The shred guru waxes poetic on his infamous 10-hour workout, improvisation, and Bette Midler’s bees.
At this point in his 30-year career, there’s not much about Steve Vai that hasn’t been covered before. Luckily, some of our more astute Facebook fans kept Vai busy for nearly two hours to talk about everything from the influence of his former boss Frank Zappa to some setlist spoilers for his upcoming Rock in Rio gig. Check out a few highlights from Vai’s expansive Q&A below.
1. Vai is digging into his archives for his next project.
Right now I’m working on the record that will be included in the 25th anniversary edition of Passion and Warfare that will come out next year. It’s music I’ve written or tracked between Flex-able and Passion and Warfare, kinda like the missing link. It’s pretty bizarre and wild. As a matter of fact, I just played Andy Alt one of the weirdest solos I think I ever did and he said, “That was the most inside-out, backwards, and flipped thing that ends up being so right!”
2. When it comes to Vai’s immaculate technique, 11 is the magic number.
Practice very, very slow and perfect. If every note doesn’t sound like it has its own personality, roundness, depth, and other perfections, then start slower. Then slowly bring the speed up and master perfectly, effortlessly, and beautifully what you’re playing at least 11 times in a row without making one mistake. Then get a little faster. Patience is of vital importance, but of even more importance is that you enjoy every note and put your full attention into the soul of every note.
3. His 10-hour workouts are a thing of the past.
If I still did those I would be as good as some people think I am.
4. Improvisation and composition are neighbors in Vai’s solos.
Sometimes when I’m in the studio working on a solo, I break it down and work on one section at a time until something comes out that doesn’t sound like anything I’ve heard or played before. I usually can’t do that on the fly, so I’ll need to meditate on an idea. I then work on that idea until it’s vocabulary becomes second nature to me. So certain solos may be duplicated live very close to the original but there’s always space for pure improv. I enjoy doing both equally.
5. Tone is a supremely unique journey.
The ultimate goal is to find whatever it is that makes you—and I mean you personally, nobody else, including society, your friends, your parents, or anything that anyone might say to you—feel good. You are unique, so the things you desire are unique. What is it that you desire that brings you the feeling of fulfillment and enjoyment? So both of your options, or one of them, or neither of them, can be the right answer for you, but you’re the only one who can choose what feels best for you. And there are no wrong answers.
6. Learning a new tune is largely a mental exercise.
I listen to the song and imagine in my mind the picture of me playing it beautifully, elegantly, effortlessly. I also visualize how it would sound in its most perfect musical condition coming off my fingers. Once this picture is clear there’s nothing that can stop it from manifesting, with the exception of something else that’s more interesting to me at that time.
7. Replacing Yngwie and Eddie Van Halen? No problem.
Both gigs had challenges, but no pressure. My goal was to do my best to deliver my unique, quirky brand of playing within the framework of what was expected for the band.
8. When it comes to nerves and stage fright, Vai focuses on the present.
Before you go onstage, take a moment to put your attention into your body, and relax and breathe. The only reason you’re making mistakes and are nervous is because you’re afraid of making mistakes and your mind is focused on a phantom, fearful future that doesn’t exist until it becomes your “now”—and that’s when the mistakes happen. The best way to deal with this is to tell yourself that you’re going to give yourself a break from worrying about anything and bring your attention to every little thing you’re doing in that precise moment.
So when you’re strapping on your guitar, your attention is on putting your guitar on. And when you walk out onto the stage, you’re focused on each footstep along the way. And when you go to play, your attention is on every note. You shouldn’t have to be thinking of what to play but instead, just let it come out and give it your attention. If a mistake happens, so what ... it happened. The best way to destroy the rest of your show is to let that mistake infiltrate and take possession of the clarity of your attention. Nobody cares. There’s no measure of a person in that way. You’re just there to bring entertainment to people.
Go easy on yourself and practice bringing your attention into all the little things you do that are simple in life. That’s when true quality will flow into them. Then when it comes time to go onto a stage, or any other critical moments in life, you’ll be more prepared, centered, and grounded in the present moment where there really aren’t any problems.
9. Whammy-bar antics are a little less destructive with Vai’s latest guitars.
Since Ibanez came out with these new titanium bars, I usually am only victorious at breaking one every two years or so. Thomas Nordegg [Vai’s guitar tech] is very happy about it. But still I try.
10. Thanks to a pop diva, Vai’s beekeeping hobby is back on track.
Unfortunately, I lost my last hive to colony collapse some months ago but will be receiving a new hive that is actually coming from Bette Midler’s house. And when they all buzz in harmony they create a melody that sounds like “Wind Beneath My Wings.”
Wisdom from a master guitarist.
Over the last 40 years, Robben Ford has established himself in the somewhat gray area between gutbucket blues, exploratory jazz, and soulful R&B. His latest album, Into the Sun, is a guest-filled affair with cameos by Warren Haynes, Sonny Landreth, and pop/rock chanteuse ZZ Ward. Ford recently took over the Premier Guitar Facebook page to answer questions for nearly an hour. Here are some gems about his favorite gear, working with Miles Davis, and how he keeps things fresh.
1. Ford’s earliest influences aren’t exactly surprising.
“My first guitar hero was Mike Bloomfield. In the jazz world, I’d have to say Jim Hall—and B.B. King is definitely the King! Jimi Hendrix is a unique stylist of the electric guitar, and is a huge influence on my rhythm playing.”
2. Miles was always interesting.
“It was certainly thrilling to work with Miles Davis and it was always interesting to be around the guy. We had a very healthy relationship. It was something I never thought would happen. It’s really a wonderful experience to play with a musical hero. I learned a lot from him even before playing with him, including the importance of space, melody, and sound. I also learned an increased confidence in myself as a musician because he was so complimentary and good to me.”
3. Ford has no plans to ditch his Dumble.
“If I were stuck on a desert island, I would have to have my original Dumble Overdrive Special. I definitely would need a reverb, but not sure which it would be. For guitar, my ’63 ES-355 would do just fine.”
4. To warm up his fingers, Ford sticks to the basics.
“I practice scales to warm up. Beyond that, I don’t really have a practice regiment. I make sure to just play the instrument, and that seems to work for me.”
5. One overdrive pedal has captured Ford’s ear.
“The Hermida Audio Zendrive immediately appealed to me. The Zendrive has found a way to reduce the compression I hear in a lot of other pedals, creating a more natural sound. I use the Zendrive for overdrive, a TC Electronic Hall of Fame reverb pedal, the Strymon TimeLine delay, and the Vertex Boost.”
6. Ford thinks “modern” jazz can lose sight of its roots.
“Jazz is the music of improvisation. It’s a very sophisticated art form and should be approached seriously. I find that very few jazz players today really keep in touch with the tradition, going all the way back to Louis Armstrong. Modern jazz tends to sound intellectual, and that’s unfortunate.”
6. While playing with the Yellowjackets, Ford’s gear was in flux.
“The years I spent in the Yellowjackets were a strange period for me. I used a lot of different guitars and amps and was never really comfortable. Yamaha was giving everyone free gear, and it was a lot of trial and error. I finally found my sound with the Dumble Overdrive and the Fender Robben Ford model.”
7. Studio musicians need to add their mojo.
“When I would go record an album, I would use basic rhythm charts with an occasional bass line. For this album, I avoided putting anything on paper because I wanted the musicians to bring their talents to the process without me dictating everything.”
8. If you only have an hour a day to practice, what should you focus on?
“Learn all the jazz chords and learn to play songs. Chords can really open up the whole picture, and playing songs will help you learn ways to use those chords effectively in your writing.”
9. Sometimes Ford tricks himself into being creative.
“One of the ways I will break out of a jam is to make a hard left turn from where the song was originally going. If it’s a mellow tune, I take an aggressive left turn to something harder. ‘Don’t Worry About Me’ from Soul on Ten is a great example of this.”
10. On tour, a Fender amp will do in a pinch.
“When I can’t bring along my Dumble, I don’t really have a favorite amp exactly, because amplifiers can vary in what kind of condition they’re in. Even if I prefer a Super Reverb, whatever Twin shows up might just be a better-sounding amp. I use the Dumble whenever possible and usually take it overseas. I really make an effort to take my own gear wherever I go these days.”
The famed luthier opens up about getting his start more than 30 years ago, finally building John McLaughlin a guitar, and how many hot wings he can eat in one sitting.
Paul Reed Smith is no stranger to Premier Guitar: He has joined us for NAMM demos, opened up his factory for private tours, and even performed for the PG cameras during Experience PRS. Just in time for his company’s 30th anniversary, Smith gave fans and PRS owners an opportunity to ask him questions when he took over our Facebook account for about 90 minutes. Thanks to all of your inquiries, we uncovered a few nuggets of the luthier’s personal and professional life that were previously kept under wraps. Here are the highlights:
1. One door closes on a guitarist, the next opens for an award-winning guitar builder.
I started making guitars because I wasn’t a good enough guitarist and I somehow viscerally understood how to build instruments. I wanted to have a big impact ... I thought I had a lot to offer, but the people around me, for the most part, didn’t think so. So the main inspiration was to spend a life of trying to build guitars the best I could, rather then being one of those people who dies saying they could’ve tried harder.
To get my first guitar off a piece of paper, it took me over three years of drawing and redrawing, cutting bodies, and then more drawing [laughs]. If you take a Strat and a Les Paul Jr. and you average the lines, the body shape that comes out looks god-awful. It took a long time to get the body shape to the point that it was comfortable to the eye, comfortable with the way it felt, and comfortable to how it works as part of a musical instrument.
If I went to Washington Music Center and opened a case with a guitar I’d made, it would draw a crowd. But if I played guitar there, no one would show up, so I guess I made the right choice.
2. Proud like a father.
My two current favorites that are mine would have to be the Private Stock McCarty and Paul Signature. We recently got a chance to record “Machine Gun” and I used a DC3 that sounded lovely, too.
3. Don’t get it twisted—25" is the primo choice.
Everybody has it wrong, including the companies that use 24 3/4" as their scale length. The reason I made it 25" is because when you hit a low E string hard using a set of .009s on a 24 9/16" scale length, the low E goes sharp and then comes back into pitch. The reason I didn’t go all the way to 25 1/2" is because Hendrix and SRV were tuning guitars down to Eb or D because the strings were too tight when tuned to pitch. So it was an experientially based decision, not a compromised guess. I’ve always been surprised at how well it worked—especially when I saw other companies building 25" scale fret-slotting machines. Another problem with either the 24 3/4" or 25 1/2" scale-length instruments is that if somebody grew up on a short-scale guitar, they wouldn’t play a longer one and vice versa. With the 25", I was getting a simple “yes.”
4. And while he’s talking about measurements, Paul wants to clear the air on fretboard radiuses.
People think that old Les Pauls have a 12" fretboard radius—they don’t, because all the ones I’ve measured had a radius of 10". I’ve just felt it’s the most comfortable to most hands and so that’s why I’ve pretty much always stuck by that radius. I’ve never had an artist complain about the 10" radius. However, there have been a few times players have requested a flatter one because that’s what they’re used to. But for the most part, a 10" radius works perfectly for our guitars and most guitarists in the market.
5. A guitar three decades in the making.
One of my all-time guitar heroes is John McLaughlin. John is a genius musician who is one of the fathers of our musical industry. He has been telling me for nearly 30 years that one day my company would be good enough to make him a guitar [laughs]. Finally, after playing one of my Paul’s 28 Violin models he said, “Okay, I’m ready to order a guitar.” We made it three times until he was pleased with what he saw on the computer screen.
Essentially it’s a Violin guitar with a tremolo, 57/08 humbuckers, rare curly maple, rare ribbon-striped mahogany, a pernambuco neck, and black rosewood fretboard. Most recently we made him something very similar with the skyline of New York City as a fretboard inlay. His picture is on my door playing that guitar along with another photo of me holding onto Chuck Brown (the godfather of go-go) who recently passed away. Being able to build instruments that John not only enjoys and loves, but uses on a regular basis, is one of the biggest accomplishments of my career.
6. Need an extended-range axe? You should probably look elsewhere.
We’re really limited on our 7-string production right now because we haven’t tooled up for it at this point. PRS bridges are proprietary and as a rule we would not buy a 7-string bridge off the shelf from another manufacturer, so that’s why we haven’t expanded production to include models with tremolos. Our main concern is that other manufacturer’s bridges wouldn’t have our exact specifications on them and we’d either have to compromise our own design or invest a bunch of time and money in R&D to outsource the hardware—and that’s not something I’m comfortable doing right now. Furthermore, we’ve come to rely on our own innovations to make the instrument stay in tune and sound great. No compromises at PRS. As far as an 8-string goes, there are no plans at this point to do anything like that.
7. Chasing the sonic magic.
We develop new pickups because of a need we find in the market or a need we find internally. All of this is done to make musicians a more useful musical instrument and because these needs are fairly constant in the guitar community, we find ourselves continually working on new pickups or using different winding techniques.
That’s the place the Narrowfield pickups came from—we found a hole in the guitar industry that could be filled with a pickup that presents a focused, articulate string attack. The Narrowfields are like a single-coil but are hum canceling, and the result of this is a new sounding pickup system that blends features of single-coils, P-90s, and humbuckers.
We don’t really do pickups because they’re cool, we design them to fill a void, but we’re currently working on something more esoteric, like Filter’Trons and Gold Foils, though these aren’t replicas. When all the bugs are worked out, hopefully we will release them.
8. Robot tuners? We don’t need no stinkin’ robot tuners.
About three to four years ago we were offered the auto-tune system technology when it was first invented, but we passed. If you put a whole bunch of contraptions on the headstock of the guitar, my experience is that the guitar doesn’t sound as good and can become unbalanced. However, I do think the fact that they [Gibson] are putting automatic tuners on all their instruments is awesome and I’m glad to see they’re embracing the future!
If you’re driving a car, you need to be checking the rearview mirror a good percentage of the time while you are also looking through the windshield. It’s a good idea to look left and right once in a while, too!
9. When I close my eyes and imagine what a guitar should sound like, I think….
One would have to be Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? because it started something so powerful. As far as the tone in my head, I hear something in the middle between Jeff Beck, Carlos Santana, and David Gilmour with an oboe, viola, and low D whistle thrown in. [By the way, check out the sound of a low D whistle.]
10. We move forward by trying to identify the goals of Leo and Ted.
I keep thinking there is no space left to explore, but on a daily basis this ends up not being true. We discovered something yesterday that we have been working on for 30 years, and I’m almost positive it is going to make it to market in the near future and impact our industry in a good way.
The problem is that we didn’t invent the electric guitar, the humbucker, the single-coil pickup, the tremolo system, the scale length measurements—we’ve refined them. What’s starting to happen is that we are understanding what the people who invented our industry wanted and why they did it a particular way. We’re starting to understand what they were shooting for, what their goals were, and what they were thinking when they were in their workshops years ago. From that mental position, we can make real advancements in guitar design and break the mold. Another analogy would be, instead of understanding the gun they shot with, we are figuring out where the target was. But in short, yes, there is a lot more room for new designs and improvements on old models—what fun!
Bonus fact: Paul Reed Smith caps his hot-wing quota at 15 in one sitting.
