportunity to jam to “exclusive backing tracks and loops directly from Vai’s catalogue”.

We at MusicRadar are big fans of the Spark Mini. The tones, courtesy of that Positive Grid BIAS engine, are work the price of admission alone, and that’s before you get to features such as Smart Jam, Auto Chords, AI-powered tone, and the clever editing and preset options that the accompanying app offers you.

It has 10-watts of Class D power driving a pair of 2” active stereo speakers that bely their size. All in you have something like 33 amp models and 43 effectsThere is a headphones output, an 1/8” aux input, Bluetooth and USB connectivity that allows you to use this as a USB audio interface. 

And you can take it anywhere, with its rechargeable batteries offering up to eight hours of playing at low/mid volume from a three-hour charge. Or listening – the Spark Mini can be used as a Bluetooth speaker, too. 

Positive Grid is taking names for the preorder. Price TBC but we would expect it to be in line with the £/$229 the regular Spark Mini sells for. They are the same amp just with added Vai details and presets. See Positive Grid for more details and to sign up for the launch.

The fact that Steve Vai does not approach the electric guitar like any other guitar player owes as much to his philosophy as it does to the techniques he has developed over the years, and so when Jacob Collier comes out in a recent interview to say that the biggest thing he has learned from his friendship and collaborations with Vai is not necessarily to do with how he addresses the strings, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.

Collier, who is on the crest of his own creative wave right now having dropped all kinds of virtuosity and imagination on his fifth album, Djesse Vol 4, revealed that what he learnt from being in the room with Vai was bigger than technique, admitting in a recent interview with Kerrang! that it is the Steve Vai philosophy that is the most profound lesson he took from it. 

“He’s taught me a lot about the guitar,” says Collier. “but not so much from showing me stuff on the neck or talking about picking or something like that. It’s more about his approach to life that is quite resplendent and his philosophy for radically accepting a process and trusting the universe, which feels very big and glorious.”

This very much sounds like the Steve Vai we know and love. He didn’t name his groundbreaking Ibanez seven-string guitar the Universe for nothing. Whenever you speak to Vai, he will invariably credit the universe for bearing gifts, gifts in the form of ideas, avenues for musical exploration. 

Or as Vai calls it, “low hanging fruit” – ideas that just fall out of the sky and present themselves, like that time when he was recovering from shoulder surgery, and had to play one-handed or not at all.

This, he told MusicRadar, was how wrote Knappsack, from 2022 studio album, Inviolate. Trusting the universe? That’s part of recognising when something is low-hanging fruit, like Knappsack.

“Everything that I have done that has been worth its salt has always came with an innocent ease,” said Vai. “It was a recognition of the low-hanging fruit. So, when people saw Knappsack, where I am playing with one hand all over the place, ‘Oh my God! It’s crazy!’ Nah, it’s simple. The idea, I am sitting there, and I’m playing, and I only had one hand, and it was just low-hanging fruit. And the low-hanging fruit said, ‘You can write a song with one hand.’ So, I did.”

This low-hanging fruit is not just the preserve of Vai, a player whose reach on the instrument is beyond most mortals; this is something that is available to us all, and that was very much the sentiment that Collier was sharing with Kerrang! “There is no right or wrong,” he says. All of us can participate. 

Vai told us likewise; the talent is recognising how to pick the fruit that is uniquely speaking to you. 

“That low-hanging fruit exists in everybody when they look for it and those are the perfect creative ideas that the universe is feeding specifically for their own unique ability to exploit that idea,” said Vai. “Somebody else who is a sports figure is not going to get an idea to record a song with one hand, y’know! [Laughs]”

Collier welcomed Vai to the studio to track three songs for Djesse Vol 4: 100,000 Voices, She Put Sunshine and Box Of Stars Part 2. Last year, he shared footage from the studio in which Willow was screaming into the mic and Vai was laying down his guitar parts for 100,000 Voices. Collier was not afraid to offer his suggestions for Vai, saying it would be neat to contrast the more complex ascending scalar licks with some pentatonics on the way down.

But as he says to Kerrang!, Collier approaches his collaborations with special guests such as Vai, John Mayer and Coldplay’s Chris Martin as a fan first.

“Say Steve Vai for example – I listen and I think, ‘How does he do that? That’s crazy!’” says Collier. “And Steve is one of my dearest friends. He’s an amazing guy.”

Djesse Vol. 4 is out now via Decca. In other Collier news, the English multi-instrumentalist recently celebrated the release of his new Strandberg signature model, The Boden JC 5 Djesse, which features five-strings, tuned DAEAD – an instrument he describes as “a literal dream of mine”.

Joe Satriani says his forthcoming album with former student, longtime friend and fellow G3 guitar genius Steve Vai will feature a song based upon restored audio of the pair jamming together when they were teenagers.

Speaking to Derek Thomas for Masters of Shred’s Talking Shred YouTube segment, Satriani offered a tantalising album update, sharing the story behind forthcoming track, The Sea Of Emotion Pt 1, which debuts on Friday, 29 March, and revealing that the song will be a trilogy, with the first two parts written by him, the third written by Vai, who based his composition around on an old tape recording that Satch had long forgotten about.

“Steve used to come to my house for lessons, and I used to have an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, and every once in a while I would record us jamming together so he could hear what he sounded like, and I would critique it, like a teacher,” says Satriani. “Anyway, one song that we started to work on we recorded maybe 20 minutes of it. It was brutal, just doing this thing over and over and over again. I gave him the tape and never thought about it again.”

Fast forward what, 50 years? That’s how much time has past since Satriani gave Vai lessons. The tape has resurfaced, restored, and has been used on a track that completes 'The Sea Of Emotion trilogy' by taking the Satch/Vai story right back to the beginning.

“Steve kept the tape,” says Satriani. “He transferred it, got it cleaned up, all digitised, and he still has it, so the beginning of part three is actually that recording when we were just kids playing together and then he built the song around that, so it has been a crazy couple of weeks of this beginning collaboration, and that is what we are going to be unleashing on the world.”

Satch joined Masters Of Shred from the Monsters Of Rock Cruise 2024, and was typically forthcoming about his career, his experiences working with Mick Jagger and the challenge of nailing Eddie Van Halen’s guitar tone for the forthcoming tour with Sammy Hagar – one of the first problems being that he is learning this Van Halen material for the first time, because back in the day he didn’t want to copy EVH’s licks.

He explained where he and Vai were coming from with The Sea Of Emotion; it is a track about a place in Long Island where all the high-school kids would hang out and share their troubles.

“If you sat on the top of the parking lot, right outside the gym at the Rushmore Middle School, and you looked down, it was a really beautiful thing for kids to go to late at night,” says Satriani. “Y’know, three in the morning after partying or something, you’d sit there and you would look out onto this field, and eventually we started hanging out there, and everyone would just sort of express themselves, and maybe it was because there was nobody else around, teenagers would finally let our guard down. 

“And so we called it The Sea of Emotion, because that was the place you’d go to just sort of unload whatever it was you were thinking about, things that you were troubled about, and I brought Steve there and introduced him to that.”

Check out the full interview with Masters Of Shred above. The Sea Of Emotion Pt.1 debuts on Friday, 4pm UK time, with a video shot by Satriani’s son, ZZ. Expect six minutes of virtuosity, and a little nostalgia that will set the scene nicely for what will be one of the electric guitar albums of the year. 

Meanwhile, the Satch/Vai Tour rolls on, with the pair playing Jacksonville, Florida, tonight. See Steve Vai for full dates.

Matteo Mancuso has announced that he will be one of the virtuoso instructors at the Vai Academy 7.0, and to celebrate the announcement the Sicilian maestro has performed a fingerstyle cover of Steve Vai's Paganini-inspired knuckle-twister, Eugene’s Trick Bag.

While Mancuso is certainly not the first to cover the track that Vai wrote for Ralph Macchio’s Eugene Butler to perform in the 1986 Walter Hill movie Crossroads, but he is one of the few who has really made it is his own, using his classically informed right-hand approach to articulate Vai’s arrangement.

Mancuso developed his fingerstyle technique from watching his father play, and he explained to MusicRadar earlier this year how it gives him a freedom when phrasing arpeggio's and skipping strings.

“I started to study a little bit of classical guitar because my father is a guitar player,” said Mancuso. “I always saw him playing classical guitar with fingers, and I just thought that every guitar was meant to be played like that – only with fingers. That’s why I started electric guitar like that.” 

“Alternate picking is easier to learn rather than fingerpicking on the same string, but actually fingerstyle, or fingerpicking in general, is more useful if you want to concentrate on arpeggios or string-skipping. It lets you have more freedom on this area of the guitar.

We don’t know yet if this will be on Mancuso’s syllabus when he rocks up at the Omni Championsgate Resort, in Orlando, Florida, when the Vai Academy 7.0 gets underway on 2 January 2024. But those who are looking to bring the New Year in with some serious guitar workshopping can expect “four days and nights of non-stop guitar”.

As the tag-line reads, this event welcomes “a new breed of virtuosity”, among which, Mancuso is arguably the most exciting. Few players have made such an impact in such a short space of time, with Mancuso’s debut album, The Journey, arriving on the back of wholehearted endorsements from Al Di Meola, Tosin Abasi, Joe Bonamassa and of course Vai himself.

Vai has amassed another formidable lineup for next year’s event, with his choice of artist representing the vanguard of guitar talent. 

“I am absolutely thrilled to announce that this year’s event is all about celebrating the young, cutting-edge guitarists who are pushing the boundaries and reinventing the instrument today,” said Vai. “I have a ton of respect by this new generation of players and am fascinated by their talent, technique, and creativity. It’s inspiring to witness the incredible potential and innovative spirit that these young guitarists possess.”

Having invited Vai to guest on their latest album, it is only fitting that the enfants terribles of instrumental prog guitar, Tim Henson and Scott LePage of Polyphia, will be there. Mateus Asato will be there, fresh from releasing a signature Archetype VST plugin package with Neural DSP. Sarah Longfield, Yvette Young, Ichika Nito and Daniele Gottardo are also among the guests.

All are seriously gifted, and on hand to share some of their talents to guests. Players of all abilities are welcome. There is no competition at the Vai Academy, just an immersion in the instrument. The event takes place on 2-5 January 2024. See Vai Academy for ticket details.

• Ichika Nito plays Metallica's Nothing Else Matters on a 14-string guitar

Joe Satriani has just announced the spectacular return of the G3 Tour, and he is getting some old friends in on the act, with the original 1996 lineup of Eric Johnson and Steve Vai joining him for a special reunion tour in 2024.

The tour kicks off on 23 January in Tuscon, Arizona, and will see the venerable trio of electric guitar virtuosos play a 13-night run down the west coast of America. Satch, could not be more excited to get the inaugural lineup back together.

“Reuniting the original G3 line up is a dream come true for me,” he says. “I can’t wait to take the stage with Eric and Steve again!”

It has been a minute since we last had a G3 Tour. Last time out was 2018, when Satriani was joined by John Petrucci and Phil Collen. A lot has happened since then. Satch has put the stylistically audacious Shapeshifting in 2020, following it up with The Elephants Of Mars in 2022. 

There has been a pandemic. Steve Vai has learned a new instrument of sorts, with the triple-necked Hydra coming straight out of an Ibanez fever dream. He, too, has released a couple of studio albums, with Inviolate in 2022, and earlier this year finishing off and releasing the Vai/Gash album, which was left unreleased after the death of his good friend and lead vocalist on the record, Johnny 'Gash' Sombrotto. 

• Steve Vai: “Joe Satriani has an ear like none other. When I was a kid he would say, ‘No, don’t vibrate it out of tune. You’ll sound like an idiot!’”

Eric Johnson has been busy, too, releasing EJ Vol. 2 in 2020, with The Book of Making / Yesterday Meets Today released last year. All have had new signature guitars in the passing years. There will be lots to play. Both Vai and Johnson said they were honoured to be hooking up with their old friend on a tour that takes the G3 concept back to the start. “I’m proud to be a part of it,” said Johnson.

“It’s always an honor to contribute to a G3 tour, and to be with Joe and Eric again playing on stage is like living life to its fullest!” added Vai. 

Johnson last played G3 in 2006, which was tantalisingly close to a return to the original lineup, with Vai taking Johnson's place for the Australian dates, joining John Petrucci. Vai's most recent appearance on the G3 bill was in 2016, when he and Satch were joined by the Aristocrats. 

Sometimes the future is hard to read. Other times, not so much. Like today. It might only be 12 September 2023 but already we already know – beyond reasonable doubt – what the hottest guitar ticket of 2024 is going to be. The question is what will they play? And will they extend the tour beyond the dates that are already confirmed?  

• Eric Johnson: the 10 greatest guitar tones of all time

Even if it has never been an annual thing – c’mon, Satriani’s schedule is already busy enough – the G3 Tour has become a special event in the guitar calendar. A European leg would be something…

Tickets will go on presale tomorrow, 13 September, general sale on Friday 15 September. VIP packages offer early access to the venue, one “premium” reserved seat, and include a pre-show Q&A and photo op with these affable guitar virtuosos. 

There’s also a commemorative guitar pick set and a postcard set autographed by the principal players. Find out more over at G3 Tour.

G3 Reunion Tour 2023 Dates

• January 23, 2024, Tucson, AZ - Rialto Theatre
• January 25, 2024, Highland, CA - Yaamava Resort & Casino
• January 26, 2024, Scottsdale, AZ - Talking Stick Resort Ballroom
• January 27, 2024, Las Vegas, NV - Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino
• January 29, 2024, Spokane, WA – First Interstate Center for the Arts
• January 31, 2024, Seattle, WA - The Moore Theatre
• February 1, 2024, Salem, OR - Historic Elsinore Theatre
• February 2, 2024, Reno, NV - Grand Sierra Reno
• February 3, 2024, Oakland, CA - Fox Theater
• February 5, 2024, Fresno, CA – Saroyan Theatre
• February 7, 2024, El Cajon, CA - The Magnolia
• February 9, 2024, Los Angeles, CA - Orpheum Theatre
• February 10, 2024, Los Angeles, CA - Orpheum Theatre

Steve Vai has been looking back on some of the top-tier vocalists he has worked with in his career and says that Devin Townsend is “as brilliant as they come” who was ultimately “a little squelched” when he fronted his band for 1993’s Sex & Religion.

After playing with Frank Zappa, then David Lee Roth, and the release of Passion And – a landmark in electric guitar – Vai was already established while Townsend was just starting out on his musical journey. He was only a teenager when Vai hired him. Speaking to the Vintage Rock Pod, Vai admitted that he only needed a singer and that his vision for the band and its sound left Townsend frustrated. 

“Devin was great to work with in the studio because he was eager and he was patient,” said Vai. “He didn’t need a five-star hotel. He was also incredibly talented in his own right. And that was kind of squelched in my band because I just needed him as a singer. I didn’t know how brilliant he was as a creator, a musical creator, because I didn’t allow it, basically! A little bit, here and there, but I had my vision.”

• Devin Townsend replaced a track from his new album because of... Barbie Girl?

Vai had a clear idea of how the record was going to go. He wanted to put a supergroup together, and while he was not prepared to altogether jettison the ambitious arrangements that made Passion & Warfare resonate, he wanted to make a more accessible record.

Vai’s melody-centric approach never changed but that vision did fall under Townsend’s influence as he turned him onto heavier music. Townsend, who was recommended to Vai by his label, Relativity, gave Vai’s arrangements the voice he had been looking for.

“I finally had a singer that I could work with,” he says. “If you listen to that record, there are oceans of vocal harmonies.”

• Steve Vai: “Joe Satriani has an ear like none other. When I was a kid he would say, ‘No, don’t vibrate it out of tune. You’ll sound like an idiot!’”

There were creative tensions. There is, of course, that famous story of Townsend taking a number two in Vai’s guitar case. But that is all water under the bridge, and is the sort of misadventure that happens when you have two creative minds trying to express themselves when only one has the casting vote. It certainly hasn’t coloured Vai’s affection for their collaboration. 

“Devin was always entertaining, I can tell you that,” said Vai. “You never knew what he was going to do. He was unpredictable, and he was bold, and he was… Did I say unpredictable!? Yeah! He would do these crazy things. It was constantly entertaining. I knew it was frustrating for him because he had so much to offer and it was bubbling inside him and he was trapped in the Vai cage, doing music that maybe wasn’t necessarily what he would do, but he was a good sport about it.”

Townsend put that energy and talent to good use. After completing his stint with Vai, he formed Strapping Young Lad, initially as an industrial metal studio project, but within a few years Townsend had recruited Gene Hoglan behind the drum kit, Jed Simon on guitar, and Byron Stroud on bass guitar, and that intensity made them extreme metal royalty. 

After flaming out on extremity, Townsend went on to become one of prog-metal guitar’s most creative talents. It was then that Vai fully appreciated how good Townsend was.

“We collaborated on some things but it wasn’t until later when Devin started making his solo music that I’m like, ‘Woah! I didn’t know that was there!’” Vai says. “Because he is in my book a bona fide genius. He is as brilliant as they come.”

You can listen to the full conversation with Steve Vai at Vintage Rock Pod, and watch an extract above, in which Vai reflects on the good times playing with David Lee Roth, and the pressure of being the first guitarist to work with Diamond Dave after Eddie Van Halen. The pressure? As Vai explains, there was no pressure.

“I didn’t feel pressure because if I would have felt pressure it would have meant that I was competing with Edward and you can’t do that,” he says. “That’s foolish. You can’t compete with Edward, y’know.”

Steve Vai turned up for his gig at the Teatro Metropólitan in Mexico City on 21 June and was greeted by the sight of a local guitarist playing one signature track For The Love Of God with a twist – he performed it on two electric guitars at once.

This, apparently, is Rafael Flores’ specialty. He is a dual-guitar legato master whose two-handed tapping skills are beyond reproach. Some guitarists might reach for the convenience of the double-neck; Vai certainly has on many an occasion. But not Flores. He just has two custom Ortiz Murcio double-cuts, equipped with a Seymour Duncan humbucker pairing, and makes the magic happen, juggling them both on their guitar straps. 

As the keeper of the triple-necked Hydra, Vai, of all people, would acknowledge that. Game recognises game, and Vai, taking a video of the performance for Instagram, described Flores as a “wonderful man” and his take on the Passion And Warfare classic as a “lovely rendition”.

As Flores revealed in the comments, it took him three years to put it together. Vai is not the first guitarist whose material Flores has adapted for two guitars – sorry, two simultaneous guitars. He has reworked Always With Me, Always With You by Vai’s mentor Joe Satriani, and Something by the Beatles.  

For The Love Of God is one of Vai’s best-known works. In 2012, he told MusicRadar that the melody came to him long before the rest of the track did. He got a rough version down, humming into a cassette recorder, and then revisited it some years later when putting together his sophomore studio album. 

• Guitar lesson: Are you up to the challenge of these Steve Vai-style riffs and licks?

“Yeah, that’s a pretty good snapshot of what I do as a melody guitar player,” said Vai. “And it was just one of those simple, innocent moments that I think a songwriter has, when you are inspired it can come out at any time. I think people who are geniuses, it comes out all the time. But guys like me, I gotta wait until the moment comes. And I remember, it was in Stucco Blue Studios, and I was a young man – it was before Roth, before all that stuff.

“I was walking out of the studio. I had to go do something. There was an acoustic guitar sitting on the couch and I said, ‘I feel something. I don’t know what it is.’ And I picked up the guitar and just started playing these chords and singing the melody.

Vai likened the songwriting process to fishing, a moment of feeling out the fingerboard for where the next step of the melody would go. After he found that, got it down on tape, it lay dormant, only to come back and haunt him some years later, when he eventually revisited it and the whole track just happened.

“I heard the entire piece of music in my head,” he said. “All I needed was that much and the whole thing was there.”

Vai would go onto play For The Love Of God in his set in Mexico. He plays the final stage of his Inviolate South America Tour in Monterrey, Mexico, tonight, before returning for the US tour on 16 July, playing the Rialto in Tuscon, Arizona. See Steve Vai for full dates. Follow Rafeal Flores on Instagram.

Steve Vai’s touring rig is not what anyone could consider carry-on luggage. You have the Axe-Fx III, and the tricked out 12-switch FC-12 floor-based controller. There are the Ibanez signature guitars, and many, many versions of them – the JEMs, the PIAs. Okay, his 'board is relatively simple, but then there’s the Hydra, and the complicated routing that goes with that. But what about when Vai has a date with an orchestra? 

Well, as Vai’s tech Doug MacArthur reveals in a new YouTube rig tour, that’s a different ballgame, and it might come as a surprise, but that’s an opportunity for Vai to dial things back a little and take a more minimalistic approach.

The date was 13 May with the Metropole Orkest in the Netherlands. Vai and the Metropole have collaborated before. In May 2021, they had a three-week recording session, and this 2023 performance at the Bridge Guitar Festival, in Eindhoven, led by conductor Jukka Iisakkila, was a chance to play some new stuff. 

An off-date after the end of the European leg of Vai’s epic Inviolate Tour, it was also the chance to leave the Hyrda behind, to pick up a few favourites off the rack – EVO, of course, Vai’s number one JEM made the cut – and to travel light.

“Normally Steve has, like, a refrigerator-sized rack that we tour with all the stuff for the Hydra, a larger Axe Fx, and some other stuff,” says MacArthur. That was gone. In its stead MacArthur rolled in the super-compact Synergy Syn-1 preamp module, which features two channels driven by a pair of two 12AX7 tubes, running it through a pair of Fryette LXII 50-watt stereo power amps – a 6L6-driven favourite of Mastodon’s Bill Kelliher – and a pair of 4x12 slanted speaker cabinets.

The pedalboard is straightforward. Vai tends to fall in love in and out of love with a pedal. They go on. They come off. But those familiar with Vai’s rigs through the years might be asking themselves where the Boss DD-7 delay pedals are. 

There are typically two, set to different delay times. But for this set, MacArthur said it would have been impossible to be adjusting them between songs, and so Vai’s rhythm guitarist Dante Frisiello suggested they use a Fractal FM3 unit, which for many of us would do just nicely as a fly-rig. The FM3 could handle the delay and chorusing.

“It’s great,” says MacArthur. “You are able to program all these different patches, and its so stripped back compared to Steve’s normal Fractal with the FC-12. But it’s getting us by really well.”

There are fewer electric guitars than we are used to seeing. Here, Vai has his number one EVO JEM, FLO III, a floral-pattern JEM tuned down a whole step, and a FLO replica as a backup. 

As on Vai’s usual touring rig, his guitar’s signal feeds straight into his wah pedal, then into his signature Ibanez Jemini overdrive/distortion pedal, complete with swirl finish. MacArthur says Vai mostly uses the Tube Screamer green mode. There is a DigiTech Whammy, and a Boss volume pedal, and you can watch MacArthur explain some of these choices and the signal path in the video above.

There was one detail in the rig that MacArthur didn’t mention, and it’s one that Vai has previously described as the most important switch on his whole rig, without which he could not do the show, and that is the green button located above the volume pedal. What does that do? Well, thanks to Thomann’s rig tour with Vai from last year, we know all about that. It switches on the fan, blowing air into Vai’s face to make him look cool – and, of course, be cool, too. That helps.

The fan-shot footage in the video above will give you an idea of how all of this sounds. You can check out more of Vai’s work with the Metropole on his 2005 DVD, Visual Sound Theories.

Steve Vai and Michael Angelo Batio joined a world record breaking jam yesterday as 7,967 guitarists converged upon Wrocław Market Square, Poland, to cover Jimi Hendrix standard Hey Joe, and it’s one of the most bonkers sounding covers you’ll hear.

To some ears, this sounds like a field recording from the floor of the Anaheim Convention Center during day three of NAMM. To Vai, this massive agglomeration of acoustic and electric guitars sounded like “somebody kicked a beehive.” 

But it was the ideal preparation before he took the stage at Wrocław’s Hala Stulecia on Monday night, for the latest European leg of his epic Inviolate 2023 Tour.

“It sounded like someone kicked a bee hive!” said Vai, on Instagram. “It was glorious to see all those folks playing guitars and enjoying the event. Really quite amazing. Thanks to the festival for inviting me. We go on stage for our set soon. Poland knows how to have a good time!”

Polish blues-rock guitarist Leszek Cichoński was behind the event, which has become something of a May Day tradition in Wrocław, and assembled the biggest ever guitar orchestra for the world-record attempt. 

Just look at the footage; it’s just a sea of humanity, headstocks and strings. “It was a perfect day,” said Batio, whose Electric Guitarlands Tour hits Vienna tonight.

There, Batio will be upping the tempo. Hey Joe is barely practice speed for the Chicago speedster whose discography features some of the most blazing neoclassical shred metal guitar ever committed to tape.

But good luck finding three people who can play Planet Gemini from front to back. Jimi Hendrix’s Hey Joe is the democratisation of virtuosity write large, a track in which the greatest player of all time kept it simple but left room for decorative flourishes when the occasion called for it. 

Ordinarily, we’d pick up a Fender Stratocaster for an easy afternoon jam on Hey Joe but Vai and Batio are extremists. Vai was on his white Ibanez ‘Evo’ JEM signature guitar, leaving the Hydra behind and the multi-neck action to Batio, who had his custom-build double-necked Dean for the day. He was also pictured with his MAB2 Aviator S-style, and looked delighted to be there. Everyone did. 

The performance beats previous world records set in Wrocław, which is fast becoming to Hey Joe what Woodstock was to The Star-Spangled Banner. Back in 2008, it was some 1,900 guitarists. In 2018, 7,411 guitarists jammed on Hey Joe. Last 1 May there were 7,676. It is surely only a matter of time before we break the 8,000 mark. Next May in Wrocław? Bring a guitar.

NAMM 2023: Ibanez has launched seven new signature guitars for some of its most high-profile guitar players on its artist roster, including four stunning limited edition models for long-time endorsees Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Paul Stanley, plus new Lari Basilio, Martin Miller and Ichika Nito electric guitars.

Basilio, Miller and Nito’s new models will be join the regular Ibanez lineup. Basilio’s is perhaps the least surprising. It has been teased for some time that her LB1 was going to be made available in White, and that’s what we’ve got here. 

All the other specs are the same; there’s the solid ash body, the roasted birdseye maple fingerboard and neck – aka Ibanez’s S-Tech Wood – plus Basilio’s signature Seymour Duncan pickups, a Gotoh T1702B vibrato and Gotoh Magnum Lock tuners, and all the features that make the LB1 a true do-it-all guitar. The LB1 in White has an estimated street price of $2,699.

The new Martin Miller model should look familiar. The MMN1 takes the MM1’s AZ-N-inspired profile, its Transparent Aqua Blue finish, but reimagines the contemporary S-Style in an HSS pickup configuration, with Miller going for a set of Seymour Duncan Fortuna pickups, controlled via Ibanez’s dyna-MIX9 switching system with Alter Switch.

• Martin Miller: “Guitar players need to talk about intonation a lot more. We don’t tune our ears towards it because it is never a topic that is brought up in tuition”

Fundamentally, the guitar is constructed of a solid mahogany body, capped with a 4mm piece of flame maple. It has a roasted maple neck, a rosewood fingerboard, stainless steel frets, and the same Gotoh hardware as the LB1.

Feel-wise, it might be a little similar, too, as both Basilio and Miller have gone for a 9” to 12” compound radius ‘board. Both guitars have, of course, Prestige fret edge treatment, Luminlay side-dot markers, and ship with a hard-shell guitar case. The Martin Miller MMN1 has a list price of $3,466.

Ichika Nito’s ICHI00 rounds out the production line signature models with a guitar based on the Ibanez Talman, the compact electric favoured by the likes of Yvette Young.

It arrives in a dairy White finish, and while not that far evolved from the TM1730 that inspired it, it has some premium appointments such as a roasted maple neck carved into Ibanez’s super-speedy Wizard C profile, Gotoh MG-T locking tuners, and a trio of ICHI-S single-coil pickups.

Best of all, Nito wanted his nyatoh-bodied bolt-on to be affordable, and with an estimated street price of $699, it is by far the easiest on the budget of Ibanez’s NAMM announcements so far.

And now to the real fancy stuff; four models you’ll have to dig deep for. Let’s start with a guitar that celebrates 35 years of partnership between Steve Vai and Ibanez, the PIA77BON. 

• Steve Vai: “One ear has been pulled towards rock my whole life, the other towards high-information music; my brain mixes it up and that’s when you get the weird Vai s**t”

This takes Vai’s signature PIA format and refinishes it in a hydro-dipped multicolour swirl finish, which was newly developed for this limited run. Vai, of course, picked the colour scheme, and it’s one that references some classic JEM and UV models in his collection. The finish, by the way, is called “Brilliance of Now”, hence the “BON” in the designation. It has an estimated street price of $8,499.

Not cheap, but then it is for the collectors. It is also as high-performance as an Ibanez electric gets. You’ve got the alder body, with the Petal Grip carry handles, the five-piece maple and walnut neck, the Low-Pro Edge double-locking vibrato, and there’s even a high-pass filter on the volume control. Pickups are Vai’s signature DiMarzio UtoPIA set.

Joe Satriani, meanwhile, gets not one but two new limited-edition JS models, and like Vai’s these are vintage Satch. Well, again, we’ve got a 35th anniversary to celebrate with Satch so it’s time to dig out the good stuff.

Pulling focus and reflecting light in all directions there is the JS3CR, a JS model that references Satch’s ‘Chrome Boy’ model with a solid basswood body finished in a metallic mirror chrome finish. Just the thing for checking whether you’ve got some spinach in your teeth before you head out onstage.

It has a DiMarzio Satchur8 humbucker at the bridge and and a PAF Pro ‘bucker at the neck. Satch also has a high-pass filter on the volume control, and there’s a coil-tap on the tone pot, too. Other features include a maple neck, rosewood ‘board, 22 medium frets, Edge tremolo, and top-shelf Gotoh tuners. The JS3CR has an estimated street price of $5,399.

If a chrome finish ain’t your thing, well, what about a Paisley pattern finish? Satch’s other limited edition option is the JS1BKP, and was designed by Satriani in collaboration with the Ibanez Custom Shop in Los Angeles. 

The JS1BKP obviously has a similar profile to the JS3CR but is quite a different guitar, with a body of solid alder and a pickup configuration comprising a SUSTAINIAC Driver neck pickup, and a DiMarzio Satchur8 humbucker at the price. It has an estimated street price of $3,499. 

Finally, how about a Paul Stanley Iceman with a Cracked Mirror finish to round things out? With KISS currently circumnavigating the globe many times over for their last ever tour, why not mark the occasion with a PS3CM. Technically, it has been designed to mark 45 years of the PS10 but it’s kind of timeless. 

One of the most aggressive and out-there body shapes in the Ibanez catalogue, the PS3CM has an African mahogany body, topped with maple, a three-piece maple neck, an ebony fingerboard with medium frets (and Prestige fret edge treatment as standard). 

The hardware is by Gotoh. The pickups are from Seymour Duncan, with the KISS frontman going for a ’59 and Custom 5 humbucker pairing. The PS3CM has an estimated street price of $6,999.

For more details, head over to Ibanez.

Steve Vai has played with some of the greatest vocalists in rock music but the greatest of them all might have been the one we never got to hear until now. 

David Lee Roth, David Coverdale, Ozzy, Lemmy, Vai has worked with them all in some capacity. As a young buck with an ear for transcribing and a prodigious talent for the electric guitar, he made his bones in Frank Zappa’s band. And yet his friend, the late Johnny ‘Gash’ Sombrotto, an untutored fellow biker born with a voice and all attitude is by Vai’s lights right up there.

Vai/Gash is our posthumous introduction to this voice, this force of nature, and it is an album that offers ample evidence to support Vai’s endorsement. Tracked at the dawn of the ‘90s, fast, unrehearsed, in the moment, it was intended to be the Vai and Gash’s soundtrack to weekends spent on the back of a Harley Davidson. It is straight-up hard rock, with a hydrocarbon rhythm guitar tone – all organic crunch – and solos that say their piece with a minimum of fuss.

The album never got finished. After Gash’s death in a biking accident in 1998, Vai put the material on cold storage. He “blacked out” and tried to move on. But now the time was right to go back to it, to apply the spit and polish and put it out.

It finds Vai in an alternate mode to that of Inviolate. Inviolate was the sound of Vai as frontiersman, staking out new territory for the instrument, inventing new techniques as he did with joint-shifting on Candle Power, inventing a new instrument with Ibanez in the form of the triple-necked Hydra. Vai/Gash is a throwback to the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, the generation of Linklater’s Dazed & Confused.

“I wanted to rip something out that was really straight ahead, no frills, no extended guitar solos or widdly-widdly in between,” says Vai, joining us live from the Harmony Hut, his home studio and base camp for guitar adventure. “I just wanted prrrrrr! Uplifting! I wanted it to make us feel the way we did when we were riding.” 

Vai/Gash serves another purpose for the wider audience. For those who’d sooner take the train than to two wheels, it reveals a side to Vai that we see rarely, yet that’s always there. 

The rocker who could park himself in the Whitesnake groove and drop science on six-strings and elevate the material. The shred foil for David Lee Roth when he went solo and needed the best player on the planet. That Vai has never gone away he explains but he is pulled between two extremes, the fundamental principals of rock, and what is possible on guitar.

This record is our introduction to Gash but even just by the time it is finished we get a real feeling for who he was by the time it is finished. Did releasing this give you a sense of closure?

“It’s an odd feeling, because you really had to know Johnny Gash. I mean, he was such an extraordinary character. And by that time when I made that record, I had worked with a lot of lead singers in rock ’n’ roll, from Zappa to Roth, Graham Bonnet, David Coverdale, Lemmy, Ozzy, tons of people, and y’know there is a difference between being a great singer and a rock star, a person who has that DNA, who can stand on a stage and just be engaging, charismatic, commanding, empowered, confident. 

“I’ve seen it. I’ve been involved with every type. And there is a difference between that [and being a good singer], and nary to they meet where you have a great singer who has got the real charisma like a David Coverdale. But Gash had both to me. Whenever I would listen to the record, because I knew Johnny, I loved it. I loved it. Because he was such an interesting character. 

“He was crazy, and did insane things, but he was so charming and charismatic, and loveable. He was endearing, and funny, and a pain in the ass sometimes! All these things! Totally unpredictable, man. Totally unpredictable. I could tell you stories, you just wouldn’t believe.”

You say crazy and unpredictable, and then we read he is from Queens, NY, and it kind of all makes sense.

“Yeah, and you can hear New York in his accent, in his singing voice. People will hear this and say, ‘Oh, it sounds like when he was with Roth, or Whitesnake, or Alcatrazz.’ But there are big differences in it for me. 

“Obviously, I am the same guy who was playing on all those other records, and I have certain stylistic nuances and idiosyncrasies – and I love rock ’n’ roll. One of my ears has been pulled towards rock ’n’ roll my whole life and the other is high-information music; my brain mixes it up and that’s when you get the weird Vai shit.

“But the rock ’n’ roll is in there, and I loved that. The Roth stuff is more West Coast sounding, it’s kinda like California, it’s got that vibe. Gash is as hardcore East Coast, New York, Italian biker as you can get. The worlds don’t meet. Not the energy; just listen to that voice, the accent, and the… cheekiness. [Laughs]”

Gash's voice gets stronger as the album goes on. Did you sequence it in the order that you recorded it, and this was him really hitting his straps the more takes he did?

“You may be correct in that. I don’t recall the order. I think I did In The Wind first, but the thing about Johnny was, he had never sang. He had never sang rock ’n’ roll! He sang crooner. He could croon so beautifully. He did Frank Sinatra. There is a video of him online – he made a video for his dad – singing Frank Sinatra. Beautiful. 

“But I could hear his voice, just his speaking voice, and his yelling voice, my instincts said there’s something in there. Affter I tried to sing the record, which was an abysmal disaster – I don’t have that rock ’n’ roll voice – I got him in the studio and was stunned, like, ‘Are you kidding me!?’ 

“I produced every record I ever recorded of mine, and I have recorded great singers, and I could tell that he was just starting. I could hear things that were raw, unfiltered and energetic, like a teenager, but I also knew there was going to be a development. There were certain ways that he was singing that I thought, ‘I wish I had time to work with him.’ 

“I was planning on going back and tweaking some things, explaining, ‘Try this. Watch what happens if you do this.’ Because he loved me. We were great best friends and he trusted me musically, completely. Yeah, sometimes I think what we could have done in the future, and it is tough.

“Like, he never did a concert. He never did anything. He just blasted that shit out and I knew that, given time, it would develop into stuff that – well, we don’t know. I guess the universe had other plans.”

As a guitar player, when you are working with a vocal like that, are you conscious of pulling back a little and making space, and giving it more room?

“Yeah, you have to keep all these things into account, and my focus on a project like this has parameters. Just like my focus on Flex-Able had parameters, and Passion And Warfare, Sex And Religion, and the orchestra music that I do, you apply parameters to create flavour, and with the Gash record, I didn’t want to be the Steve Vai that got in the way of the vocal. It needed to be really powerful.” 

You then know exactly what it needs.

“Now, I love playing rock rhythm guitar like that. It is freedom. It feels so good, and I nail that shit back then. I could eat that shit for breakfast. You just gimme it and I’m gonna have so much fun with it. That was something that I wanted to do on this record. The concept was every song, straight ahead, big guitars, no excuses, no frills.”

 And that is a change of pace for you.

“The difference between this record and all of the other records I made outside of my solo work is every decision had a committee involved in it. ‘What song? Okay, you’re the guitarist, Steve. How does the rest of the band feel about what you are doing? How does the leader of the band feel?' The producer has a lot of say, the engineer, and then the label. ‘Oh, we don’t like that one. Do another one. Do this song.’ 

“I had an A&R guy come into the studio of a big band I was recording with, and I was playing harmonics. Now, you know what a harmonic is; it’s a squeal. It’s part of my style. It’s part of most guitar players’ styles. And he goes, ‘What’s that?’ And I go, ‘Oh, it’s a harmonic. You pinch it with your finger and…’ And he goes, ‘No, don’t do that. It sounds like a dying whale.’ And I said, ‘It’s a pinch harmonic!’ And goes, ‘Well take it out. Take it out.’ It is all over the whole record and he says, ‘Take them out. Take them all out.’ [Laughs] And I said, ‘Fuck you!’ [Laughs] Well, in so many words. 

“When I made the Gash record, it was a committee of one. Me. I go into the studio, lock the door, and create this beautiful wall of elegantly loose-but-tight rhythm guitar. It feels good. Big, hairy guitars, everybody loves it.”

You need pinch harmonics! What rock band can afford a horn section? You need them in there. But what you say is what you get. Tracks like Busted have got that swing-time rock feel.

“You gotta remember, I was making this record for us to listen to while we were riding, and it was, ‘What an I gonna love?’ And I think I was listening to Radar Love, and I love the energy of that track, but there were a lot of in between bits that dragged it out. And this is how a lot of people write songs. You get inspired by something you hear and then you craft around it, but I liked the way Busted slams.”

It is a time-capsule record. You could not make this record now. Hard rock had its time of innocence in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and you can’t go back. It would be like trying to reengineer your childhood, your adolescence. That gives it a poignancy.

“Yeah, ‘cos my psychological makeup has evolved over the last 30 years, and I think it is a good point that you made because I don’t think I could go back there just like that, psychologically. I could, but something else would come out.”

We all go back for that feeling, that sense of when you are 14 and it’s the last day of school before summer, it’s sunny, Van Halen is on, no homework. We might get that feeling but its fleeting, and that makes it precious.

“Yeah, right!? Isn’t it nice to be able to look back and have that experience, of the last day of school, and the new Van Halen or whatever. For me it was Led Zeppelin. Yeah, that’s nice, and when I listen to this record, I’m there. It kinda gives you an opportunity to give yourself a little nostalgic hernia.”

And there is nothing wrong with that. Culture can be too enamoured with nostalgia. A little goes a long way but it reminds us of our essence.

“Contemporarily, if you try to recapture the glory days of yore, you don’t have that innocence, which is what you said. When I recorded this record, when Led Zeppelin recorded, there is a creative innocence, and an almost bombastic call to freedom that you feel internally at that age in your 20s, your early 30s. 

“You are damn well going to make it real and nobody is gonna stop you, and it is going to be what you want. You just do it and you don’t care. At 62, I do that, but not like that. I do it with things like the Hydra! That’s my idea of a 62-year-old freedom-loving Steve Vai! [Laughs]”

Who else are we hearing on this record? Did Nikki Sixx write a song with you on this?

“Well, the song I wrote with Nikki [New Generation], I had written that way before I did the Gash stuff. We just got together one day and started writing, and this song came out and I demoed it. He is not on it but I demoed it and I put Gash on it and Nikki liked it. I sent it to him right before we released the record. And he sent me his new book. He said he liked it, so that’s good.

“But back them, I was very independent. If I wanted to record something I just did it. I would just find people. And there is an interesting story, though, because I couldn’t remember who the drummer was on this record.”

Really!?

“It was the weirdest thing! Because it was such a period of time, that happened so fast – like a week or something – and I was working with Brooks Wackerman at the time, and I totally forgot. When Gash died, I just blacked out. I put the record on the shelf. My mind must have forgotten because when I started to think who I had recorded the drums with, in my mind it was Brooks.

“For years, I’m thinking, ‘This is Brooks.’ And then when I am putting the credits together I wanted to make sure, and I sent it to him and he said, ‘No, that’s not me.’ I’m like, ‘Yes it is! That’s you! You were the only one who could sound like that who I was working with at the time.’ He said, ‘It’s not me.’ So I went on a quest to find out who it was, and trust me, I asked everybody I worked with in a 20-year period. I asked people who were around at the time! 

“I don’t even know who the engineer was. I didn’t even have an engineer. I just went into the studio and did it, and so I didn’t know who the drummer was. And the record company’s like, ‘Steve, we need to find out who the drummer is here.’ ‘I… I… Just can’t!’ I missed the deadline for the credits and then I am laying in bed, three weeks after, and it is bugging me that I couldn’t remember who the drummer is.”

It’s kind of serious. You need to know who did what. 

“Yeah! I’m lying there going, ‘Come on, Vai, get your shit together! You’re not that old! You’re not there yet!’ [Laughs] And then I said to myself, ‘You know how it was. You’re just not allowing yourself to know.’ Back, at that time when I made the Gash record, I was starting to contemplate what Sex And Religion was going to be and I started to audition drummers. And Gregg Bissonette had recommended one of his students, this girl out of Texas. 

“Her name was Tiffany Smith, and as soon as I remembered... ‘Of course it was Tiffany!’ I flew her up from Texas. She came to my house for three days. And we recorded 16 hours a day, for three days. That’s what she said, because I called her. ‘Tiffany, did you play on this stuff?’ She said, ‘Yup, that’s me!’ And I said, ‘Of course it’s you!’ Because she sounded so good. We recorded 16 hours a day and the Gash stuff made up 60 per cent of what we recorded. I have got so much stuff in the vault.

It is a great performance.

“I loved her. She had such great rock ’n’ roll instincts. She had a whole sound, and she would instinctually listen to the track that I had built with a click and an improvised bass part, guitars. I would just play it to her and she would go, ‘BAMM!’ Then Gash, he’d listen. I’d show him the words and he just nailed it. It went so fast. 

“The only documentation of the whole project was the handwritten lyrics, and track sheets that gave no information of the date, anything. I had to ask a friend of mine who introduced me to Gash, way back in the day, when I recorded it, and he said, ‘You recorded this in 1991.’”

You had a lot of left brain, right brain stuff going on at the time. But here’s a question: do you remember what you played through?

“Now, this is just my recollection but I believe the guitar at the time was EVO [Vai's white Ibanez JEM signature guitar], because I am pretty sure I had it because it was my motorcycle days and that is how I named EVO, after the Evolution [engine] of a Harley. 

“The amp sounds to me like my Bogner. And I think it was that period. But Jonathan, there was no thinking involved in making this record. I just went, grabbed the guitar, ‘Roll the tape! Let’s get this done! I wanna get on the road and listen to it.’ Solos? One take. No fucking around. All right, let’s go.”

You make a lot of music than needs a lot of thought behind it. Sometimes you need to do something that doesn’t for balance. Sometimes I have you down as Steve Vai, green tea drinker, beekeeper, meditation. But you’re also Steve Vai, the biker, the rock ’n’ roll guy. You’ve got to feed both sides of the personality.

“Yeah, a person feels fulfilled when they are expressing all the various aspects of their creative intentions. I have kind of navigated it that way, and it’s funny because people say, ‘Oh, you’ve done so many different kinds of things.’ Yeah, why not? If something resonates with you, do it. The alternative is that you compromise your freedom.”

Freedom is great. You’ve got that. You can take your time, develop a new technique, invent a new instrument, but then you’ve got opportunities to jam with Whitesnake at Hellfest. That looked like a lot of fun, by the way, and something that maybe you needed to do to realign your chakras.

“You know how you were talking about how you can project into the past and find those nostalgic moments that give you a little lift, well, when I look into my past, the only thing I choose to remember are the things I enjoyed. What’s the alternative? So when I think about Whitesnake, there was so much that I enjoyed about that. 

“I was so lucky. I felt very privileged just to be put in that situation for however long we did it, and to make such a cool record, and to tour like that. And David Coverdale, man, the guy was phenomenal, even if you are on the stage watching him. He never missed. He was always confident and he always sang great. 

“The guys in the band were great fun. Adrian [Vandenberg] and I are dear friends, and I saw Rudy [Sarzo] the other night, and I saw Tommy [Aldridge] at Hellfest. Bands come and go, and come and go, and come and go, and I knew through all of it that eventually I had to be independent because I had too many ideas of what I wanted to do.

“When I did Passion And Warfare, I just thought that was the end of my career as a rock guy. ‘No one is going to get this record and that is fine! I still have to do it.’ It was like the Gash record. After I recorded it, do I wanna release this? And the answer was no because it was not quite done, but also because it wasn’t quite the right time because we were in grunge world by then.

“I did enjoy the snapshot of the Whitesnake thing when Hellfest came along. I do feel incredibly lucky to be the sort of artist who can play on Hellfest and then on the same tour play Bospop, and I can do these different kind of stages. But Hellfest was just… Walking towards the stage for Hellfest, becoming that guy, y’know! And the fact that Whitesnake was going on after me was the bonus.

“I thought that David might reach out and offer me the chance to come and play, and I was very happy when he did. Being on that stage with him again was just really a nice little reminder of how cool it was to be a rock star in the ‘90s.”

Did you have to work at it to remember the parts?

“Well, I played Still Of The Night, last song.”

You would still remember that.

“That’s an easy song. It’s a nice song.”

There is a lot guitar player can learn from singers. Phrasing, all that stuff, what you can do with the instrument, what not to do. When not to play.

“Absolutely, good melodies are phrased like the way we communicate. Good melodies sound like the human voice in their phrasing. We use commas. We use periods. We use inflections, dynamics, all these things, and you can incorporate that into a melody and you are gonna play differently. 

“One of the exercises I suggest to guitar players to extract that is to create a sentence in your head, about anything, it could be anything, and then play the sentence and keep playing it over and over. You are going to be doing those kinds of things we are talking about, mimicking a human voice. 

“Otherwise, I could just sit here and talk to you like this all day in a monotone voice and just keep going on and on and… I could give you the secrets to the universe but it would be meaningless because you would get bored pretty quick and I’d sound like a shithead.”

Or a cattle auctioneer.

“A lot of people play guitar like that!”

Well that’s true, the verbal diarrhoea. Now, you’ve also just released a new torture manual, the Inviolate tablature book. How were the Hydra parts handled on tab?

“We had to have them written out so that each neck in on a different staff. If you are interested in that kind of thing, manuscript, and if you are fascinated with that guitar, and the song that I perform, Teeth Of The Hydra, if you have the manuscript you can actually see how it is all laid out.”

And people can build that together. Players are getting more and more clever with the looper pedals by the day.

“Oh yeah, sure! Because I am a guitar player, and there are so many guitar lovers in the world that are going through the academic stage, and are hungry for other guitar players’ stuff. Inviolate, if you are into that kind of thing, it’s nice guitar music to play, like Candle Power and Zeus In Chains – that’s so much fun. Little Pretty… I mean, they’re a little advanced, but they are fulfilling and you can see them now, and you can get the write notes.”

They’re advanced but when you finally get a breakthrough it’s like you’re flying.

“Yeah!”

Let’s wrap this up. Back to the road. What is the ultimate biker song?

“Born To Be Wild. Yeah, I think that many bikers would concur. And who knows? Maybe it’ll be In The Wind?”

And if there was one vocalist you could collaborate with, that you haven’t already, who would that be?

“Tom Waits. Tom Waits but he doesn’t collaborate that way, and I have tried many times. Are you familiar with my record Story Of Light? Well, there is a song on there called John The Revelator, and that was one I sent to Tom to see if he would be interested. And he basically said [no]. 

“I know him. I’ve had the privilege of meeting him a bunch of times, and it was very interesting because John The Revelator is an old classic. And he said, ‘A lot of people have done this song and they really do it in their own way.’ Tom’s integrity is bulletproof. He only does what his mind feels like he can resonate with authentically. 

“Even saying Steve Vai and Tom Waits in the same sentence it’s like totally bizarre, but he is my favourite living artist. Interestingly enough, a couple of years after that, he came out with his own version of John The Revelator, so other than that, I’ve had the great privilege of collaborating with his favourites

“...Y'know, I’ve always loved Robert Plant. I always loved the idea of working on a couple of songs or something with him, but I am probably totally off his radar.”

Vai/Gash is out now on all formats via Favored Nations / Mascot Label Group. Steve Vai is touring the world in 2023. Visit Vai.com for full dates.

Steve Vai says that he and Ozzy Osbourne wrote and recorded an entire album together during the mid ‘90s that never got released, and that sadly will most likely never be released owing to rights issues.

Vai was speaking to Eonmusic about the newly released Vai/Gash album when the conversation turned to Ozzy. He was one of a number of artists that hooked up with the Prince of Darkness during the writing process for Ozzmosis. One of his tracks, My Little Man, which was co-written with Motörhead’s Lemmy, making the final cut. But Vai has revealed that there was a whole album of material on tape, and he took a far out approach to his tones, sending his electric guitar through an octave effect for the rhythm parts. 

“Well, I’m sitting on a whole Ozzy record, and it's like the Gash record – not 'like' the Gash record – but it's a project that I recorded that's sitting on the shelf,” said Vai. “I don’t have any control over it or rights to it, obviously, but we did record some pretty good stuff.”

By Ozzy’s Ozzmosis era, Vai had already collaborated with some legendary vocalists. He had made his bones with Frank Zappa before joining David Lee Roth’s all-star solo band, then later flanking rock royalty alongside David Coverdale in Whitesnake. An Ozzy band led by Vai on guitar looked possible. 

“Ozzy and I got carried away because we were having a lot of fun, and we ended up recording a lot of stuff,” said Vai. “And then we started scheming; 'Hey, let’s make a new record!' And all that was fine and good, and we got excited about it until the hammer came down, and they basically said, ‘What are you doing? No, you’ve just got to take a song from Vai and finish your record. We’re already into it for this much money, and Vai is [expensive].’”

• Watch Steve Vai: His First 30 Years documentary
• 10 guitarists we want to hear on the next Ozzy album

What he and Ozzy would have cooked up together would have been fascinating, especially with Vai explaining how all of his rhythm parts were processed by an octaver, which would have added some serious weight to his tone.

“The interesting thing about that stuff we recorded from a guitar perspective is all of my rhythm guitar parts, I use an octave divider,” he said. “That record doesn’t sound like anything else. There was some real, real heavy stuff… That was a conscious effort.

“I thought, ‘Okay, you’re going to work with Ozzy, and all these incredible guitar players have played with Ozzy; what are you going to do?’ I was not going to be conventional. Yeah, that’s not me as you know, but I had to be accessible, so I thought, ‘I'm going to use an octave divider on everything.”

Two of the tracks did end up being reworked and used by Vai. Danger Zone was one that Vai had already for his project with Johnny ‘Gash’ Sombrotto on vocals, a record that was started around 1990 but was never finished. Vai shelved the material after Gash’s death in ’98 and only released it this year. Another was Dyin’ Day, which ended up on as an instrumental 1996’s Fire Garden with Ozzy sharing a cowriting credit.

Vai/Gash is out now via Favored Nations/Mascot Label Group. You can read the full interview with Vai over at Eonmusic.

Steve Vai has warned that the costs of touring have spiralled and that bands are lucky if they can break even, confessing that his 2022 European tour in support of Inviolate was the “most challenging” tour he has put together.

The Inviolate Tour Europe was Vai’s first in six years, and speaking to Meltdown on his Talkin’ Rock show on Detroit radio station 101WRIF – a conversation in which he confessed to owning around 200 electric guitars, with 15 per cent of his collection "lost in the wind" – Vai described a post-Covid touring landscape as “kinda deranged”, in which there were bus shortages, support shortages and rising expenses. 

Things are getting better, said Vai, but the bottom line is not what it used to be, and the financial challenges of putting a tour together are causing even larger acts to shorten their schedules.

“Trying to get out on tour after Covid was incredibly difficult for musicians, because everything was kinda deranged,” he said. “You couldn’t get a bus. Buses sat for tour years, and you can’t do that. All the bus drivers went to drive trucks, so we didn’t have bus drivers. You couldn’t get gear. You couldn’t get help. And it was real difficult. The European tour I did was the most challenging tour I ever done, but we got through it. Now things are getting oiled. Things are starting to come back together nicely.”

Vai was speaking in support of his new album, Vai/Gash, an album he recorded with the late Johnny ‘Gash’ Sombrotto on vocals, which was finally released last week after it had sat on the shelf for 25 years. Gash and Vai were close friends who bonded over biker culture and a shared love of Harley Davidson motorcycles. 

Around 1990, Vai wanted to write a straight-up rock album to soundtrack bike rides, and Sombrotto, who had no previous experience as a frontman, turned out to have the perfect voice for the material. 

“Something in me wanted to get him in the studio and see how he would belt over these biker type songs I had demoed, but nothing could have prepared me for the voice that came out of his mouth,” recalled Vai in a statement. “I had to think, off course he sounds like that because that’s him, confident, authentic, fearless but with a light-hearted intention. This was the voice I wanted to hear wailing over these slamming rock tracks. I was stunned.”

Around that time, Vai was working on Sex And Religion and never had the time to finish it, intending to return to it later in the decade. After Gash died in a motorcycle accident in 1998, Vai sat on the material indefinitely.

“I just became so disheartened I threw the whole thing on the shelf for 25 more years,” he told Talkin’ Rock, revealing how one of the eight tracks they recorded was co-written with Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe. 

As for touring, Vai is going to be spending the rest of 2023 on the road, returning to Europe in March before heading to Mexico and South America, then across Asia, India and through into Africa. “I am fortunate,” he said. “Tickets just went on sale and remarkably there are gigs selling out in one day, and that is a nice surprise.”

And maybe those advance sales are mission-critical, too, because the financial realities Vai talks about for touring musicians are squeezing them at both ends. Acts can afford slow sales when the margins are so slim.

“It’s remarkable,” Vai said. “Before you do a tour, you get all the gigs, the guarantees, you look at what your bottom line is, and it has changed, brother. First of all, unfortunately, the promoters and stuff are challenged in [being able to] pay what they used to pay, and it is just so much more expensive. The buses, and the fuel, and shipping gear to Europe? Oh my god! I couldn’t believe it. You are lucky if you break even. I have a lot of friends who are cancelling, big bands, because they just can’t get the numbers to balance.”

Fiscal challenges or not, Vai’s tour schedule is crammed for 2023, and yes, he is taking the Hydra on the road with him. Head over to the Steve Vai website for full dates. 

Vai/Gash is out now on CD via Favored Nations/Mascot Label Group, with a vinyl release to follow on 24 February. 

Steve Vai will finally released his shelved '90s rock album Gash album on 27 January. The vinyl release will then follow on 24 February.

"This record was written and recorded in somewhat of a stream of consciousness in 1991 within perhaps a two-week period as an answer to my desire to have a particular kind of music to listen to when I was riding my Harley Davison Motorcycle with my friends," reveals Vai.

"It’s reminiscent of a certain type of rock music I enjoyed as a teenager in the 1970s. These recordings sat on the shelf for over 30 years and are being released now in 2023.”

The name of the Vai / Gash record comes from his collaboration with vocalist and fellow biker Johnny 'Gash' Sombrotto, who sadly died in a motorcycle accident in 1998, nearly two decades after suffering life-changing injuries from an earlier accident. 

“Around 1990, I was overcome with a desire to rip out what I thought would be a straight-ahead type of rock record that contained the kind of music I wish I had to listen to when I was that teenager ensconced in the biker culture," explains Vai. "And then I met Johnny 'Gash' Sombrotto.
 
"John was born in Queens, New York and as a youth was an avid motorcycle enthusiast. In 1977 at the age of 21, he endured a serious accident that caused his body to catch fire while plunging 30 feet onto a barbed wire fence.

"The doctors told his family that he had third degree burns over 60% of his body, and that if he even survived, there was a strong possibility that he would lose his right arm and left leg. While in the Burn Unit, he endured excruciating pain, especially when given the intense daily cycle of hot baths for his burns. He soldiered on, and after a month he was finally discharged from the hospital. Luckily, no limbs were amputated.

"He was, however, left with a partial left ear and layers of skin grafts over his neck, arms, legs, and entire chest. The stories he told about his recovery and the excruciating pain involved were crushingly gut wrenching. But he survived, and eventually thrived again. He made his way out to Los Angeles in 1982 and got right back up on his motorcycle.”

The two ended up bonding through their mutual love of motorcycle culture, and Vai was endeared by Sombrotto's personality.

"I’ve observed many people interacting with him on our numerous motorcycle road trips and other adventures," says Vai. "At first sight, many people could be taken by his bald head, scarred neck and burnt-off ear. Looking as he did and riding a Harley it was easy to assume he was perhaps a tough, menacing biker with a nefarious attitude, but after engaging with him for even a minute, his charm and magnetic charisma had them laughing in their shoes and completely enjoying his uplifting presence. 

"He endeared people with his wit, warmth, and sparkle. John hit it off instantly with the most unlikely of people of every age, color, size, political or sexual persuasions. He was non superficial and never judged people. This allowed his engaging personality and intoxicating charm to draw you in. Under all those scars was a bold and fearlessly warm heart that can be seen in his disarming and big soft blue eyes.”

The guitarist then had the idea for a musical collaboration, and he was wowed by Sombrotto's voice.  

"Something in me wanted to get him in the studio and see how he would belt over these biker type songs I had demoed, but nothing could have prepared me for the voice that came out of his mouth," recalls Vai. "I had to think, off course he sounds like that because that’s him, confident, authentic, fearless but with a light-hearted intention. This was the voice I wanted to hear wailing over these slamming rock tracks. I was stunned. 

"Around that timeframe I was also starting to launch work on Sex And Religion and was hoping to eventually record more than the eight songs I had laid down with John for an alternative project, but that was proven impossible. On September 7th, 1998, two days after my father had passed away, the phone rang, and it was John’s beloved girlfriend Nancy. Her voice was quaking, and I somehow knew what she was going to tell me. ‘John was in a bike accident and was killed’.”

Those eight songs will now be released as Vai / Gash, with In The Wind as the first taster. But as Vai looks back with the project, he'll also be moving forward without longtime guitarist Dave Weiner has part of his live band.

After 23 years he's decided to step down. The amicable parting is explained by Weiner and Vai in the video posted above with Weiner looking forward to 'new adventures' with music. He even found his own replacement – the band's guitar and bass tech Dante Frisello – who is introduced in the video too.  

• Preorder Vai / Gash 

Steve Vai has been reflecting on his career and back catalogue and has revealed the track that he believes is his “greatest accomplishment” on guitar. 

From the outside looking in, perhaps we would imagine it would be Teeth Of The Hydra, the track that demonstrates his ability to master the steam punk-inspired, triple-necked custom electric guitar that Ibanez was crazy enough to make for him. There is a case to be made for Candle Power, which brings a neo-Vai technique to the fore in the form of joint-shifting, creating a quasi-country, programmed anime quality to spanky clean tone guitar.

But speaking to Guitar Player, Vai looked back to 2016’s Modern Primitive album for the song that he thinks is a career highlight.

Yes, he spoke about the importance of songs such as Bad Horsie, which could have come from the electric guitar of his Crossroads character, Jack Butler, or Passion And Warfare classic For The Love Of God, a song that he never tires of playing. 

The track that stood above them all, however, was And We Are One, which he believes has a solo he has never bettered.

“I would go on record to say that I think the solo on this is perhaps my greatest accomplishment on the guitar,” said Vai. “That would be because of its phrasing, its neatness and its beauty. I don’t feel pretentious saying that, because I’m speaking within my capacities.”

It’s also because it reveals as much of Vai as any other piece of music he has released. It tells a story through instrumental guitar, and a way that only Vai could.

“With this song, I told myself, ‘You’re going to record a solo here, where every riff is going to be unique for you,” he continued. “It can’t be anything you’ve done before, and it has to be innovative.’ In that one song, there is more phrasing and melodic intimacy than anything I’ve ever recorded. That’s why this song is so important to me.

“There is really a lot going on in my playing that might not be apparent to someone who isn’t watching me play this. Not that that is important in itself, of course. What is important is that when the listener hears it, they feel something.”

Speaking to MusicRadar in March, Vai explained how the challenge of the new was a motivating factor, an invitation to dig deeper into the guitar, to fathom the instrument’s potential.

The recently released Inviolate presented him with many such challenges; how to play the three-necked Hydra, how ‘joint-shifting’ could work in a song such as Candle Power, and even how to play one-handed as he recovered from shoulder surgery and wrote and performed Knappsack while his picking arm was rested in a sling. This he says, was a gift.

“When you give your focus to something constantly, you are going to go deeper and deeper,” he said. “What you are pointing out is an evolution of a particularly way that I play that was brought on by various situations. For instance, I always liked legato. I was a big Allan Holdsworth fan. I just liked that, like you were saying, that woodwind kind of a sound. 

“I always look for situations that are challenging. Some are harder than others, but challenging situations where I can ask myself, ‘How can this serve me? How can I make lemonade out of lemons?’ So, when they said, ‘Lockdown!’ I said, ‘Okay, how can that serve me?’ Candle Power, Under It All, Sandman Cloud Mist, Knappsack, that all came out of lockdown. That’s how it served me.”

Head over to Guitar Player for Vai’s rundown of the other career-defining tracks in his catalogue.

Steve Vai is selling off a huge array of rare electric guitars, gear and memorabilia in a monster auction hosted by Julien's. 

Superfans and collectors looking for Vai ephemera might want to bid on a Frank Zappa tour jacket, handwritten music and sketches, or perhaps some stage-worn cowboy boots from his days playing with David Lee Roth. 

Guitar nerds will similarly have a field day. There’s a veritable cornucopia of delights, with guitars, amps and effects processors from all eras of Vai’s career – from the downright weird and esoteric to the classic.

Alongside a number of Carvin guitar amps, rack-mounted samplers and synthesizers, and acoustic guitars, there are some truly notable Vai guitars here. Take EVO IV, a 2012 Ibanez JEM7V in White, which was used by Vai as a backup to his 1992 white JEM that arrived as a prototype during the Sex & Religion era. 

• Steve Vai reveals the pedals he couldn't live without, zombie apocalypse or no zombie apocalypse

Some reports have stated that Vai named it after the DiMarzio Evolution humbuckers he had installed in it, but speaking to Guitarist in March, he said it was the Harley Davidson Evolution engine that gave it its name.

“It was basically stock. Through the years I changed out the neck and pickups several times, and also the electronics and the bridge,” Vai said. “At that time, this guitar had a magnetic-like pull to me. The first time I played it, it felt like home. This was the main guitar I used from 1992 to present day. I used this guitar at more concerts and recordings than any other guitar. It always felt like my safe place.”

You can now purchase Vai’s backup to his safe space, with bids starting at $2,000 and expected to fetch up to $12,000. Like the Evo, it has ‘Evo IV’ handwritten in marker by its Floyd Rose vibrato.

There are other notable JEMs under the hammer, such as Sofia, the custom-design model he used during the 2011 Experience Hendrix tour, which you can hear in action below.

And then there is “Roopy”, an early 1988 JEM7RB in Root Beer finish, and Muscle Boy, a custom graphic JEM that was made for Vai in the ‘80s. 

Another super-cool JEM is “Ode”, a mirror-finished model used heavily during the Real Illusions era [and pictured top]. 

But, as you might expect from a guitar player whose arsenal now includes custom monsters such as the three-necked Ibanez Hydra, there are some outré lots featuring some far-out designs.

There is a Bill Conklin custom seven-string, described by Vai as a “wild piece of 7-string art”, which has a hand-carved cobra body with hieroglyphic inlays, and a headstock that you could take spear-fishing. It’s nuts, though Vai says it plays well for the most part, “but it can bite at times if you play the wrong notes”.

Other notable lots include a 1999 double-neck, “Coroza”, which never made it onto the Ibanez catalogue. It has six and seven-string necks, with the six having a locking tremolo and HSH pickup configuration, the seven outfitted with dual-humbuckers and a through-body hardtail.

If that is a little modernistic, there’s also an EDS-1275-inspired 1976 Ibanez double-neck, aka “Not Her”, which was purchased to replace a similar model stolen in 1980. No Stairway? Yes Stairway, with bidding currently at $1,250 and conservatively expected to reach $2,000. 

Bidding is open now, with the three-day Icons And Idols: Rock N Roll auction event being hosted from 11-13 November. For more details, head over to Julien's Auctions.

Steve Vai is proven himself to be a champion of the new generation of instrumental guitarists; Tosin Abasi, Plini and now Polyphia have received the nod of approval from an innovator in the genre. But Vai is going one further with the latter, he's guested on their new song Ego Death.

And the team-up works very well indeed, with Vai fitting into the often otherworldly tonality and techniques of Polyphia's sound in his own way like a true guitar chameleon – and of course Vai is a trailblazer in that field. 

Contrary to his previous statements regarding 'guitar music', Tim Henson and the boys are huge fans of Vai and even give him a throne to sit on in the video. 

King Vai? We like the sound of that. 

The track – which also features Grammy Award-winning trumpet player and producer Brasstracks – will close Polyphia's forthcoming fourth album Remember That You Will Die, due 28 October via Rise Records – preorder here. 

Nobody has taken instrumental guitar music to new ears like this band right now and we're intrigued to see how far they can take it, especially with the integration of guest vocalists on the new album, including Chino Moreno and Sophia Black. 

Living Colour had already brought Rock In Rio 2022 to fever pitch. But having tore through a blistering rendition of Time’s Up, the band took a beat, before raising the stakes, with guitarist Vernon Reid addressing the crowd at the Parque Olímpico to tell them they had a pinch hitter coming off the bench to round things out on electric guitar.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to bring out our very, very special guest,” said Reid. “One of the greatest guitarists in the world, and our dear friend, Mr Steve Vai.”

Vai, emerges onstage, dressed in a multi-coloured shirt, armed with his Ibanez PIA signature guitar in Onyx Black, plays a lick, takes it down low with the vibrato before Reid jokes, “You’re hired! Let’s go.” And the band duly launch into a cover of Led Zeppelin’s Rock And Roll.

It’s a performance that’s lit up not only by Vai and Reid taking turns to solo – Vai applying his animalistic style to the Jimmy Page’s template, Reid tearing it up on his Hamer Chaparral – and Will Calhoun honouring John Bonham with a thunderous performance on drums, ably backed up by the peerless Doug Wimbish on bass guitar.

This Is The Life Follows, with Vai playing the intro melody on his Sustaniac-equipped PIA prototype, Corey Glover joining in on vocals, before Reid and Vai settle into the stilted swagger of the riff.

It is a song that reminds us just how close Living Colour can take avant-garde rock to the mainstream, taking the horizonless sensibility of jazz and applying it to the primacy of rock and funk rhythms. This is the sort of fusionist anarchy that Vai loves; he’s having a ball here.

A celebratory Crosstown Traffic follows, bouncing on a righteous groove, before the NYC rock stalwarts close out their set with their 1988 breakout hit, Cult Of Personality, which established the band as a staple of MTV’s rock programming, winning a Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1989.

Speaking to Louder in 2016, Reid explained how the song came together, pulling together audio samples of world leaders and political figures, and resting on a riff that served as shorthand as to what Living Colour’s sound is all about.

“That cool riff had a Zeppelin-ish vibe, but also a Mahavishnu Orchestra thing going on,” Reid said. “It was based on a series of notes that Corey had sung – my attempt to repeat that [on guitar]. I already had the lyrics, but with the music in place it very quickly took on a life of its own.” 

Steve Vai’s Inviolate Tour 2022 picks up on 28 September at The Magnolia, El Cajon, California. See Steve Vai for full dates. You can check out his cameo as Living Colour's over-qualified ringer – and the full set – above.

A new documentary charting the first three decades of guitar virtuoso Steve Vai’s life and career has been released – and you can watch it right now on YouTube for free.

Steve Vai – His First 30 Years, is narrated and written by Alan Berry, with Mark Enochs and Vai himself credited as co-writers. Berry, whose credits include similar documentaries about Black Sabbath’s seminal albums Masters Of Reality and Sabotage, has pulled together an expansive narrative that charts the rise of a Grammy-winning guitar great. 

It follows Vai from childhood, growing up in Long Island, learning guitar from Joe Satriani, progressing through the Berklee music school system before making his bones in the inspiring yet unsparing environment of Frank Zappa’s band… 

Fans are familiar with the chapters in Vai's story: Alcatrazz, David Lee Roth, starring in the movie Crossroads as the devil’s own guitar player, Whitesnake, and then a solo career that redefined instrumental rock guitar, with a partnership with Ibanez that has revolutionised the design of the electric guitar. 

All the major staging posts in the first three decades of Vai’s career, from Satch student to designing the JEM signature guitar with Ibanez, and releasing the seminal Passion And Warfare album, aged 30, where the film reaches its conclusion. But Berry fills in the gaps. 

He doesn’t shy away from the difficult material – the period in Vai’s life where he suffered depression and anxiety – nor the light stuff. There are some very funny anecdotes in here that make give fans a full picture of Vai. Who know, for instance, that he drove an ice cream truck, and that it would get him out of trouble then back into it within 24 hours? You might never eat a tuna sandwich again. 

What drives him through all of this, what pulls him forward and continues to do so? Speaking to MusicRadar in March, Vai said it was satisfaction he took from taking on a challenge, besting it, and making the most of the opportunities that gives you.

“Satisfaction is addictive,” explained Vai. “My style was accidental and innocent, because I sat there and thought, ‘I like this. As a matter of fact, I really like this. Okay, here’s a challenge…’ And then you complete the challenge and it is an opportunity for you. That’s the way it was in teenage Steve’s mind. Can’t do it, but wanna do it… That is all I ever needed, and that was all I ever had.”

That ethos has served Vai well over the years. He advised us to keep searching for inspiration in all places, and when the idea comes – even if it sounds too simple to have merit – it is our job to seize upon it and use it. Or to keep pushing to play something you never thought possible.

“You know what tickles me the most?,” he said, wiggling his fingers, air guitar style. “going, ‘Holy shit! It worked! It worked better than I thought, and it sounds more obtuse than I could have imagined.”

Of course, not all of Vai’s ideas are close to being low-hanging fruit. At least, not in the everyday sense. As Berry’s documentary reminds us, some of Vai’s greatest creative epiphanies were hard won, such as being halfway through a 10-day fast when it came time to record one of Passion And Warfare’s standout tracks, For The Love Of God.

“I was trying to push myself to the limit,” Vai said. “When it came time to record ‘For the Love of God,’ my fingers were totally gone. I needed to be in that state of mind to record this song, and I was in absolute pain because of my fingers.”

You can watch Steve Vai – His First 30 Years above, or head over to The Tapes Archive to read a transcript.

Much like his music, Steve Vai’s guitar collection is in a state of constant evolution.

Unveiled at the 1987 NAMM show, his Japanese-made Ibanez JEM signature guitar signalled the birth of a modern classic.

Since then, the design has been tweaked into new and interesting areas. But testament to its winning formula the apple never seems to fall too far from the tree.

Featuring a host of instruments from Vai’s decades-long career, Thomann have released a new video in which guitar techs Doug and Thomas share some rare insights into these iconic axes.

Here’s a rundown of just some of the incredible electric guitars in Vai’s current rig…

Ibanez JEM Evo

Kicking off in style with Vai’s treasured 1992 Ibanez JEM named Evo, guitar tech Doug explains how he sets up the instrument using a regular .009 to .042 set of electric guitar strings while measuring in increments of 1/32-inch.

“He doesn’t like very low action,” says Doug. 

“He likes to really be able to grab the note.”

Ibanez JSM100

This John Scofield dual humbucker signature semi featuring a figured Anigre top, back and sides is used by Vai for a single song called Little Pretty (from his most recent studio album, Inviolate).

“Steve really likes the way this guitar sounds. And for that song, it’s perfect,” enthuses Doug, who sets the instrument up with a slightly heavier .046 bottom string.

Ibanez JEM Flo & Flo III

One of the oldest members of Vai’s guitarsenal, Flo has made a reappearance with a newer neck.

According to Doug, this stock Ibanez neck has been lightly scalloped and fretted with EVO Gold wire.

Flo III is one of the most treasured electric guitars in Vai’s collection.

“There are two JEMs that I reach for,” Vai recently told Guitarist magazine. “One is the one I call Flo III: it has a sustainer and it’s the one I’ve used the most in the last 10 years.

“The other would be Evo [see above], which doesn’t have a sustainer and has a pretty different sound. But they’re both the same guitar, basically.”

Ibanez Onyx PIA

The Onyx PIA, meaning “Paradise in Art” (also named after Vai’s wife, Pia) is an advanced version of the guitarist’s signature JEM guitars.

“These have stainless steel frets,” highlights Doug. “You can’t wear them out. They’re very durable and they have a very glassy feel for vibrato.”

This particular guitar has been fitted with a Sustainiac – something Vai is still experimenting with having used Fernandez Sustainers for many years.

Ibanez JEM Bo

This guitar gets a live outing on the Inviolate track Avalancha and is tuned to drop C.

“Steve lightened up his gauge for drop C,” reveals Doug. “He always used to use .010 to .052. It’s .010 to .046 right now.”

“Martin Sims: he was the first guy in the UK who came up with LEDs in the neck in 1999,” adds Vai’s long-time guitar tech Thomas Nordegg.

Ibanez PIA Envy

Dubbed Envy (after the finish Envy Green), this Ibanez PIA has also been fitted with fretboard LEDs.

“This one is set up for Bad Horsie,” points out Doug, referring to the famous track from Vai’s 1995 release Alien Love Secrets.

Fitted with a Sustainiac it also has a slide conveniently attached to the back of the headstock.

Interspersed with live performance footage the film later delves into Vai’s mind-blowing array of guitar amps and effects.

And who better to explain it than Vai himself?

Steve Vai is in his happy place. Literally and physically that is the Harmony Hut, base camp for his audio adventures, where “enthusiasm makes the time disappear” as he tunnels deeper into his appreciation of the electric guitar.

He joins us from the Harmony Hut via Zoom, a familiar framing for the conversation, with his mixing desk glowing softly in blue in the background. But Vai’s happy place is also a state of mind, and it can be found in the afterglow of discovery. 

He has enjoyed his share of discoveries over the years, working with Carvin, Synergy, Morley, DiMarzio, and most notably Ibanez with whom he developed the JEM, Universe, PIA, and of course the striking triple-necked Hydra that presented musical opportunities the likes of which Vai could scarcely dream of until he finally plugged the steampunk-inspired hybrid electric in and learned to play it. 

The satisfaction in bringing the Hydra to heel moved him to tears, and it gave him the sounds and inspiration to write Teeth Of The Hydra, the opening track to his 10th studio album, Inviolate. Those are the most profound discoveries for Vai; new ideas and techniques, a challenge to overcome and ultimately a sound he hasn’t heard before. Those are the experiences that keep him at the instrument.

“Satisfaction is addictive,” he says. “My style was accidental and innocent, because I sat there and thought, ‘I like this. As a matter of fact, I really like this. Okay, here’s a challenge…’ And then you complete the challenge and it is an opportunity for you. That’s the way it was in teenage Steve’s mind. Can’t do it, but wanna do it… ‘Oh, there it is. Oh my God! I can do it.’ That is all I ever needed, and that was all I ever had.”

This pattern of challenge then opportunity set the table for a recording career that has taken Vai from tutelage under Joe Satriani to stunt guitar foil for Frank Zappa, playing with David Lee Roth, starring in the movie Crossroads, Whitesnake, and then becoming one of guitar’s most respected and adventurous solo artists.

“Everything came as a consequence of that,” he explains. “I didn’t ask Frank to be in his band, he asked me. I didn’t ask Crossroads. They found me. David Lee Roth found me. My record deals, they came to me. Of course I put my radar out but the challenge for me was, ‘Who do I go with: D’Addario or Ernie Ball?’ That’s a challenge, a good challenge!”

The story of Inviolate is very Steve Vai; it’s all about alien sounds and quicksilver arrangements that came together through challenge and opportunity. Injured with his arm in a sling, he put his legato chops to work and wrote Knappsack, an idea that he describes as “low-hanging fruit.” 

The technique of joint-shifting was a challenge yet it yielded, finally, and gave him Candle Power, a track performed with the unerring rigour of an algorithm but an extravagance that is trademark Vai.

Playing the Hydra? That was a big one. He plays rehearsal footage over the video connection and it’s striking how smooth his movements have to be as he moves from neck to neck and keeps the song airborne. The Hydra’s complex terrain took a lot of time. 

A lot of these techniques take time. In an hour-long conversation, that’s the only limitation that Vai acknowledges. Not even he can cheat time. The rest, however, is up for grabs.

There are limitations to the guitar in terms of the frequencies we can play with but what you do is challenge what we think is possible from them – even on a micro level, your legato gives it a woodwind quality. Is that deliberate, that sense of challenging the guitar?

“I have been very fortunate in life because I discovered something I really enjoy. When a person enjoys something that they enjoy doing, in any field, and they stick with it, it’s inevitable that they are going to evolve their own world in it. Their world is going to evolve and it is going to constantly change.  You can’t go backwards. The idea of going back is actually insane. As you go forward, you are gaining experience.

“When you give your focus to something constantly, you are going to go deeper and deeper, and I think that what you are pointing out is an evolution of a particularly way that I play that was brought on by various situations. For instance, I always liked legato. I was a big Allan Holdsworth fan. I just liked that, like you were saying, that woodwind kind of a sound.

“And I always look for situations that are challenging. Some are harder than others, but challenging situations where I can ask myself, ‘How can this serve me? How can I make lemonade out of lemons?’ So, when they said, ‘Lockdown!’ I said, ‘Okay, how can that serve me?’ Candle Power, Under It All, Sandman Cloud Mist, Knappsack, that all came out of lockdown. That’s how it served me.”

You played on through injury. It’s difficult to get you away from the guitar.

“When I got home from the hospital, the second day, I picked up my guitar and there was no challenge involved in the idea; the idea was low-hanging fruit. I’m going to write this song with one hand!”

Sometimes the low-hanging fruit can be the hardest thing to recognise from a creative perspective. We look too hard for ideas. We undervalue some ideas because they feel too easy.

“Exactly! That it is an incredibly powerful point, because everything that I have done that has been worth its salt has always came with an innocent ease. It was a recognition of the low-hanging fruit. So, when people saw Knappsack, where I am playing with one hand all over the place, ‘Oh my God! It’s crazy!’ Nah, it’s simple. 

“The idea, I am sitting there, and I’m playing, and I only had one hand, and it was just low-hanging fruit. And the low-hanging fruit said, ‘You can write a song with one hand.’ So, I did it. And that was a simple recognition, just like what you were pointing out. 

“That low-hanging fruit exists in everybody when they look for it and those are the perfect creative ideas that the universe is feeding specifically for their own unique ability to exploit that idea. Somebody else who is a sports figure is not going to get an idea to record a song with one hand, y’know! [Laughs]”

This technique of joint-shifting and how you used it on Candle Power does not seem like low-hanging fruit. The execution of it is quite something, like pedal-steel country for an anime show. It has this almost programmed quality. 

“Well, thank you for that. Candle Power, many years ago, I had this visualisation, audible and visual, and being a guitar player you learn the real estate of the instrument, and you start thinking outside of the box.

“I just thought, ‘What would happen if I had a guitar that had a solid bridge?’ Because if you have a bridge that moves, like with a whammy bar, joint-shifting is impossible. And if I was to bend notes in different directions while using open strings and hammers and crawling up the neck? That was a vision. I had no idea what it was going to be but I knew in my mind’s ear it was going to sound unique and quirky, and obtuse and interesting, and it was going to look as freaky as shit!

“That was low-hanging fruit, brother. Here’s the thing, whenever you get an idea like that, specifically given to you from the universe, it comes with the feeling of enthusiasm, and when you follow that feeling of enthusiasm it is low-hanging fruit. It is innocent. You find yourself doing it because it is enjoyable. 

“‘Steve Vai, he’s got Grammys, he’s got number one records, he’s got all this stuff… He’s so lucky. He’s got it all!’ You know what tickles me the most? [Wiggles fingers] And going, ‘Holy shit! It worked! It worked better than I thought, and it sounds more obtuse than I could have imagined.” 

And that is where you find the pleasure? The satisfaction in acquiring a new technique.

“Other people can criticise [joint-shifting] but I’m fucking blown away! ‘Holy shit! I’m doing this!’ That’s joy. I’m allowed to feel that. There’s no arrogance in that. There’s an incredible appreciation. Here’s the kicker: when I thought of it, I knew I could do it if I got the time in. 

“I did not believe I could do it. If I believed I could do it I would be going, ‘I believe I could do it but I don’t know.’ That is what a belief is. But you don’t know. There’s something different inside of you when you are harbouring a belief or when you are harbouring a knowing. A knowing has no belief in it; it’s like, ‘I know I can do that.’ I just put the time in. And if I can’t do it, it’s because I can’t put the time in. 

“But the enthusiasm makes the time disappear. It stands still. That’s how you make time stand still; you give something your full attention, then you pick your head up and it’s three hours later. I picked my head up and it was three weeks later and I only got those two parts of the song that do the joint-shifting because it was so difficult.”

But now you have this technique, presumably there will be applications for it, more musical ideas. Other people can step up and use it.

“One of the things that we do creatively is create a landscape for new people to come along and be newly inspired and then take it from there. Because when I thought of joint-shifting, and you asked me if I was going to do more of that, in order to prepare for the tour I will have to work very hard just to play Candle Power, but in my mind’s eye I can see and hear a piece of music that sounds so different you will not believe it. It’s all joint-shifting and more. 

“I have these weird techniques! I hear it, and I know I can do it, but I don’t have the time. It’s going to take younger fingers and time. I try to contribute inspiration for kids to take it further because it’s a treasure. The joint-shifting thing is a treasure. You hear people say, ‘It’s a country technique everybody’s been doing…’ Fine. I don’t care. You saw me doing it that way, take it someplace else, because I took it somewhere different. Now it’s your turn. I want to see it. I want to live to see that.”

We are all standing on shoulders of giants. And yes, it could apply to country. Candle Power is like Dwight Yoakim from the Andromeda system. Players can take this and apply it in all kinds of different contexts. You can.

“Can you even imagine? I wanna do it so bad. Maybe I will. I do a little bit of it on Greenish Blues.”

You will, because it is part of your vocabulary now.

“It is, and that’s a great way of putting it. It’s your vocabulary.”

You also had a new instrument to learn in the Hydra. And then, of course, there is a big difference in being able to play a piece of music and being able to perform it.

“You’re exactly correct, and that was a real challenge for me, because the Hydra introduces some real limitations. It’s heavy. I recorded the song and learned everything when it was on a stand, because I just couldn’t hold it long enough, but Thomas Nordegg, my guitar tech, created this strap that holds the guitar and puts the weight on my waist. 

“Now you mention the performance, in my mind’s eye, I was thinking, ‘Okay, I have to get it to where I can navigate with this instrument freely onstage and not make any mistakes. I know I can do it, but it’s going to take a lot of time.’ Essentially, I am just about there.”

Can you not just use it with the stand onstage. The very act of playing it onstage is spectacle enough.

“I think so. Actually, Joe Satriani said the same thing to me, and I have decided as such that I will probably perform this with the stand. Because it is risky.”

Well, I endorse that approach. It’s funny how you both like to make things difficult for yourselves…

“We enjoy it though! What’s similar between Joe and I is that we were fortunate to discover something we really love when were young, and we just never stopped focusing on it. And you expand on it. We have a bit of a different voice, very different, but we have supported each other so much. I wouldn’t be anything, what I am today without Joe just being there – and many others. Without Jimmy Page just being there, Jimi Hendrix… 

“But Joe more than anyone else, for me, and it is just so nice that over the years we have been able to work together and we’re still like brothers. And we’re still trying to figure out ways of getting on tours together. His new record? Oh my God! It is so Satriani. It’s that expansion of melody and tone, and all of the things that you love about him. Inviolate is that artist making that next step, and those who are attracted to what I do see that as well.”

It’s fascinating that you have both made these records out at the same time and that are so indicative of where you are coming from artistically. It is great for us to look at them critically and appreciate the differences in your styles. You’ve both got a similar sensibility, a way of seeing the instrument, but how you do it is different.

“Joe is a class act, and his musical sensibilities are inspired. 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.’”

He is Mr Intonation.

“I know! I couldn’t believe his intonation. It’s stunning.”

Going back to electric guitar design, it is funny, because this is a 20th century technology, playing through 19th-century technologies like vacuum tubes, it’s quite steampunk in its own right. 

“I see various things going on. There’s a part of me that looks into the world and sees what’s available: ‘Where is technology and how can it serve me, and what guitars are available and what can they do?’

“And I remember, early on, thinking, ‘This is a Stratocaster, okay, it’s got a whammy bar, which is what I want. I don’t like the way it sounds because it has single-coils. Now there’s the Les Paul; that’s what I want. That’s what Jimmy Page plays. It sounds great. It sounds rock ’n’ roll. But it doesn’t have a whammy bar. It doesn’t have enough frets. It doesn’t sit well.’

“Then I am working with Frank Zappa and watching what a free-thinker he is, and he had no governor. When it came to taking a guitar that Jimi Hendrix burned at a concert, that Frank got ahold of, and then putting parametric EQs in it? It didn’t matter whose guitar it was, it looked cool. 

“So, I decided at one point, and this was simple, innocent, low-hanging fruit, not having any intention of making something that anybody else would be interested in except myself, and what that was was the JEM.” 

That's the key. Doing what you want with no regard to what anyone else is thinking.

“I looked around and went, ‘What do I want? What’s not here? I want 24 frets with double-coil pickups. I want that.’ It didn’t exist, y’know. I wanted to be able to reach those frets! That didn’t exist. You can’t reach them on a Strat or a Les Paul. They make these cutaways so you can’t play comfortably up high.

“When you are doing things innocently, it’s not like you feel like you are being blasphemous. It’s blasphemous to put a whammy bar on a Les Paul? Fuck you! I’ll do what I want! Y’know, I am going to do what I want because it doesn’t matter to anybody, see? That makes it easy. When it doesn’t matter to anybody else but you, it’s really easy.”

Even so, Frank Zappa really modded Hendrix’s Strat? 

“Yeah! He had these double-stacked parametric EQs. And he put a Floyd Rose on it… [Laughs] Y’know! He took the pickups out! He changed the pickup covers that had the stuff Hendrix used, the lighter fluid. It had the pickup covers that had the holes from the lighter fluid. ‘Take them out and change them!’ [Laughs]”

It’s such a Frank Zappa thing to do.

“I know! But Dweezil got it all back together. Frank didn’t throw this shit out. From what I understand it was a guitar that Jimi burned in Miami.”

Incredible. There should be nothing sacred when it comes to art. It’s freeing.

“Yes, yes! [Especially] when you are sitting there thinking that you are doing doesn’t matter to anybody. I designed the JEM to my little idiosyncrasies, and when I started playing it I thought, ‘Yes, this it. This is the guitar. It’s perfect. It is perfect for me.’ And it didn’t exist in the world.”

You have made this record to be very much like a Side A / Side B release. The sequencing would suggest so – and this is something Mr Satriani did as well on his new on. Was the vinyl release on your mind when you sequenced the record? And is that the perfect form for your music, analogue, on vinyl?

“I know what you’re saying, yeah. If people could sit in that chair [at the Harmony Hut] and hear the digital version of Inviolate and then hear the analogue version, it would become very clear to them what is going on.

“So, here’s my best explanation: I like to preserve the analogue domain as much as I can, for the vinyl, because that is what the vinyl enthusiasts are looking for. In the past, all of my records that were recorded on analogue, were analogue, analogue, analogue; it goes from 24 track to two-track, to vinyl. So, it doesn’t get processed digitally. That’s the most authentic analogue sound. 

“With something like Inviolate, I did not record it on analogue. I haven’t done that for years. But it is recorded on high-quality with great convertors – the best. We found the convertors that we liked and then recorded digital, but when I was mixing Inviolate, I did one mix to digital, and then I did one mix directly to analogue, so when you take that analogue, that analogue tape, the two-track, then goes to get mastered completely differently to the digital.” 

And you notice the difference?

“I had Bernie Grundman master it. Bernie Grundman is the most-renowned analogue record maker in history. He’s been doing it since before I was born. So, when you listen to the digital version, and you are an engineer, you understand its limitations. 

“When you slam digital meters it creates a distortion that is very unpleasant. It’s got spikes and pops and razor-edges. When you slam analogue, because it is magnetic tape, it compresses, and it warms it up, so a slammed analogue – and I am not talking destroying it here, going many dBs above the limit – you are getting the full signal that is being fed. 

“Although the source was a digital source, it didn’t have to go through analogue to digital conversions millions of times, and this is when you can relieve the recording of a lot of hash, a lot of that digital hash that you don’t realise is so annoying to you. 

“It actually makes you feel different, and this was a study that was done, that Bernie actually told me about, where they took a group of people and they played them music from vinyl that was pure analogue, and the same music on digital, and the people who were exposed only to the digital had more of an aggressive kind of an attitude or feeling – much more!”

Maybe all the digital noise that's out there is what's making everybody so angry.

“When I was mixing Inviolate, when I am mixing anything that’s pure digital, there is a part of me that is enjoying the music, that’s listening for EQs and stuff like that. But there is part of me that says, ‘This absolutely sucks.’ I hear the digital in it. I know we can’t get rid of it because it’s digital, it’s there, it’s unnoticeable to many who aren’t listening for it… That’s why I said, ‘If you are sitting in that chair’. I put the record on and the analogue is like [sighs]. It has this warmth. The top end is completely different. It is just different.”

Sure, but digital is a fact of life and it does bring with it some benefits. Like we spoke about earlier on, maybe we just have to choose not to let it bother us.

“Yeah, you forgive it! You bypass it.” 

• Inviolate is out now on CD, vinyl and digital via Favored Nations / Mascot Label Group.

We've written many, many words about guitars this year but we prefer for the playing and people to do the talking. So here's a rundown of our favourite guitar videos of the year – performances, demos and interviews featuring names, including John Mayer, Tosin Abasi, Yvette Young, Eric Gales and Rick Beato, that have inspired us. And we hope they've done the same for you. 

Eric Gales let rip with Gary Clark Jr 

Two of the greatest bluesmen around are always going to be a hot ticket, but Gales proves here why he's a player's hero as he's handed the second half of an eleven-minute jam on Gary Clark Jr's, When My Train Comes. And boy, does he run with it. No wonder you placed him high in your blues guitarists of 2021 list.

Eric Gales' 11 tips for guitarists

Rhett Shull's grade A evaluation of the Neural Quad Cortex

Shull is a working player as well as an excellent presenter, and as he gets to grips with the year's benchmark guitar multi-effects and amp modeller over the course of 28 minutes, his honestly and critical, unbiased ear come to the fore. And so does the Neural Quad Cortex's quality. 

Neural DSP Quad Cortex review

Pete Thorn entered Van Halen mode

Thorn sets the benchmark for gear demos on YouTube and Eventide's MicroPitch delay pedal gave him the green light to enter Van Halen mode (Eddie Van Halen used the effect from the 1984 album to around 1997).

What we love isn't just the playing here, it's Thorn's background on EVH's history with the effect that explains its special quality so succinctly. 

But it wasn't the only time in 2021 that Thorn got his Eddie on… 

Eventide MicroPitch Delay review

Nili Brosh, Laura Klinkert, Irene Ketikidi, Anouck André, Lari Basilio and Gretchen Menn united

A Portishead-style backing track provided the perfect foundation for an incredible showcase of guitar talents who collaborated on International Women's Day, with very different playing approaches.

Eric Haugen had a refreshing philosophy on practice

A recent video that really hit us – because Eric has a great, calming approach to things and makes some really important points about practice here that aren't often talked about by guitar players. Check out more of his lessons on the Eric Haugen YouTube channel. 

7 tips for better guitar practice

Cory Wong and The Dirty Loops joined forces

There's in the pocket, and then there's just beyond – pop funky glory from Wong and super Swede trio The Dirty Loops on Follow The Light from their collaborative EP Turbo. Where superlative musicianship meets the sharpest '80s hooks around. Shout out to Henrik Linder here, one of your worthy bassists of the year. 

Watch Cory Wong’s top 3 funk tips for guitarists

John Mayer embraced the extended guitar solo

Because even John Mayer loves soloing in the minor pentatonic like the rest of us. 

5 guitar tricks you can learn from John Mayer

Chris Buck took flight

Your pop / funk / r'n'b guitarist of 2021 (he also plays a mean rock and blues), Chris Buck shines here on the first single with his reanimated band, Cardinal Black. The solo at 2:30 is a masterclass in taste and tone. 

Interview: Chris Buck on his new band Cardinal Black, '62 Strat, Klons and going down the pedal rabbit hole

A J Ghent played masterful slide on an Abasi Concepts guitar

Making the guitar sing is an easy complement to throw around but how many players really take it to this level? And on a cutting edge Abasi Concepts Space T mode, no less. Support AJ Ghent 's music on Instagram, YouTube and Facebook.

Rick Beato's interviews become must-see events

While his chat with Sting and Dominic Miller is essential viewing, your online guitar personality of 2021's chat with Tommy Emmanuel is full of great wisdom for guitarists. 

Ok, few of us will ever get close to Emmanuel's level but that's not the point; his experience, humility and joy for the craft of making music and performing is full of great lessons to learn in this chat. 

Tommy Emmanuel: the 10 guitarists that blew my mind

The phrase 'boomer bends' became a thing

We told you Rick Beato's interviews were becoming events. When Polyphia's Tim Henson sat down for a contemporary guitar summit with Beato alongside Animals As Leaders' Tosin Abasi and Polyphia's Misha Mansoor he raised the boomer bends debate. It caused enough furore to justify a whole follow-up interview between Beato and Henson.

Tosin Abasi revealed all to Kiko Loureiro

The growth in pro guitarists making their own content has been our gain; new insights into playing and the life of a touring musician. Here is a candid fly-on-the-wall view of Megadeth guitarist Kiko Loureiro and Animals As Leaders talking technique – no interview agenda, just two world class players digging into Abasi's approaches. 

How to play guitar like... Tosin Abasi

Steve Vai played a whole song one-handed

Just in case we forgot how good Steve Vai is, he performed a whole new song called Knappsack while recovering from shoulder surgery. Knappsack being the name his surgeon gave to the sling Vai is wearing… the surgeon being Dr Knapp.

The song will feature in rerecorded form on the new Steve Vai album, Inviolate. 

Pro tip: Steve Vai's visual guide to musical modes

Matteo Mancuso making fusion fire with a Yamaha Revstar and Helix

Some supreme right hand technique going on here, folks! 

The 10 best multi-effects pedals 2021

Gibson raised the guitar broadcasting game again

As Dave Mustaine joined Gibson (and recently released his first signature model), they gave the Megadeth man the full Icon treatment and the best interview we've seen with him. They just let Mustaine talk and we were happy to listen. 

Interview: Gibson's Cesar Gueikian on the past, present and future of the guitar giant: "We care about the quality, we care about the legacy that we will leave behind"

Yvette Young had some fun with her new Ibanez signature model launch 

Being a seriously good guitar player and not taking yourself too seriously is not only possible, but positively encouraged by Yvette Young. 

Yvette Young: my 12 top tips for guitar players

We saw the Beatles creating magic

The Beatles Get Back film enabled us to see the Fab Four in new ways; joking, rehearsing and creating together, with some tense moments, over a whopping eight hours of edited and restored footage from 1969. It was enlightening and inspiring stuff.

"For the first time, John and Paul knew that George had risen to their level" – Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick track-by-track interview on Abbey Road

Mdou Moctar played a stunning live session

A beautiful setting by the river Niger and the sublime, hypnotic sounds of a guitarist and his band coming into their own this year. Mdou was also your pick for alternative guitarist of 2021. 

Mdou Moctar interview: “My intention is for the guitar to be spitting out the sound of revolution”

Julian Lage gave another masterful performance with his signature Collings

A new Julian Lage album gave us the chance to talk tone with him and enjoy the wonderful breadth of his playing. He's becoming one of the contemporary greats. 

Julian Lage: “I bought a stethoscope and taped it to the back of the Telecaster. I could only handle it for about a day and thought, ‘This is abusive!’“

And speaking of excellent instrumentals…

Lari Basilio's playing is wonderful on her recent collaboration with Ester Na here.

We became obsessed with Jay Nelson's Fender Custom Shop spraying videos

Watching a master at work is strangely relaxing. 

The best rock guitarists in the world today, according to you

One of the benefits of joining Steve Vai's Patreon is watching his exclusive Tall Tales series – the maestro simply telling great stories from his career. Now he's decided to share one with the rest of us. 

Not only is Steve Vai a great storyteller but this is a great story. We won't spoil it but it involves Vai pretending he doesn't know how to play guitar in front of a group of kids…. with hilarious results. 

For more info on Steve Vai's Patreon, head to patreon.com

Steve Vai's unusual tip on how to practice without a guitar

Steve Vai has been talking about the evolution of the electric guitar and recalls how it was Frank Zappa who introduced him to the then avant-garde technique of tapping, before Eddie Van Halen came in with "an epic transmutation of the guitar."

Vai was speaking to Evan Ball on Ernie Ball's Striking A Chord! podcast about his career in music, from his early days as a high-school music theory enthusiast, to Joe Satriani's life-changing tutelage, making his bones as a player with Frank Zappa, and how Eddie Van Halen's paradigm shift changed everything for guitar in popular culture.

Speaking on the contested origins of tapping – a technique exemplified and officially canonised as an article of pop culture on Van Halen's Eruption – Vai said Zappa's Inca Roads was the first time he heard anyone try it on record.

"Depending on who you talk you you’ll hear different stories about how tapping emerged," said Vai. "You’ll hear people say, ‘Oh no, it started decades ago!’ I can only tell you my recollection, my story. The first time I personally heard tapping was on a Frank Zappa song. It was Inca Roads and he used this pick, and he would kind of like tap on the neck with his pick, and that was one of my favourite solos.

"It was a big, long, beautiful, involved solo, recorded live in Helsinki. When I heard the tapping, I said, ‘That’s cool.’ And I started doing it, but was unrefined and it was more novelty based. And then, all of a sudden, there’s Edward."

Zappa's vision would soon have a profound influence on Vai. Aged 18, Vai was asked to audition for Zappa, before Zappa deemed Vai too coltish for the band. A couple of years later he was in, but not after some due diligence on Zappa's part, with a succession of auditions scheduled to see if Vai was ready for the material and for the road.

“It was tough," recalls Vai. "He was tough. I had to go through a lot of mini-auditions. I think Frank’s concern with me was taking a 20-year-old kid on tour. ‘Is he going to be able to perform? Is he going to be able to learn all this music and actually play it properly?’ I was put through a lot of different little auditions. I remember there was this one really difficult passage in a song called Wild Love, and it is a composed piece with all these polyrhythms, and I had to play that to him over the phone."

Vai's audition was not yet complete. He had to learn a setlist of songs as Zappa was putting his band together for a 1980 tour of the States. When he got to the audition, none of them were called. "He had to see if I knew how to deal with my sound."

Other trials included learning the first movement of Sinister Footwear – "it’s impossible! ... sheer terror! – and transcribing Zappa's solos. 

"He had given me this guitar solo to transcribe," continued Vai. "And Frank’s solos were anything between five and 10 minutes long, and I transcribed it and I said, ‘Y’know, I could double that.’ And he said, ‘Go ahead.’ I learned it and really got a kick out of all these impossible things I was doing."

Ultimately, Vai made the cut, joining Zappa on stage. But, he explained, playing with Zappa was more than just a question of virtuosity. It taught him an appreciation of nuance and being able to take direction.

"Frank built music by any means necessary," explained Vai. "He would come in with written stuff and say, ‘Play this!’ Or he would pick up the guitar and cryptically play through something… He’d sing something to you. Any means necessary just to get the point across, and you just had to be ready.”

You can check out the full conversation here. Alex Winter's new Frank Zappa documentary is out now on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital HD. See Zappa for more details.

In what might be the most literal example of the term ‘sustaining an injury‘, Steve Vai has injured his hand while fretting a difficult guitar chord and holding it for 20 minutes.

Vai says he was ”meditating on” the chord when time got away from him, and after taking his hand off the fingerboard he discovered he had developed trigger finger. The US maestro was speaking to Tyler Wilson of Music Is Win for season 2 of its Guitar Villains YouTube show, when he revealed his musical misadventure.

It all started with the acoustic guitar and some experimentation. After all, what is Steve Vai if not a frontiersman for new techniques and sounds?

“It is a lot harder to play the acoustic guitar than I thought,“ said Vai. “There is nothing virtuosic in it. But that’s how I screwed up my hand. I was doing this fun thing and I had to put my thumb in this really weird position, and I had to kind of hold this chord, really for a long time. I was meditating on it. And I knew it was a hard position, and I kept on sitting there and playing it and playing it.“

According to Vai, 20 minutes pass, long enough to have sprained the tendons and developed trigger finger so severe that he needed surgery to correct it. Mild cases typically involve a splint. But Vai says the operation was a success. He's just going to have to wait it out before he can start fretting chords again.

”They did the operation, and they cut in there, and the guy is fooling around with everything in there and it’s really bizarre, but it’s all fine. It was something very simple that they can fix. But I won’t be able to play for a while.”

Nonetheless, he has a lot of music in works. In the interview, he spoke about stripping everything back for a minimalist acoustic album, and he has also revealed plans for an album of eight-string material. This enforced lay-off, however, might give Vai a chance to use his practice technique that you can do without a guitar.

NAMM 2020: Ibanez has unveiled the next evolution of Steve Vai's signature JEM series, the frankly stunning Paradise In Art (PIA).

The PIA retains much of the decorative panache of the JEM. There is multi-coloured blossom inlay spiralling up the fretboard. There is gold hardware, evocatively titled finish options of  Stallion White, Envy Green, Panther Pink and Sun Dew Gold. It is unmistakably a Steve Vai guitar.

But the big dinner party talking point is that the Monkey Grip has been replaced by the Petal Grip. In a statement, Steve Vai explained the thinking behind it.

“The petals signify the bond that two people have when they resonate together, and this is represented in the art of the guitar,” explained Vai. “The petals are also reminiscent of the Yin and Yang sign which is thought of as complementary (rather than opposing) forces that interact to form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the assembled parts. The petals are also the most beautiful and attractive part of a flower and intended to signify a message of unity and companionship. It is the ethos that guided the artistic design of the guitar.”

The PIA has a solid alder body, a five-piece maple and walnut neck, and rosewood fingerboard with 24 jumbo stainless steel frets and Prestige edge treatment. 

It is equipped with an all-new DiMarzio HSH pickup set, which is as yet unnamed, and a Floyd Rose Edge tremolo. 

Speaking to our friends at Guitar World, Vai said that the design expanded on the JEM's player-first appointments.

“Just like the JEM, it’s a very sleek, very kind of ‘metal machine,’" he said. "It’s built for tone, for speed, for intonation, for real performance. The way it sits on me, the way it sounds, the way it plays…it just feels like home. The minute I got my hands on it, I instantly felt a deep connection to the instrument.”

There are no prices listed for the PIA yet but we would imagine it to be in line with the JEM's current pricing. 

See Ibanez for more details.

Check out our NAMM 2020 hub for more gear news.