Hey Friend,

GUITAR WORLD has done it again! They sat down with Joe Satriani to talk about learning how to express yourself on guitar and delivered it up on a silver platter for us.

GW was kind enough to transcribe the entire video and include tabs, so this is a resource I highly recommend taking the time to watch.

This master class is interesting in that Joe starts at the beginning, when he first picked up guitar. He talks about his mindset at the time, and how he explored the fingerboard. 

What it turned into is a long discussion of finding his way to his style of playing guitar. At an hour and fifteen minutes, there’s a lot to take in, but Joe’s laid-back conversational approach to teaching makes it easy to follow along.

I don’t have a lot of time to go into it, but something that jumped out at me is the way your musical influences inform your playing and help you develop your own style.

Joe talks about the artists that he was most influenced by, namely Jimi Hendrix. When you listen to a lot of Joe’s music, you can definitely hear the Blues based style of Hendrix.

Makes sense, right? You try to emulate your favorite players, but you’re also influenced by the instructors you learn from. You also gain a great deal of inspiration from other players you’re involved with.

Steve Vai is one of Joe Satriani’s most famous students.

One could say Joe had quite an influence on Steve, but when you listen to the music of Vai, you’ll hear a different story.

Steve Vai went on to work with Frank Zappa, who was known for jumping way outside musical boundaries to find interesting sounds. So Steve took what he learned both from Joe Satriani AND Frank Zappa to develop his approach to guitar and music.

Kirk Hammett had different musical interests. But like Steve Vai, Kirk owes part of his development to Joe Satriani. 

I love hearing the early stories from these guys, because despite Satriani’s relaxed demeanor, when it came to his students and learning guitar, Joe was a task master. He expected you to show up with your sh!t together, and if you didn’t, there’s the door!

But that work ethic paid off hugely for Kirk and Steve (as well as a number of other very successful guitar players)

Speaking of taskmasters, the j.o.b. calls.

Gotta roll. Find some time to watch this video and follow along with the transcript - it’s worth studying.

  

Peace~

Dave

P.S. - I was lucky enough to catch the Space X rocket launch yesterday. It was very cool to run outside my office and take some snapshots of the rocket as it left Earth headed for Mars.

Very cool!