Sometimes itt can seem like there are more guitar virtuosos than ever before. A short scroll on Instagram, or a peruse on YouTube can be demoralizing and disincentivizing for most guitar players.
So how does one keep their head above water in a sea of virtuosos? “If I go to Instagram and I see somebody eight years old playing faster than anyone has ever played before, I’m happy,” Joe Satriani tells Guitar Interactive Magazine.
Of course, that’s easy for one of the world’s most respected shredders to say. But Satriani says that all players can benefit.
“I’m looking at it, going, ‘Maybe I can learn from that eight-year-old about how they’re holding their little finger or where they put their thumb,” he continues. “But that’s because I’m a guitar player, so I’m interested in the mechanical aspects of technique.
“But,” he also says, “it’s absurd to think that technique has anything to do with music, to a certain degree. Normal people hear music without the anxiety of technique. They either like it or they don’t.
“Us musicians, we can’t help it. We obsess about technique because we need it in order to play. The rest of the world does not perceive technique that way at all.”
Technique shouldn’t be something that players let get the better of them, because there will always be a better guitar player than you, he says. It’s the music beneath the techniques that matters.
“It’s the early ‘70s. You’re Lindsey Buckingham, and somebody gives you an Al Di Meola record,” Satriani develops. “Are you going to say, ‘Well, that’s it. I suck. Al Di Meola is God, I should just give up and work for the Post Office’”
He also turns to a late 70s post-punk classic, Gang of Four’s “Love Like Anthrax”, to further hammer home his point.
“I remember listening to the guitar part, which was just feeding back in a room for the entire song [no notes were being fretted],” he explains. He was a fan, despite it going against everything that, on paper, defines virtuosic guitar playing.
“I thought, ‘Why should I impose negativity on it because there’s not something that resembles practicing in it?’”
“We need technique,” he accepts. “When stuff is technique driven, it’s not bad, but musicians need to know that it is distinctively technique-driven.
“There’s a time and a place to stand in front of a group and go, ‘Watch this! You’ve never seen this before’, and that’s totally valid. But it’s not going to hit the audience the same way as, say, a slow, beautiful melody, or a haunting series of chords. As long as the musician understands that and they’re cool with it, then everything’s okay.”
Elsewhere, the Ibanez artist has revealed he and Steve Vai relied on plugin tones for their new collaborative album. Mick Jagger has also explained how he nearly featured on one of Satriani’s albums, but the guitarist deleted his takes.
