Why Steve Vai Had to Relearn Picking After Playing Fast for Years

In the beginning of my playing, I gave precious little time to my tone. I just wanted to play fast. I started to develop this picking technique that was kind of up here like this. And I could play fast, but it didn’t sound very good. The tone of the note has so many moving parts to it. One of them is just where you hit the [Music] string. There’s so many uh parameters in creating the tone that comes off your fingers. It’s different how you turn your pick. It’s different the angle you go this way. It’s different if you do it like this or you do it like this. I changed my picking style completely. I’ll be 1983 because I just was getting tired of not having a great tone. I went through all these amplifiers. I was searching for something that sounded like some of the things I was hearing at the time. Edward Van Halen had hit the scene. You had Ingbeay. You had so many players. And I could never figure out why don’t I sound

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