
Steve Vai strikes a pose with a stunning black and gold Ibanez PIA, his latest signature guitar, introduced in 2020. The JEM’s signature “monkey grip” is gone, but don’t fret, it’s been replaced by a “petal grip.”
The maestro invents a new instrument, recovers from two surgeries, and releases the barn-burning Inviolate—but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as he reveals the source of his seemingly limitless creative power.
About halfway through my call with Steve Vai, I’m brimming with enthusiasm and feeling energized and inspired. Sure, it’s fun to talk to Vai—he’s a hero to so many of us, so it’s naturally exciting—but there’s more to this: He’s giving me a motivational pep talk.
“There’s a huge secret,” he says, and I’m all ears. “Everybody is inspired within themselves with unique ideas that are perfectly suited for their unique creativity in the world. That is within everybody. When you receive that inspiration accompanied with the feeling of enthusiasm and the belief of ‘I know I can do this, I just gotta put the time in,’ that’s an inspiration that’s tailor-made for you and there’s no way that it’s not gonna happen. The universe gave you that so that you can manifest it. That’s what it wants you to do.”
This empowering rap comes with a warning though: “Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t find it because their minds drift into fantasy about the future and basically create these fictional desires that are impractical and not really right for you. It’s like people saying, ‘I want to be a world-class virtuoso guitar player,’ but they have a completely tin ear. It’s like me saying, ‘I’m going to win Wimbledon.’ It’s a fantasy. And within a fantasy, there’s always a feeling of resistance. You might believe you can do it, but you don’t know you can. So, there’s a huge difference.”
Steve Vai - Little Pretty (Official Visualizer)
This is the kind of stuff that Vai has put out there in his Under It All YouTube series, which includes about 14 or so hours of esoteric content that sometimes veers into self-help territory. But getting the scoop direct from the maestro himself feels even more enlightening when I realize what he’s saying isn’t just a positive-mental-attitude/self-realization fest. It’s the foundational core of Vai’s ethos, going back to his earliest work.
Even casual fans know the story of how young Steve Vai so impressed Frank Zappa with his transcription of the exceedingly complicated rhythmic brainteaser “The Black Page” that Zappa hired him. It goes without saying that the rhythmic and conceptual chops necessary for handling a work like “The Black Page”—or, really, most of Zappa’s catalog—takes a rare kind of brain. But the stars had to align to help the young upstart realize his destiny.
Everybody is inspired within themselves with unique ideas that are perfectly suited for their unique creativity in the world.
While he was a fresh-faced Berklee student, Vai met keyboardist/violinist Eddie Jobson—a former Zappa side musician—at a concert by Jobson’s band, U.K. “He started to explain to me what polyrhythms were and how Frank would write polyrhythms over whole bar lines,” he remembers. “I could immediately envision what a tuplet was, what a nested tuplet was—it all just made sense with regard to the timing of a bar or whatever you place that tuplet over. I was placing tuplets over beats that included tuplet timing in them.” This crucial info helped set Vai on his course. “I had an epiphany and then that just launched an intellectual forensic study of the division of time in musical notation.” Inspired, Vai took on the monumental challenge of transcribing Zappa’s work, and the rest is history.
Nowadays, at 61, Vai has fine-tuned his sixth sense for the whims of the universe and is maintaining an uncanny level of creativity. His latest album, the astounding Inviolate, is a straightforward—inasmuch as that’s a thing for Vai—barnburner, and it’s just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. But as straightforward as Inviolate may be, the path leading to its creation was a winding one. Vai simply followed the cues that presented themselves.
Vai poses with the gargantuan steampunk-inspired Hydra on the cover of Inviolate. It’s a heavy instrument that requires a waist strap. Still, he says, “it gets to your legs after a while” and “throws off your equilibrium completely.” Good thing it looks and sounds so cool!
In early 2020, he decided it was time to make the acoustic record he says “was one of those fantasy projects that I had written down through the years.” With “tons of material” to draw upon and a Paul Reed Smith Angelus acoustic, Vai posted a video of himself playing his song “The Moon and I,” his debut as a solo acoustic singer/songwriter. It’s a revealing performance in which he patiently builds tension in the strum-heavy intro and makes way for the sparse verse. His voice sounds strong, but slightly rough around the edges as he adds a little grit near the end of the song, exposing a different side of the virtuosic performer we’ve become accustomed to hearing play with only the most exacting precision.
Bolstered by the warm response the video received, Vai got to work recording 15 acoustic songs, all, he says, chock full of “beautiful, lush vocal melodies” and “rich chords.” But playing so much acoustic guitar posed some new physical challenges. “There’s one song where I have to fingerpick and I’m just not good at that,” he explains. “I was holding this obtuse kind of a chord way up high on the neck and there’s a lot of pressure on your thumb to hold your hands in place when your fingers are stretching. I just sat there meditating on this, holding the same chord while I was getting my fingerpicking together, and when I took my hand off, it felt like I sprained my thumb.” About a month later, his left thumb froze—a condition called trigger finger.
That wasn’t the only injury he sustained during the recording process. “There was one song that required strumming that was so fierce, so fast, that it would take me three weeks to build up to be able to get to the right tempo,” he says. “I worked on it, worked on it, worked on it, just about got it to where it needed to be—and I would have 14 guitar parts in the can and about three vocals. Unfortunately, that was as far as he’d get because his shoulder, which he’d injured a year prior, “just blew up.” He tore two tendons, which required surgery.
I had an epiphany and then that just launched an intellectual forensic study of the division of time in musical notation.
In December 2020, Vai underwent corrective surgery on his right shoulder, and surgery on his left hand followed in January 2021. Through his recovery, Vai wasn’t content to watch Netflix and chill. He simply couldn’t keep his hands off a guitar. So, with his right arm in a sling called a Knappsack—after Dr. Thomas Knapp, who performed his surgery and invented the device—and his left thumb still in a bandage, he got to work on a new one-handed guitar piece, “Knappsack.”
It was a simple idea. “I’m just gonna write a song with one hand,” he says, and insists “it wasn’t that hard. I just knew instinctively that I could get a tune out of just my left hand.” Donning his sling and bandage, Vai made a play-through video for his YouTube channel. It’s a dramatic look that does indeed contribute to the performance, but “Knappsack” retains the musically thrilling hallmarks of the maestro’s personal style, and its singable melody is bursting at the seams with expertly executed legato arpeggios and scale runs.
Once fully recovered, Vai was itching to get a tour booked. He decided to keep his acoustic project on ice and leaned into the idea of a new electric album. With “Knappsack” in the can, he created a series of musical challenges to overcome. He “set up parameters with the guitar that were somewhat out of my comfort zone” by using a hardtail Strat with a clean tone and playing without a pick for “Candlepower,” and he grabbed a Gretsch 6118 Anniversary on “Little Pretty,” which includes a difficult set of solo section chord changes. “It put up quite the fight but achieved what I was looking for.”
Steve Vai’s Gear
"Who else would do a three-neck guitar like that? I’m a total ham and I love it."
Photo by Michael Mesker
Guitars
- Bruno Urban custom 6-string
- Fender Stratocaster
- Gretsch G6118T-60 Vintage Select Edition ’60 Anniversary Hollowbody
- Ibanez Hydra
- Ibanez JEM “Bo”
- Ibanez JEM “Flo III”
- Ibanez JEM “Evo”
- Ibanez PIA
- Ibanez Universe 7-string
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball super Slinky Cobalt (.009–.042)
- Ibanez heavy
Amps
- Ampeg SVT Classic
- Carvin Legacy
- Lazy J 80
- 1980 Marshall with high-gain Jose Mod
- Marshall JCM2000
- Marshall JMP
- Paul Reed Smith Archon 50
- Synergy BMAN Preamp
- Synergy Vai Signature Preamp Module
- Victory V130
Effects
- Digitech Whammy
- Dunlop Cry Baby
- Fractal Audio FM3 Amp Modeler/FX Processor
- Ibanez Steve Vai Jemini Distortion
- MXR Phase 90
Despite his one-handed post-surgical musical opus, Vai says the biggest challenge on Inviolate can be heard on “Teeth of the Hydra,” where he debuts his newest creation, the steampunk-inspired Hydra, a three-neck beast that includes a 12-string neck that’s half fretless, a bass neck that has fretless E and A strings, a 7-string neck, harp strings, and a guitar synthesizer. Vai says the instrument, a five-year collaboration with Ibanez, “was a downloaded inspiration that came specifically for me because when it came I knew I could do it.”
When the Hydra was delivered, “I opened up the case and it was awesome and it was intimidating,” Vai says. “It had a big gnarly smile on its face. I propped it up in the studio and walked past it probably 20 or 30 times a day for a year, year-and-a-half, and every time I did it, it would go, ‘You know, you gotta play me. You gotta write that song.’ Finally, I carved out six weeks and I sat behind the Hydra and thought, ‘What was I thinking? What was wrong with me? What have I got myself into? People are gonna see me with the guitar and say, ‘He can get any guitar made he wants, but it’s all a gimmick.’’
But the Hydra was the product of his own brain, so Vai knew he could rise to the occasion. “I’m sitting there thinking ‘I’m in trouble,’” he admits. “And then that other voice came in and said, ‘You got this, you knew you had it all along, shut up and do it.’ And I sat down behind that thing and started motoring away slowly. I put a beat down and I started imagining.”
In late 2020 and early 2021, Vai had surgery on his right shoulder and left thumb. Injury is nothing new to the guitarist: “Through the 41 years of touring that I’ve done, you could probably name anything and I’ve had it. I’ve toured with slipped discs in my neck, right out of neck surgery. I’ve toured with slipped discs in my spine and had to get surgery … structurally I might be a little compromised because I grew up hunched over a guitar.”
Photo by Larry DiMarzio
The biggest challenge Vai created for himself wasn’t just to use the Hydra for a song, but to do so without looping or overdubbing. Although he learned he needed to record the harp strings separately because of how sensitive they are, Vai otherwise tracked “Teeth of the Hydra” in a linear fashion, performing one section at a time. “‘Candlepower’ and ‘Knappsack’ were probably two of the most challenging things I’ve recorded in my catalog, and they’re a walk in the park compared to the Hydra,” he says.
Any skeptics who might think that the Hydra is a gimmick should quickly be silenced by just how rippin’ “Teeth of the Hydra” is. Yeah, it’s a complete shred-fest, but it’s also tuneful and fun. That said, Vai is realistic and grounded about the concept of the song and of the instrument. “I’m an entertainer. It’s in my blood,” he says. “I love performing. Who else would do a three-neck guitar like that? I’m a total ham and I love it.”
When you’re engaged in those perfectly constructed inspirations that came to you for you, you’re in a state of enjoying what you’re doing right now, and life is only a series of right nows.
When we spoke, Inviolate was finished and Vai had an approaching tour (which has now been rescheduled). But he was planning to complete his acoustic record while travelling. In the summer, he’ll be heading to Holland to spend a month recording orchestral music with the Metropole Orkest. “I’m still keeping that side of my career going, because I love it,” he says. “I don’t expect my fans to go crazy for it, but some people will like it. At the end of the recording date with the orchestra, I should have about four albums in the can of new orchestral music. So, I’ll be balancing that with the acoustic record.”
And if that’s not dizzying enough, he just received a completed mix of an archival record from around 1990. “It’s my answer to the kind of music that I’d like to listen to when I’m out riding my motorcycle—when I was a teenager,” he says. “It’s kind of like ’80s rock with a biker edge. I found this singer, his name’s Gash, and the guy could sing like I never heard anybody. I wrote this stuff in a stream of consciousness and recorded it in about a week.”
Vai with Evo, the Ibanez JEM he’s been playing since before he recorded 1993’s Sex and Religion.
Photo by Larry DiMarzio
As we get off the call, my head is spinning just thinking about how Vai is going to split his time between a full-on rock tour, producing an acoustic record, and recording hours of orchestral music. It’s mind-boggling on a technical and creative level—not to mention his time-management skills must be seriously on point. Plus, he’s maintained this high level of activity for so long, sustaining his drive, motivation, and quality of work.
When I inevitably find myself wondering “how does he do it,” I keep coming back to this one nugget of wisdom he shared: “When you’re engaged in those perfectly constructed inspirations that came to you for you, you’re in a state of enjoying what you’re doing right now, and life is only a series of right nows.” If that’s the case, Vai seems to be making the most out of every one of them.
Steve Vai - "Candle Power"
For his 60th birthday, Steve Vai challenged himself to record a track on a hardtail S-style guitar with a clean tone and no pick. He ended up inventing a multi-string bending technique he calls joint shifting, which he uses in this play-through video for “Candlepower” (from Inviolate) to thrilling—and funky—effect.
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AI, which generated this image in seconds, can obviously do amazing things. But can it actually replace human creativity?
Technology has always disrupted the music biz, but we’ve never seen anything like this.
AI has me deeply thinking: Is guitar (or any instrument) still valid? Are musicians still valid? I don’t think the answer is as obvious as I’d like it to be.
As a professional musician, I’ve spent the vast majority of my days immersed in the tones of tube amps, the resistance of steel strings under my fingers, and the endless pursuit of musical expression. Each day, I strive to tap into the Source, channel something new into the world (however small), and share it. Yet, lately, a new presence has entered the room—artificial intelligence. It is an interloper unlike any I’ve ever encountered. If you’re thinking that AI is something off in the “not-too-distant future,” you’re exponentially wrong. So, this month I’m going to ask that we sit and meditate on this technology, and hopefully gain some insight into how we are just beginning to use it.
AI: Friend or Foe?
In the last 12 months, I’ve heard quite a bit of AI-generated music. Algorithms can now “compose,” “perform” (with vocals of your choosing), and “produce” entire songs in minutes, with prompts as flippant as, “Write a song about__in the style of__.” AI never misses a note and can mimic the finer details of almost any genre with unnerving precision. For those who are merely curious about music, or those easily distracted by novelty, this might seem exciting … a shortcut to creating “professional” sounding music without years of practice. But for those of us who are deeply passionate about music, it raises some profound existential questions.
When you play an instrument, you engage in something deeply human. Each musician carries their life experiences into their playing. The pain of heartbreak, the joy of new beginnings, or the struggle to find a voice in an increasingly noisy and artificial online world dominated by algorithms. Sweat, tears, and callouses develop from your efforts and repetition. Your mistakes can lead to new creative vistas and shape the evolution of your style.
Emotions shape the music we create. While an algorithm can only infer and assign a “value” to the vast variety of our experience, it is ruthlessly proficient at analyzing and recording the entire corpus of human existence, and further, cataloging every known human behavioral action and response in mere fractions of a second.
Pardon the Disruption
Technology has always disrupted the music industry. The invention of musical notation provided unprecedented access to compositions. The advent of records allowed performances of music to be captured and shared. When radio brought music into every home, there was fear that no one would buy records. Television added visual spectacle, sparking fears that it would kill live performance. MIDI revolutionized music production but raised concerns about replacing human players. The internet, paired with the MP3 format, democratized music distribution, shattered traditional revenue models, and shifted power from labels to artists. Each of these innovations was met with resistance and uncertainty, but ultimately, they expanded the ways music could be created, shared, and experienced.
Every revolution in art and technology forces us to rediscover what is uniquely human about creativity. To me, though, this is different. AI isn’t a tool that requires a significant amount of human input in order to work. It’s already analyzed the minutia of all of humanity’s greatest creations—from the most esoteric to the ubiquitous, and it is wholly capable of creating entire works of art that are as commercially competitive as anything you’ve ever heard. This will force us to recalibrate our definition of art and push us to dig deeper into our personal truths.
“In an age where performed perfection is casually synthesized into existence, does our human expression still hold value? Especially if the average listener can’t tell the difference?”
Advantage: Humans
What if we don’t want to, though? In an age where performed perfection is casually synthesized into existence, does our human expression still hold value? Especially if the average listener can’t tell the difference?
Of course, the answer is still emphatically “Yes!” But caveat emptor. I believe that the value of the tool depends entirely on the way in which it is used—and this one in particular is a very, very powerful tool. We all need to read the manual and handle with care.
AI cannot replicate the experience of creating music in the moment. It cannot capture the energy of a living room jam session with friends or the adrenaline of playing a less-than-perfect set in front of a crowd who cheers because they feel your passion. It cannot replace the personal journey you take each time you push through frustration to master a riff that once seemed impossible. So, my fellow musicians, I say this: Your music is valid. Your guitar is valid. What you create with your hands and heart will always stand apart from what an algorithm can generate.
Our audience, on the other hand, is quite a different matter. And that’s the subject for next month’s Dojo. Until then, namaste.
Our columnist’s bass, built by Anders Mattisson.
Would your instrumental preconceptions hold up if you don a blindfold and take them for a test drive?
I used to think that stereotypes and preconceived notions about what is right and wrong when it comes to bass were things that other people dealt with—not me. I was past all that. Unfazed by opinion, immune to classification. Or so I thought, tucked away in my jazz-hermit-like existence.
That belief was shattered the day Ian Martin Allison handed me a Fender Coronado while I was blindfolded in his basement. (Don’t ask—it’s a long story and an even longer YouTube video if you have time to kill.) For years, I had been a single-cut, 5-string, high-C-string player. That was my world. So, you can imagine my shock when I connected almost instantly with something that felt like it was orbiting a different solar system.
Less than 5 minutes with the instrument, and it was all over. The bass stayed in Ian’s basement. (I did not.) I returned home to Los Angeles, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I kept playing my beloved semi-chambered single-cut 5-string, but I sent its builder, Anders Mattisson, a message about my recent discovery. I asked if there was any way we could create something with the essence of a Coronado while still suiting my playing and my music.
That’s when everything I thought I knew about bass—and the personal boundaries I had set for myself—came crashing down.
When we started talking about building a bass with a fully chambered body, much like the Coronado, I was adamant about two things: It needed to have active electronics, and I would never play a headless bass.
Fast-forward three months to the winterNAMM show in California. Anders arrived for dinner at my house, along with a group of incredible bass players, includingHenrik Linder. I was literally in a chef’s apron, trying to get course after course of food on the table, when Henrik said, “Hey, let’s bring the new bass in.”
He came down the stairs carrying something that looked suspiciously like a guitar case—not a bass case. I figured there had been some kind of mistake or maybe even a prank. When I finally got a break from the chaos in the kitchen, I sat down with the new bass for the first time. And, of course, it was both headless and passive.
I should mention that even though I had made my requests clear—no headless bass, active electronics—I had also told Anders that I trusted him completely. And I’m so glad I did. He disintegrated my assumptions about what a bass “has to” or “should” be, and in doing so, changed my life as a musician in an instant. The weight reduction from the fully chambered body made it essential for the instrument to be headless to maintain perfect balance. And the passive nature of the pickups gave me the most honest representation of my sound that I’ve ever heard in over 30 years of playing bass.
I’m 46 years old. It took me this long to let go of certain fundamental beliefs about my instrument and allow them to evolve naturally, without interference. Updating my understanding of what works for me as a bass player required perspective, whereas some of my most deeply held beliefs about the instrument were based on perception. I don’t want to disregard my experiences or instincts, but I do want to make sure I’m always open to the bigger picture—to other people’s insights and expertise.
Trusting my bass builder’s vision opened musical doors that would have otherwise stayed bolted shut for years to come. The more I improve my awareness of where the line between perception and perspective falls, the more I can apply it to all aspects of my world of bass.
Maybe this month, it’s playing an instrument I never would have previously considered. Next month, it might be incorporating MIDI into my pedalboard, or transcribing bass lines from spaghetti Westerns.
No matter what challenges or evolutions I take on in my music and bass playing, I want to remain open—open to change, open to new ideas, and open to being proven wrong. Because sometimes, the instrument you never thought you’d play ends up being the one that changes everything.
Genuine, dynamic Vox sound and feel. Plenty of different tone-sweetening applications. Receives other pedals as nicely as a real amp.
Can get icy quick. Preamp tube presents risk for damage.
$299
Tubesteader Roy
tubesteader.com
The Roy is an exceedingly faithful Vox box that brings genuine tube dynamics to your pedalboard.
This is an interesting moment for amp-in-a-box pedals. It used to be novel to have a little box that approximated the tone signature of an iconic amp. Nowadays, though, modeling pedals and profilers can give you many digital emulations in one package. Nevertheless, there are still worlds of possibility in pedals that copy amp topology in discrete form—particularly when you add a real preamp tube to that mix.
That’s what Montreal builder Tubesteader did with the Roy, their entry in the Vox-Top-Boost-AC30-in-a-box race. The Roy is a 2-channel preamp and overdrive built around a 12AX7 vacuum tube—a design gambit that is relatively uncommon if not totally unique. The tube makes the Roy look much more vintage in spirit at a time when sleek, black Helixes and Fractals are overtaking stages. In some ways, it looks like an antique. It can sound like one in the best way too.
Riding the Tube
The Roy comes in a handsome brownish-red enclosure, with an unsurprising control layout. The rightmost footswitch turns the pedal on and off, and the one at left switches between the identical channels. Each channel has an output volume and gain knob; the controls on the right are assigned to the default channel, and when you tap the left footswitch, you engage the left-side control tandem. The treble and bass controls between the two volume and gain knobs are shared by the two channels, but a post-EQ master tone cut control, which rolls off additional treble frequencies, is mounted on the crown of the pedal beside the power input. The input and output jacks occupy the left and right sides, along with a 3.5 mm jack for external operation. The Roy runs at 12 volts and draws 350 mA, and the included power supply can be reconfigured easily for a range of international outlets.
Tubesteader’s literature says the pedal’s tones are generated via a high-voltage transistor in the first gain stage coupled with the 12AX7, which operates at 260 volts. That preamp tube is nested at the top of the enclosure’s face, underneath a protective metal “roll bar”. Trusty as it looks, when there is a glass element on the exterior of a pedal’s housing, there’s an element of vulnerability, and transporting and using the Roy probably requires a more conscientious approach than a standard stompbox.
Royal Tones
Compared to the Vox's own Mystic Edge, an AC30-in-a-box from Vox powered by Korg’s NuTube vacuum fluorescent display technology, the Roy feels warmer, and more dynamic, proving that the 12AX7 isn’t just there for looks. The Mystic Edge could sound positively icy compared to the Roy’s smooth, even breakup. The Roy is very happy at aggressive settings, and in my estimation, it sounds best with output volumes driving an amp hard and the pedal’s gain around 3 o’clock. That recipe sounds good with single-coil guitars, but with a P-90-loaded Les Paul Junior, it achieves roaring classic-rock greatness. I’ve always felt Voxes, rather than Marshalls, are better vehicles for dirty punk chording. The Roy did nothing to dissuade me from that belief. And the pedals' midrange punch and bark in power-chord contexts lent authority and balance that makes such chords hit extra hard.
Though the Roy creates many of its own tasty drive tones, it really comes to life when pushed by a boost or overdrive, much like a real amp. When I punched it with a Fish Circuits Model One overdrive, the Roy was smoother and less spiky than a cranked AC30, yet there was plenty of note definition, attack, and the harmonic riches you’d turn to an AC for in the first place. A JFET SuperCool Caffeine Boost also brought additional depth and color to the output and broadened the pedal’s voice.
If you’re most comfortable with a real Vox amp, the Roy is a reliable and familiar-feeling stand-in when managing a different backline amp. In at least one way, though, the Roy is, perhaps, a bit toofaithful to its influence’s design: There’s a lot of treble on tap, and it’s easy to cook up tinnitus-inducing frequencies if you get too aggressive with the treble control. Noon positions on the cut/boost tone knobs sound pretty neutral. But I found it difficult to push the treble much past 2 o’clock without wincing—even with the tone cut control set at its darkest. (This quality, of course, may make the Roy a good match for squishier Fender-style designs). The relationship between the Roy’s treble and bass controls also takes time to master. The two don’t just add or boost their respective frequencies, but also add or subtract midrange, which can result in intense and sudden gain-response changes. As a general guideline, a light touch goes a long way when fine tuning these frequencies.The Verdict
The Roy isn’t exactly a bargain at $299. Then again, this Vox-in-a-box can stand in for real-deal Top Boost tones and the 2-channel design means you can move between an AC’s chimey cleans and ripping cranked sounds in a flash. If you’re squarely in the Vox amp camp, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more authentic means of achieving that range of clean-to-crunchy sounds.