Joe Satriani on why he doesn’t rate vintage guitars “The musician has to connect with the guitar for it to become special”
Rare guitar seekers search high and low for guitars owned by the greats, in the hope that they can capture some of the same magic. But for Joe Satriani, working in a guitar shop “disillusioned” him to these collectables, simply because they don’t always sound as good as their price tag suggests.
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Having exclusive access to some of the “most expensive, the most valuable, rare guitars”, Satriani tells D’Addario, he discovered what they sounded like. And while a dream job to many, the experience made the scales fall from his eyes. “There’s nothing special about it”, Satch admitted.
Satch believes that players should “connect with the guitar” rather than chasing after vintage instruments for the sake of it. It becomes special to them, and the hallmark of their own sound. Unfortunately this would mean that buying a guitar previously owned by a guitar god doesn’t mean that you’ll get much out of it yourself.
This realisation encouraged Satriani to build custom guitars instead, but “it was really to get by week to week” he says, “and to do the gig I was doing at the time.” Outside his “disco band playing around the East Coast”, which was “going nowhere’, his solo music career was beginning to grow. Satch began realising this after receiving a short-but-sweet review of his debut solo album Not of this Earth in Guitar Player.
Despite this, Satriani still has an appreciation for unique guitars, such as the see-through Ibanez Y2K Crystal Planet prototype, designed by Junji Hotta in 1999 to coincide with his Crystal Planet album. Alongside some other gear, he sold this guitar on Bananas at Large to collectors. Even though he’s disillusioned with vintage guitars himself, he still recognises them as artefacts that people love to collect.
In the same interview, Satriani also talks about how he struggles with being extroverted on stage. “I don’t ever feel like myself” he says about the experience of playing to his fans – certainly a surprising thing for someone with as many massive gigs on his CV as Stach.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
