“They’re booby-trapped!” Steve Vai recalls the difficulty he faced learning Robert Fripp’s guitar parts for BEAT
Even for a player who’s tackled the catalogues of Frank Zappa, Alcatrazz, and Eddie Van Halen, some guitar parts remain as demanding and impossible as they come. Just ask Steve Vai.
Speaking in a recent interview with Rock Antenne, the virtuoso opens up about the unexpected challenge of learning Robert Fripp’s intricate guitar work for BEAT, the supergroup celebrating King Crimson’s 1980s material. While Vai initially thought he had it covered, reality soon hit as he started physically working through the parts.
READ MORE: Steve Vai struggled to play Brian May’s Red Special guitar due to its strange neck: “I just remember thinking, ‘I can’t play this thing’”
“I had to make sure I could play this stuff,” Vai explains [via Ultimate Guitar]. “So I listened to it, and I felt ‘Yeah, OK. I can get this.’”
That confidence was backed up by a detailed “music transcription book” covering every note of the era’s three albums – a “godsend”, as Vai put it.
“But once I started putting my fingers to the actual parts, I realised that they’re booby-trapped,” he says. “They’re Robert Fripp parts. And he has a unique technique that he developed his entire life, through vision and discipline. And I have a totally different technique.”
“I just felt that probably about 80% of the stuff was easily under my fingers the way he did it, and then probably 15% I got the same notes but I changed the way he did it, because our techniques were too alien to each other.”
“But there was a small percentage of stuff that was just ruthless and just so out of my ballpark at my age,” Vai adds. “And there was Frame by Frame, y’know there’s that one riff [sings fast melody]. It goes at breakneck speed, it’s impossible to pick, and it goes on forever. I couldn’t do that consistently every night. So, I changed it a bit, but that’s the only one.”
Thankfully, Vai didn’t have to second-guess those adjustments for long. As he’s previously shared, Robert Fripp himself had given him the green light to put his own spin on the parts.
“Fripp said, ‘If I were sitting in the audience, I wouldn’t want to see you doing my kind of solo. I wanna see Steve Vai go crazy!’ So, that’s what I do,” he told Vintage Guitar.
Meanwhile, BEAT – featuring former Crimson members Adrian Belew and Tony Levin alongside Tool drummer Danny Carey and Vai himself – will kick off their European tour this summer.
View the full list of dates on the band’s official website.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
