“My god, what am I going to do?”: Steve Vai and Joe Satriani are two of the greatest guitarists of all time, but these instruments made them panic
Even the most refined guitarists can struggle from time to time. Hell, Metallica’s James Hetfield thinks Master of Puppets is tricky, and Brian May describes the Bohemian Rhapsody riff as “unnatural”. But that’s what separates the rookies from the pros – a pro won’t back down from a challenge.
Steve Vai and Joe Satriani in particular have made a point of pushing themselves in their joint project, SATCHVAI. Alongside challenging riffs, they also strayed far out of their comfort zone; for the track Old Sins Have Long Shadows, Vai braved it out with a fretless guitar. “They’re not my expertise… I struggle with them!” Vai admits in a new interview with Guitarist.
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Typically, Vai is known for his excellent fretboard tap dancing. Without the frets, though, he felt lost. In many ways, a fretless axe is the ultimate test for a guitarist, as scrapping the frets essentially throws all conventional chords out the window. It almost transforms an axe into an off-kilter violin. However, Vai knew that the track in questioned required a fretless guitar to capture a “ghostly” feel.
“[That was] one of the big challenges for me…” he says. “When I approached [that track] one side of me is thinking ‘My God what am I going to do?’ But to get that ghostly, weird, offbeat riff, it had to be [a fretless guitar], y’know? All the vibrato and little shakes – it doesn’t sound like a guitar. It sounds like a ghostly spirit.”
Other challenges took less intimidating forms – like opting for a nylon-stringed guitar instead of a bold electric. “The nylon string intro to The Sea Of Emotion Pt 2,” Satriani says. “When I first composed that, I had full distortion, stereo echo, chorus and I’m playing it on electric guitar… but the song made this journey from a grown man who still thinks like a 14 year old, sitting by his amplifier, having a rock ‘n’ roll moment, to seeing that I should play it on a nylon-string and leave space for what Steve did, which is that electric violin-type dreamscape.”
“It was a piece of cake on the electric, but not on the acoustic…” he laughs.
SATCHVAI’s debut, The Sea of Emotion, drops on 6 November.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
