Joe Satriani has built his reputation on dazzling technique. But ask him what Sammy Hagar does better than he ever could, and his answer isn’t singing — it’s knowing when not to play.
The pair have spent years playing together, first in Chickenfoot and now in Hagar’s Best of All Worlds Band, celebrating the music of Eddie Van Halen. That close collaboration has given Satriani an appreciation for a side of Hagar’s musicianship that often gets overlooked.
“I’ll play too many notes, but he won’t,” Satriani tells Thinking About Guitar. “I always ask him, ‘Well, what is that?’ And of course, he doesn’t think about it. It’s totally natural to him.
“But he somehow plays the right notes with the right kind of vibrato. And that still fascinates me, as it did when I was a young kid growing up.”
Satriani says Hagar approaches the guitar like a great lead singer rather than a typical lead guitarist.
“I always thought that one of the coolest things about his guitar playing was that he somehow took the knowledge of being a really good lead vocalist and applied it to the way he played guitar,” he says. “He’s kind of a crazy shred guitar player on the one hand. But on the other hand, he’s got this editorial process that I personally recognize as being a lead singer.”
That ability to edit himself, Satriani believes, separates Hagar from many American rock guitarists.
“There aren’t many American guitar players who are well known for restraint,” he says. “I always saw that as something that would come from the U.K. or Ireland. You have these players like Eric Clapton or Brian May who just play the perfect notes. They don’t turn the amp up to eleven.
“I think [Hagar] would take that one step back from the edge of the cliff and make sure that he could pull it off. I hear it over and over again as a thing that really good lead vocalists have. And they apply it to their guitar playing.”
Hagar’s reputation has always been built first on his voice, but he arrived at guitar with a deep appreciation for melody and a $39.95 Silvertone electric guitar, which came with an amp. As per a 2024 Classic Rock interview, he got his education trying to learn every solo Eric Clapton had ever done, because.
Speaking to Classic Rock in 2024, he recalled learning every Eric Clapton guitar solo he could find because “I was more into Clapton and Peter Green than, say, someone like Hendrix” — an influence that helps explain the economy and phrasing Satriani so admires today.
The Best of Both Worlds tour has just wrapped its June U.S. dates and heads to Europe for July before returning stateside in August.
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