Joe Satriani

How how are you mate?

I’m doing good how about yourself?

Yeah I’m good, where are you at the moment?

I’m just in San Francisco at the moment.

We had a bit of trouble connecting yesterday

Yeah I’m not sure what that was. Somebody called yesterday instead of today, then today they started 15 minutes late but hey, I’m here now.

Well hey it all works out in the end. What have you been up to lately?

Well today was a very interesting day. I had a couple of water heaters put in my house, I had a guy come over to fix the washing machine, and then I did some testing on some Marshall Amplifiers, and in between all that I’ve been doing interviews since this morning as well so it has been one of those days where I can’t believe how much I’ve done, and I can’t wait to have a beer and just kick back.

So how were the amps?

The sound great, they were a lot of fun and there’s a new engineer at Marshall named Santiago Alvarez and he works out of Hong Kong of all places, but he’s been sending me some great amplifiers and I’ve been having a great time with them.

What sort of mods/specs are we talking about?

Well, we’ve been primarily working on the J and 4-10, and I’ve been trying to get each channel to be a little bit more SOMETHING. I want each channel to be a little bit more effective with pedals, I want the clutch channel to have a little bit more edge, and we’re making some other modifications but I can’t tell you everything that we’re doing, because it’s gotta be a surprise. We are, I guess, trying to get more and more of my sound to come out of that amp so I can use each channel during a show.

Outstanding. Sounds like the man knows what he’s doing.

Yeah he’s really great, he’s doing great things.

You’ve just released Black Swans And Wormhole Wizards. I guess a criticism that can be levelled at a lot of primarly instrumental artists is that sometimes things are a little clinical, and there’s not a lot of soul in the music. You’ve defined this as your most soulful album yet, is it a conscious decision to bring that out and how do you do that in the instrumental realm?

Well, when you start out making a record, you should have lots of goals. You’ve got songwriting, performance, sounds, personell, style and things like that, and you really need to keep control of all those things. There have been albums where I wanted to go and make a very bluesy-sounding record live in the studio, so that would be the eponymous release in ’95. There were records like Flying In A Blue Dream where I wanted to try to blend some of the elements of what was the very early days of stream-of-consciousness techno with really aggressive rock guitar, and we came up with a lot of that stuff. I also introduced the vocal thing which was a really crazy idea, but it gained me a larger audience that stuck with me and sort of got used to the idea that I would be doing lots of different things, not just Surfing With The Alien or the earlier record, Not Of This Earth, which was very unusual. Lots of unusual songs on there.
So with this one, I really wanted to bring the power of the melody and my phrasing, and the performance of not only myself but of everybody, I really wanted it to jump off the record and I don’t mean just turning things up loud, it was really about the feeling behind the music, and making it accessible to everybody so they can really feel it. I put that question to my co-producer, basically in the same breath, to Mike Fraser. I said I didn’t really know how to put it into words, but I’d like you to help me, or how can we – we’ve done lots of records together since ’96 – how can we have these songs create more of an impact on someone’s heart when they listen to the music. The technique is transitory. As soon as you do something unique that no one has done before that’s totally technical, every guitar player in the planet learns it and puts themselves on Youtube playing it and suddenly it’s not special anymore. So to make a record based solely on technique is just stupid. I’ve never done that before but I would certainly never get talked into doing something like that, instrumental music is really hard to do without that and instrumental rock guitar is probably even harder, but that’s what I do – at least when I’m not in Chickenfoot.

I find it interesting that you touched on Youtube, in terms of technical guitar players. You can see some really amazing stuff on Youtube, from a technical perspective, from all over the world. How much attention, as one of the most widely recognised, I guess masters out there, do you pay to stuff you see on there?

Well I love it, I think it’s great, for two reasons. Number one it’s great that people from all over the world can show themselves off . That part of the internet revolution is great and it really does bring us closer together. To know that kids in Perth, or Bombay or New York City are all plugged into the same thing and are all shredding is really cool. The other thing it does, though, is that it reminds you that it’s not really what makes things special, and it never was. Before the internet when people when people used to ask me about technique I’d try to explain to them that it wasn’t important, and they would always force it on my persona, like they had decided that was the guy I am and damnit that’s how they’re going to interview me. I’d always say that I’m not that guy, I’m the guy that writes songs and works hard on melodies and tries to play rockin’ solos. Now I would hope that any interviewer could go on the internet and see there are a million shredders out there, and so there is a difference between the guy who can play more songs than anyone else and the guy that’s making his own albums, the albums he wants to make.

The point you make is that it’s all fine being a virtuoso, but it’s not worth a damn if you can’t write a song.

Or if you can’t perform, you know. The definition of virtuoso needs to be broadened, it has to be understood that it doesn’t mean just running some scales. A guy like Keith Richards writes amazing songs that reach people and the songs stand the test of time, that’s a virtuoso.

The passing of your Mother – you have my condolences – how much impact did that have on the album?

Yeah, well that was devastating for my whole family. She was diagnosed with embryonic cancer and she passed away within three weeks, the diagnosis was extremely sudden, and, uh, we’ve all been struggling to deal with that. That whole year has so many ups and then finally, some really good times we shared with my mum but her passing focused all of us on the importance of family and how it is really important to not only to write about those connections but also to follow your dreams and not to hold back. SO when I went in to record the album I certainly wasn’t going to hold back, I was going to make the kind of record I needed to make, and to make sure that my performance really came from the heart.

It’s an obvious statement but no doubt your mother was extremely supportive throughout your career, especially in the early days.

Oh she really was. I was the youngest of five kids. When I came along and showed an interest in being an electric guitarist they’d probably given up a little bit in trying to get their kids to do the right thing or whatever (laughs), to become doctors or lawyers, then I come along and I wanted to be Jimi Hendrix they probably though ‘Oh, okay we give up’ but infact they used to let my highschool band play in the basement, both my parents, and they would argue with the police when they used to show up to try and shut us up. They’d buy guitar strings if I needed them and really anything, they were very supportive and they really had a lot to do with the guy I am today.

You know you’ve got good parents when they’re arguing with the police on your behalf.

Ha, yeah absolutely, that is absolutely true.

How much involvement do you have with the development of your Ibanez guitar range.

Well everything really. The designs start with me, nothing goes out until we’re both happy, that’s myself and the engineering team. I started working with them in the middle of ’87, after I recorded Surfing With The Alien, I was getting ready to tour and they agreed to make a guitar to my specs, so I took one of their existing models and made some drastic changes to it. We’ve essentially been evolving that JS guitar for 20 years now, and we just put out the 2400 last year and I’ve used that almost exclusively on the new album, along with my 1200. I’m looking at a new prototype right now, that’s like a three single-coil version of the guitar and it really sounds great, I used it on the Experience Hendrix tour and it obviously functions like a Stratocaster but it’s much more, I guess it just has more is all I can really say. There’s so much more to it. It’s really great, it’s got these pickups on it that just make it sing.

‘More’ seems to be a running theme through the amps and the guitars.

Yes, you know because my experience being a live player is there’s always an occasion during a song or a set where you need more of something, and that’s where your ear will let you down unless there’s something on there, if you can go to that extra number or there’s an extra pickup position or even if the guitar itself is very dynamic. It’s easy to put that into a pedal, it’s a little bit trickier to put it into a guitar.

Ha, do the amps go to 12? That’s one more than 11.

No, I’ve decided just to make 10 louder (laughs).

What about the VOX pedals – you said the guitar is constantly evolving, is it the same with the pedals?

Well we just released two this year. The Ice9 Overdrive Pedal is one of the coolest pedals ever. It’s literally like having four classic overdrive pedals under one foot, and of course it has a ‘more’ button, and we put some innovations in that that nobody else is doing with those pedals so that’s going to be a very hot pedal, and of course we’re just coming out with the JS amp-plug, they’re the coolest little things, they’re smaller than your hand and you plug it right into your guitar and you put your headphones on and it’s the coolest little amp, it sounds like you’re playing, y’know, through a saturator and a time machine and a new Marshall, it’s just really amazing.

Brilliant. We’ve got time for one more quick one apparently. 20 years, 15 Grammy nominations, no wins. Do you think you’ll break that?

I’ve got to be honest, I don’t think I want to. Like you said it’s been that long and I’ve had an amazing career, and I’m a little worried that if I win my luck will change. So I don’t really care about it that much.