Joe Satriani on Telling Stories With Notes, Alien Love, and Being Bitten by Jagger

Today’s Guitar Villain is Joe Satriani. Known in his truest form as a literal alien, Satriani’s music can certainly transport you to various places in the universe, and after paving the way for so many guitar players after him, Satch is still the master of the six-string sonic highway we’re all driving down. With dozens of Grammy nominations and what seems like an endless catalogue of music, Joe is constantly innovating and always inspiring in the realm of guitar, and if you know me, you know how pumped I am for this episode of Guitar Villains.

Intro and Joe Satriani's supervillain alter-ego: 0:00
Burning Questions: 13:45
Name Those Notes: 29:33
Joe's latest album, Shapeshifting and his studio recording tips: 44:45
Joe's Shapeshifting gear choices: 48:35
Joe's favorite airplane album: 53:15
The Satriani title-track phenomenon: 55:03
Joe Satriani's dream band: 57:35
Joe's supervillain advice: 59:40
The brilliance of Eddie Van Halen (this podcast was recorded just hours prior to the news of Eddie's passing–I thought I'd timestamp this comment Joe made): 1:01:45

Check out Joe's latest album, Shapeshifting, streaming everywhere now: http://bit.ly/JS_GuitarVillains

Sign up for Guitar Super System, the most popular independent guitar learning platform on the internet: http://bit.ly/GVJS002

Transcript

0:00

welcome to guitar villains i'm your host tyler larson why guitar villains you ask well because villains are cooler than heroes it's just a fact this is a podcast by guitar players four guitar players and over the course of this series we'll talk to some of the most innovative and creative minds in the guitar community find out what makes them tick and find out how we can become better guitar players ourselves thank you for watching the video podcast here on youtube and you can also listen to the podcast on spotify itunes or wherever else you get your podcasts today's guitar villain is joe satriani known in his truest form as a literal alien satriani's music can certainly transport you to various places in the universe and after paving the way for so many guitar players after him satch is still the master of the six string sonic highway we're all driving down with dozens of grammy nominations and what seems like an endless catalog of music joe is constantly innovating and always inspiring in the realm of guitar and if you know me you know how pumped i am to have joe on this episode of guitar villains welcome to guitar villains the show where we deconstruct and decode the guitar and joe i feel like we're sort of kindred spirits in that we both left our budding football careers which totally would have panned out and we would be in the nfl today oh yeah instead instead we became guitar players but uh i was actually a soccer player in high school and i was recruited to be the kicker it turned out i was good and the end of the season i had a choice to either go play football in like gainesville or poughkeepsie new york or go to music school in boston i don't know about you i think i made the right choice yeah definitely yes yeah well that's good though i mean you know sports is great music is so physical uh that anything that you can add to being in touch with your body is great i think i think it always helps the the musical experience uh and being a musician being in touch with every little muscle and joint is so important and so yeah if you can dance or play soccer whatever it is uh that's great as long as you don't we have some athleticism about us right yeah small movements very tiny movements but um still it's really it's about connecting your heart and your mind uh to your body you know and and that's really what it is and it's it's using all your senses and uh but ultimately the guitar doesn't play itself you know right right indeed and for for context anybody who doesn't know you were 14 years old your friend while you're about to head out to the football practice told you that jimi hendrix had passed away and you immediately went and quit the team and vowed to become a guitar player and this story is well documented i don't want to rehash it but the one thing i want to clarify is you didn't yet play the guitar when you made that decision is that right uh that's right yeah i had only you know i've been a drummer since the age of nine uh i took lessons i think for about three years uh my teacher was a jazz guy and uh but in the course of those three years i started to notice that i just wasn't feeling like i was really connecting 100 and i just thought you know when you're a kid you're so impatient and i was very impatient with the lack of my progress and i just thought why everybody sounds better than me uh you know and then you know as you start to get into 10 11 12 you really start getting distracted by fun sex whatever it is that's going on and so i've tried to remember like you know what was my thought process but i think it was more of a overwhelming feeling than anything else it seemed logical to me i had quite the time that night at dinner convincing the family uh that that's what i was going to do i literally you know announced that dinner stood up and said okay everybody you know and this is what's gonna happen and there was like a moment of silence followed by everybody yelling and screaming you spoke it into existence yes but um yeah i you know uh it's funny i always thought that um the the feeling of loss was the biggest thing i felt like i couldn't understand how am i going to get through the next week of school without having jimi hendrix in my life you know and and that's how important music was to me and i just thought well then you have to provide the music i wasn't thinking i'd ever be as good as him or i'd replace him or any of that it was nothing logical or concrete it was more like a uh an emotion that uh there was loss and i had to fill it and that was the only thing that seemed to make sense was to play guitar and then of course i found out how hard it was and how much it hurt my fingers and and uh you know like every other beginner i just sucked and i was just like wow how do i get from nowhere to square one at least well that's a good a lesson for everybody joe satriani once sucked the guitar so you never have to feel bad so we do things a little bit differently on this show joe we're gonna play some games i'm gonna try to get to the bottom of what makes you tick as a musician and hopefully you'll have a great time and maybe the next time touring is back on the menu and you're coming through nashville we can uh we can link up if you're if you're coming through maybe like the ryman or something like that i don't know oh it'd be great to play there again yeah yeah so this show is called guitar villains because villains i think are cooler than heroes i've always found the characters a little deeper and more complex more memorable so the first thing i want to ask is out of all the movie or comic book villains out there who would you say you identify with the most and this could be simple as appearance or as nuanced as a character trait and if you want it's kind of a strange question i can give you my answer for which villain i think you're most like and you can respond with a different choice or agree well yeah let me hear what you think that's pretty funny i'd i'd i'd like to hear what you know your idea of what my hero or villain is okay so there's the obvious like oasis in the desert you know the no bones about it answer which is of course the silver surfer but here's the thing i uh i don't really consider him a villain oh look there you go you got a little figurine right there i don't really consider it's kind of weird when you put the two together i mean one of them one of them is a little bit bigger than the other but you can see oh yeah yep striking similarity right there's a resemblance there but i don't know about you i don't think he's really a villain at all plus that's way too easy of a comparison it feels like a shortcut which isn't how i roll so in my opinion your real super villain alter ego is mr johnson from a 1957 film called not of this earth and mr johnson in case you don't know he's an alien from the planet devonna and he has a sensitivity to high decibel and frequency levels sounds and he looks like a human but he's conspicuous only for his silted informal way of speaking and his sunglasses which he wears even in the dark and the reason he wears these sunglasses is because he has to hide his white blank eyes his blank stare he uses these eyes to kill his victims by burning through their eyes into their brains and he removes the blood of his victims using a system of tubes and canisters that he keeps in an aluminum attache case which may be like a guitar case who knows so we don't insinuate true evil on guitar villains of course this is all i don't think you're actually a vampire alien but these resemblances are quite uncanny like first of all sensitivity to high frequency sounds i think i'd say out of any guitar player you've played the largest gamut of low and high frequencies thanks to that trusty whammy bar so you've been all the way down low and all the way like it may be as high as any guitar player or as low as they've ever gone and yeah i clearly know what to listen for uh in the sunglasses at all times a day i mean that's basically your calling card and you're you might be the only person in the world who can get away with doing that and of course the film title not of this earth it's the name of your first record so yes that's what in that's going into the mindset that might be your villain doppelganger i could do that you know it's if people haven't seen the film but this is what this is basically this the production effects were pretty good they basically he'd take off his glasses and you heard which was you know the sound effects guy crumpling some paper off camera but um so you know that film oh my god all right so here's the story it's such a funny story so okay so i thought this was a deep cut but you got it no when i was in high school um i was in a couple of different bands and um and and a few of us were were in bands together different things anyway one of my friends michael arculio was a beatle fanatic and he was a drummer and he wanted to just have a beatle band right and so meanwhile i'm the singer in the band and myself and the bass player as well we were we were in our own band that that did quite well playing zeppelin sabbath stones that whole kind of thing and um anyway so but we're in this band with michael because he's a cool guy and we all love the beatles so we're playing beatles songs upstairs in his room every day rehearsing like crazy and every once in a while we go down to the kitchen his mom makes us sandwiches or something and there's a little tv this is like ancient history but anyway uh back then when there was no cable and just a couple of channels going and there'd always be uh the the uh the low rent channel on i think it was channel nine on long island and uh or 13 no nine i think it was channel nine and they're showing uh you know b and c movies all the time anyway so this one movie is on like all the time for those few months that we're rehearsing and it happens to be the movie not of this earth and the four of us memorized the entire movie because every time we took a break we go down the tv would be on and you know there'd be the movie so we just adopted the the script into our day-to-day language and um okay so fast forward years later i relocated out to the west coast i'm living in berkeley california i get this idea to make the leap from doing a little avant-garde ep to a full-length album and i thought you know i want to come up with a title and i had this song that i called not of this earth and i thought you know if i make this the title of the album maybe my friends will see it and they'll they'll know where to get a hold of me because i was putting out the record on my own label and my apartment's address was printed on the back of the the sleeve you know so it's the only reason why i did it was just just to say hi to the three other guys i lost content put it out into the universe yeah so i just very innocently thought you know i'm nobody i haven't got a career in instrumental music i'm not even trying and so i just did it as a joke right right so then fast forward uh steve insists on sending the album to a guy named cliff cultrary at a small label out of new york who just signed him for his flexible record and steve's idea was if they signed me for flexible which is the weirdest record ever he said they're definitely going to sign you so i said well you can go ahead and send it to him he'll probably he won't call me back anyway he did i got signed the next album that i did for them was surfing with the alien and then that's when the whole career took off but i still had this album it did work because my friends on the east coast did see me and the and the title of the movie and everything they got the joke and they call me up so that was the only reason why i did it so it's so funny that you should just bring that up because it is not a well-known film that is really weird i mean i i do a lot of research it has sound effects like this yeah for the burning of the brain and everything um but i still every once in a while i say gandalaila you know and uh i i have the script to memorize you know geez i i identified with the uh the the really young uh vacuum cleaner uh salesman remember right he said that right i could turn flip-flops in your uh i found as much of it as i could on youtube to try and piece it because you couldn't get it on amazon and uh yeah it seems like an interesting film i'll find a way to view the whole thing at one point or another yeah you'll have a good laugh that's great so uh first things first joe i have a couple softball lobs for you i call this segment burning questions[Music] yes so these are rapid fire questions that if you were to conduct a a live master class where anyone could ask you questions about anything they want regarding music these are the questions they would ask you which don't totally matter but they must be answered okay what gauge pick do you use oh extra heavies most of the time if i'm playing melodies solos it seems like the extra heavy pick um just makes everything sound a little bit thicker up and down the neck and that's what i've noticed about pick thickness is the you know the thinner the the pick is the more it reveals its mass as you traverse the strings and the fretboard if i'm strumming i might go to a medium if i'm strumming an acoustic guitar that's supposed to be just part of a large group of instruments in a track i'll use a thin pick um and uh that's about it but i keep a lot of picks on hand different you know different kinds but mainly it's extra heavy what gauge strings do you use now that's interesting um so for years i tuned to 440 and i used nines that was kind of like my thing uh then about 10 years ago uh when i got together with uh chad michael and sammy uh to form chickenfoot uh sammy at the time was doing e flat and beca and because he and michael had been with van halen for so long and they kind of adopted that tuning and so i thought okay i'll drop down and then after about six months my tech and and i we just were getting so frustrated that we had 440 guitars uh with nines and then we had these e-flat guitars with tens on them and i said you know what i need to make a decision here so i just said let's just make everything ten city flat and we'll just stay there that way i can go from my gig to chicken foot and i don't have to you know have a whole separate set of guitars uh so it did make life easier and i started to notice that again traversing up and down playing melodies and solos i did gain uh something in terms of uh thickness maybe of tonality and how to work a little harder to get strings to sort of crack open and sound thinner which is really important when you're trying to kind of vocalize a melody right um and you know because if you don't then it just sounds like you're playing scales or something it's it's a it's a particular problem for electric guitarists um but recently uh since i've been home a lot and you know i'm the one changing all the strings usually you know on tour mike does everything i get new strings on all the guitars every night spoiled absolutely spoiled rockstar especially with those floyd roses it's not not necessarily an easy task all the time it isn't and and mike does an amazing job keeps me really in tune so i started fooling around because i've been doing a lot of sessions for different people and i started to listen to their tracks and i'm thinking you know my thing doesn't necessarily fit so what can i do to fit so sometimes i put 11s or 12s and sometimes i put nine sometimes i go all the way to eight so uh the last two three days i've been uh working on something for for another musician who's doing an orchestral thing and uh it's sort of like uh orchestra with uh with some techno elements um but it's real orchestra and i thought well this is kind of interesting because the electric guitar has got to fit in this massive thing not only do you have this beautiful sonic spread of a full orchestra and and we're talking you know london philharmonic but we're also talking where he's adding elements that are uh software-based you know right right and so i'm thinking okay so i'm somewhere in between the analog and the digital and so um i've got two seven string guitars one with tens one with nines one at 440 one of d flat uh i've got melody guitars with uh tens a flat and melody and solo guitars uh with eights um at 440. and they're all occupying the session right now kind of next to each other and it's it's been a bit confusing you know for the fingers takes me a few minutes to remind myself like when i go to eights to relax a little bit yeah the bending especially and yeah yeah but the the payoff is the expressiveness and and uh if i didn't tell you like if i was playing you track and i didn't tell you it was h you just you wouldn't guess it and because you know guitar players were very sensitive to the tactile response but actually the audience is hearing something entirely different um and and so that's what i've been toying with there's really a world of expressiveness in there just playing around with your string gauges um it's really interesting what you can do a little a little side note if anybody read that p townsend book there's a great little nugget of information in there about how he was taught by um oh i forget the guy's name uh lonnie donegan or or dwayne eddy or somebody um to to take his g string and and make it a b string and that way when he does double stop bends they they move and pitch pretty much closer to each other than if it had been a regular g and a b i thought that was really remarkable just for a little thing you can do it's it's almost like telecaster players going to a higher gauge for their first strings to get rid of that typical fender tele string buzz that's always on the first string for some reason you know um so yeah you should play around with your gauges i guess that's the short answer all right a lot of insight there on the string gauges what is your number one guitar um it's probably that guy over there the chrome guitar okay although the the the uh the mcr over there that's the one with the eight so that that's uh 448 eights and uh the chrome guitar that's number three it was not supposed to be my main chrome guitar i basically got three at the start of last year um one was the prototype of the js1cr that i approved and number two was the first one that came out of the factory so to speak you know and uh and i took those on the on the uh the tours with me so they got uh played and banged up like crazy on the experience hendricks to it which is where i got the the t-shirt yeah sweatshirt um and um so number number three was left at home that was like the perfect porridge or something there's like first one's too hot too cold this one's just right i it surprised me i just thought it was the one that didn't feel right so i left it at home and then every time i come back from the tour i would pick it up and use it to record demos for shape shifting and then i go back out on tour and i play number one and number two every night and i you know come back home play number three and then as i started to send the demos out everyone was telling me like hey whatever guitar you used on that demo man bring that that thing sounds great and so i it was just like one of those things like the guitar that you know that you ignored turned out to be your favorite guitar uh it's harder to play for some reason i don't know why and i left the action really high which i don't normally play with high action but um it's it seemed to uh it helped me sort of calm down the note quantity a bit and and the shape-shifting album i didn't want it to be a shred fest you know i really wanted to concentrate on the melodies a lot more so i thought okay i'll bring along a guitar that's going to make me struggle a bit and and maybe you know one out of six notes i'll i'll get rid of so it'll just sound right nice two more questions what's your favorite amp your number one amp it's probably my own my jvm uh you know they they don't marshall doesn't make it anymore but um uh it's got the longest name ever right it's a martial yes jvm410hjs highly memorable um and uh i love that thing every time i play that if i'm just like in in one of my practice rooms and i'm just playing along with the with my playlist or something i just feel so comfortable and then every night when i walk out on stage and i turn that thing up and we pray we you know we we're playing it pretty loud maybe it's 114 db or something like that um it it just feels great to me it just always sounds right and you know my my gig is different than most people i play melodies and solos all night long that's it you know that's kind of like the gig and i play way up the neck as you pointed out at the beginning of the show i play some crazy high notes and i and i go all the way down so um this amp that uh was designed uh for me by engineer santiago alvarez really meets a lot of the issues that i had with other amps that i love you know the vintage marshals and fenders that for my gig are always inappropriate for something and you i just can't get through a gig with using amps like that um so this one solves that issue of let's say if i was going to be specific like when you go to play a song like friends which is really high up the neck you can't have the same piercing screeching tone that a four bar solo would have or an eight bar solo where you're supposed to rip somebody's head off and then go back to the singer he's got a nice sonic voice yes that song in particular is also down tuned what is it drop d flat or drop it it's actually uh it's a drop d tuning but we're all at e flat so it's pretty right that's what it is yeah it sounds like c it high and high it has like both the ability to take that high frequency but also the girth of the low end which is sometimes hard for some ants they get a little flubby or whatever they do yeah and you know album after album since i guess we had the prototype for the first chickenfoot record and we worked through it all the way through there we've all the albums since then that's 10 years worth of albums which is a lot of records we did that that particular setup using my 5150 uh and uh and the jvm using the same two speaker bottoms you know just a stock 1960 b and an old 19 around 1968 69 slant 4x12 basket weave um with original greenbacks in it those two seem to be the you know the workhorse setup for for so many situations is pretty remarkable um yeah it's a great sounding amp extremely flexible and uh but the main thing is i can just turn the thing up and it's i mean it's been designed exactly for what i like so uh it's it's a lot of fun last burning question favorite guitar pedal oh that's a tough one that's really tough um yesterday i i brought um no what did i do yesterday i brought this one out again um oh cool this dry bell vibe machine it really is great is that the one that you used on corey wong's new song yes i did yeah yeah he was just on the show and uh i was talking to him about that song and i i was like there's something to that tone because i was talking about how you complemented his very clean style so well and i thought maybe that i don't know why that just popped into my head but it seems like maybe it had a vibe element very subtle though yes yeah well you have the ability um to make it uh pretty subtle well one of the things that's really nice about it is that i think it addresses uh you know the modern amp setup uh if you go with like an original univibe which was really i mean decades old and we you know we all think about hendrix playing machine gun i mean it's just like the most iconic thing but the recording of that is is quite unique and his setup was quite unique and it doesn't really work in today's sonic uh landscape um specifically um the super high end transients that poke through and then just this unbridled low end which eventually it just gets carved out by anyone mixing a modern album and it can drive other gear crazy if you're constantly sending too much of something you know into a limiter and it's reacting and it's it's actually uh taking away things from the part of the performance uh that that should be getting through you know so um you you can dial up total vintage you know univibe in this but you can also car pre-carve it so that by the time the effect gets to the amp it's not driving all those things in the amp crazy and any limiter compressor you might have uh in in processing uh the audio signal right before it goes to a mix um and it allows it to be more present which i think is what you want and certainly when you got a really funky track um like massive you don't want to be covering it up you know you want to fit in uh you got to jump out by that same time you want to be able to fit in because it's so gorgeous sounding you know what cory does with his buddies it's just great so uh the pedal really helps so yeah today i would say that's that's my favorite today's episode of guitar villains is brought to you by guitar super system are you tired of youtube ads telling you that youtube guitar lessons suck me too i don't know about you but somebody setting an acoustic guitar on fire or teaching crappy cover songs in front of a musty black curtain feels a little disingenuous to me i'll get straight to the point join tens of thousands of other guitar players and visit guitar guitarsupersystem.com to join the most popular independent guitar learning platform on the internet if you're a beginner there's an entire curriculum called a beginner's corner just for you if you're an expert the music theory and technique curriculums reach the highest levels of mastery and are based on industry standard learning methods i've used since graduating berkeley college of music if you're somewhere in the middle you're actually the perfect candidate the choose your destiny approach allows you to cater your learning experience to exactly what you want to accomplish whether that's improving your improvising ear training learning new techniques songwriting and more you'll also have access to private live streams lesson comments and a community forum for feedback as well as exclusive giveaways and new curriculum releases the best part is everything that i just mentioned is included in one monthly subscription and you can cancel any time or like a lot of people do upgrade your subscription to a yearly pass of course you can also just learn guitar right on youtube for free because youtube guitar lessons don't suck if you know where to look so check out guitarsupersystem.com now back to guitar villains[Music] now we're going to move on to play a little game i call name those notes[Music] the concept is pretty simple i'll play you a quick sequence of guitar notes from songs you've recorded over the years and you have to tell me what song those notes come from so we're going to see how well you know your catalog and how well you can recognize your guitar playing and it'll spur some conversation about the music okay so we're going to start with something easy that i think you'll get and then things will get progressively harder does that sound good i love it all right let's go yeah now i wrote that song uh upstairs on a piano believe it or not right um mysterion and i use this pedal to record i seem to have everything like in arms isn't that weird we did not plan this but uh yeah the ultimate octave the old one yeah maybe uh so that's from professor sacha funklus and the mysterion of rock maybe your finest album title might i say oh thank you i want to ask you okay so i'm not supposed to be stepping out of camera i think i actually use this oh is that the hendrix does that have the picture of hendrix on it yeah yeah yeah hendrix dunlop okay i used to have that pedal way back in the day that's an awesome i don't know why i got rid of it i had the original one which is a pain because it didn't have the battery thing it was just drove us crazy oh cool we never knew if it was dying or not but um yeah you know i remember one of the i just loved the chords it was just the weirdest chords ever you know and but it was just me early in the morning playing these chords on the piano and thinking i'm going to bring this in and the rest of the band is going to go huh you know um uh kunaberti loved it because he loves weird stuff the moment that um i was coming back in the studio after getting a coffee or something like that and and uh jeff was in the corner and he's just banging things and he's got his bongos and uh so i go into the control room and i say hey john you gotta you gotta mic up jeff right away let's just before i even ask him just like set it up and then we'll roll the track and i'll just like you know surprise him you know because sometimes when you have crazy ideas if you sit down with everybody you know in a meeting right and you say okay now i've got this great idea you're going to play bongos you're going to do the slide whistle people have a you know they start to object because they have ideas in their mind about how they wanted to appear on your album totally so you've you know you sometimes you gotta surprise them and say no we're just doing this don't worry about it it's just a little funny thing to have but of course once we heard the bongos it did something to the weird guitar sound which is it it helped you like take it in yeah i need to listen to that now now that you say that i'm gonna i'm gonna go back and listen for that that's a way better context for the song than i was going to ask so that's perfect all right we got another group of notes for you you ready yes here we go[Music] yes i know that right away little worth lane i wrote that on piano as well um but the first time i wrote that was uh draw in a car driving to new york city uh i was just i spent some time with my mom out at her house um in seacliff and uh i was uh in the in limo you know or a town car something like that leaving long island and that song sort of came to me and i remember thinking okay just remember every single note in your head you know and just sort of like uh catalog it the music feels like home you know it's kind of you said little worth lane was a a home of yours okay so well that that's yeah that's the name of the street where my mother's home was right because it's interesting the way instrumental music and titling is so hard but that music the for the chord progression and the melodic you know ideas that you craft it really does feel like i'm going back home and i you did a really good job conveying that and a personal aside my dad loves that song and it reminds him of his mom oh wow some kindred spirits there as well that's really really nice oh great got a couple more uh couple more for you here ready yes[Music] is there love in space yeah this this feels like a transmission through the dark expanse of the universe is this the hendrix part of the equation coming through just making noises with the guitar nobody ever thought to make like yeah i guess so i i love uh i love weird sounds um i was doing it last night it's funny i had uh i've been working on a session that shouldn't have any weird noises on it and um i i actually plugged in some stuff improperly on purpose and just recorded me banging the guitar to see what would come out and i i did come up with a soundscape that i think the client is going to be very happy or very upset about it surprised without a doubt surprise they're hiring joe satriani they can expect a little bit of uh you know something psychedelic but i i i think you know hendricks certainly pioneered the the concept but i i don't know if it matters what i think but i think you've accomplished your goal you set out to do on the football field like kind of taking what he did and carrying on the torch because the sounds you make actually you know he sometimes the sounds he made were just for pure spectacle and sometimes they're brilliantly musical i feel like the sounds you make actually have musical context like i could actually notate that little transmission if you will and it's really delightful well i tell you i'm very happy to hear you say that um i everything that all the noises that the guitar can make i really love and and i i can relate to it in a really strange way like it's a language to me you know that that sometimes feels like it feels like a secret language but i know there are people out there who get it like yourself who understand that um and and you quite innocently in this little room i think i was recording that song and and on the wall over there was a a picture of an alien that my son who was very young at the time had drawn and i just remember i was writing the song to the picture and to his to his artwork and i started to think you know uh in a child's innocence you know they they expect love wherever they go because that's how they grow up they're just cared for and loved you know and and that's one of the problems when you become older is you go out and you realize the world is not all about love you know and so i but i'm looking at the alien i'm thinking i wonder if you know the concept of love is anywhere else uh outside the the planet earth is it just you know is it just a human thing and that's it and so when we get out there it's not the radiation or the lack of oxygen or water that's going to be a problem it's going to be the fact that the concept of love is just not recognized at all which is be a big problem for us an unanswerable question that that maybe maybe we'll ponder for the rest of our days here yes all right i got i got another group of notes here we're getting a little bit more difficult okay here we go wow where did you find that recording wow uh that's i'm gonna guess that's uh me playing with mick jagger at the tokyo dome that's exactly what it is wow maybe some people don't realize uh your first big break was you got the gig playing with mick jagger on his solo tour in the 80s and i've heard you say what a consummate professional he was is there some experience on the road that sticks out maybe something you haven't shared about that period of time before on the tour on that particular tour um well i've been interviewed like crazy about it um and uh but it's um there are so many funny things that uh we shared as a group of people you know one of one of the things that uh mick was so great at was just making everybody feel like we were all in the band together right and and he just had a way of making everybody feel comfortable about it um but he he worked the hardest and he put out the most you know but we had just the funniest of times um that are really small little nuggets that that you know would make us all just laugh so hard that we couldn't continue everyone would fall down on the ground you know or something like that just like stupid stuff and i they those moments stick out with me because you know there's there's all the moments that were written about in the press you know the the the things that were successful the things that were tragedies and and but i got to see him deal with the chaos of life you know that there's there's always conflict in life and and uh and but he you know he dealt with it and we got through the tour we got through two tours and all of that was happening while he was kind of feuding with keith and finally going back to the stones which is where i always knew he was going to be going so it wasn't like a conflict with me but i could see from my perspective that that was something he had to really uh to handle um but i mean i think one there there are two things that stick out in my mind which i always remember as being so cool um one was uh when he liked to like when you were doing a solo or something he'd like to interact with you in a very theatrical way but always very supportive you know never you know because he knew that like okay joe takes a solo here he's got to stand over here the lights are going to hit him it's going to be loud i want to make sure that my guitar player is just like raging at that moment so whatever i can do to frame him so he would do things and you had to realize not to let it throw you off because he's so crazy in his physical movement yeah right and and doug and i uh doug limit the bass player and i used to always agree that you couldn't watch mick if you were grooving because he doesn't move like a regular guy he's out there dancing like jerry lewis or jim carrey or something he's you know what i mean yeah and if you start looking at him all of a sudden you lose your beat you know because he he's not grooving to you he's acting for the for the audience you know i mean he's doing something that's on a higher level of performance anyway i do remember i was playing some solo maybe it was that one you played and he just came over and he bit me on the shoulder and i thought and you know i kept saying to myself you know just keep going that's mick that's what he does he does weird things but that was pretty weird he just came over and he was like behind me and just making faces then he just you know chomped down he just decided to chomp down while i was playing and i thought that's great yeah how many people can say they've been bitten by mick jagger while they're playing a solo in front of 90 000 people that's a pretty epic we'll leave it at that i got one more group of notes for you here we go oh my god um i stole that right from uh from richie blackmore is that this is a stolen lick well you know when i hear that you know aren't they all stolen yeah i mean i steal from each other i love richie blackmore and of course you know i spent six months playing with d purple and so i i i had the rare opportunity as a fan to join the epic you know lineup of deep purple yeah and to experience doing that and to make believe just you know for a micro second like hey i'm in deep purple of course i always knew i was just an american kid from long island i got to play with an epic british band um and i i mean always above me was richie blackmore looking down at me going huh really you're going to play an ibanez guitar and yeah he he maybe looked at you like whoa that's some clean playing right there to put it to put it one way you know i read some of the stuff richie's a guy you can't you can't copy him you can't replace him he's just so many guitar players from that era were put so much personality into their sound and they had such limited tools that their personality just came out so when you go to you know you can cop the notes and figure out the fingering but you can never actually figure out their the the essence and the magic that goes into it it was it's you know it's like trying to you can't it's like jimmy page you can't contain that there's no there'll never be a book that can explain the genius of jimmy page it's just you know you can't do it he's just too creative every micro second that he plays a guitar it's true any attempt to sort of reign it in and and codify it is like forget about it you know so that's so yeah that solo you you i don't know if you guessed the song did you guess the song oh uh i'm thinking i i what confused me is i used it on a a couple of things but that's from the new record right it's uh it's from uh um uh uh hear the blue river no no no it's from um uh uh what's the other one forget the title now where's balling sorry it's falling stuff yeah yes falling stars i i i gave you an interesting i always give the hardest like out of context passage for the last one because it could fall in like 17 different spots especially with how many songs you have but this is a good segue this is my favorite song on the new record um you had this awesome youtube series where you broke down each song and i really enjoyed watching that do you do you know the book the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy yes yeah many years ago i feel like you could write the musician's guide to the studio with with all you've probably learned over the years you've already kind of demonstrated some of that knowledge like the way you were talking about how guitar pedals would affect the mix that you delivered the engineer and things like that so yeah how much of those laws did you rely on during the recording of shape shifting oh wow what a uh and we could talk about that for hours uh i mean the main thing is for i guess since 98 i've done a lot of home recording um that has contributed either you know 99 or or 50 of the end result guitars you know that wind up on the album like a lot of people these days you know and and uh so uh this particular record shape-shifting again contained i'm gonna i'll just throw in maybe it's 50 that the performances were done at home and they s they somehow survived the transition to a new studio a new uh co-producer a new band you know i'm always flexible about that you know uh like a song like yesterday's yesterday you know i i always thought we'd be using more elements from that but as soon as i got in the room with the guys i thought oh no i have to change my part you know i got to react to this great thing that's happening here um with falling stars it's very complicated uh in in a very subtle way there's lots of layers of guitars that are doing little things and um the i should mention that when i brought the project to the band and to jim scott who i had never worked with before i said look i got this idea instead of me saying we're going to do a reggae album or we're going to do a dance record or an edm record or a metal core record and every song's got to be put into that thing to make you know pump uh in that particular direction i said let's do the opposite thing i'm going to bring 15 songs every song is totally different and i want us to break down and to reset ourselves and our gear for every song like we're almost like we're a different band for each song and so we'll shape-shift yeah hence the title for each one so everyone got excited about that because it wasn't the usual thing that they would be asked to do for an album and so every every morning you know the guys would show up and be like wow let's just break everything down and and screw it back together in some new way uh with with what you know jim and i decided uh to do so uh working with jim scott was amazing uh he just got fantastic ears he's got this unbelievable creative attitude and knows how to handle people just like all the producers that i've worked with have been really great you know people person peoples people person people whatever you want people people people people um they're just they know you know they they know how to handle the very volatile emotional situation of musicians letting their guard down and giving everything they have and not being afraid to make mistakes and all that kind of stuff it's very necessary if you're going to get a great album and uh and and he plus that studio pliers in valencia california is so crazy it's just a it looks like a personal crazy warehouse that jim put together and uh you just you go there and it's like the fun house of all time you just want to have a great time he gets great sounds and uh so we we should know just practically you know uh stating um we had those two bottoms i talked about earlier we had my 1960b we had my very old basket weave cabinet we had an alternative to both you know like with some uh vintage 30s and and another basket weave that for some reason doesn't sound as good as the other one i don't know why yeah uh and then um we had a bunch of brand new fender combos which i really like the hand wired ones and the custom ones so the the silver face and the black face we had uh princeton's deluxes um i had some new fender custom shop uh bandmaster stuff um i think i had my my blackface dual showman um and on that particular song uh jim had this idea like well why don't we start with the smallest amp and then you know wind up with the biggest one that can handle the the pedal this guy here uh which is the the last solo was done with the with the electronics i'll use that for the song uh big distortion as well great sounding pedal lots of fun very complex always spits out a different sound every time you play which i think is a really cool thing for a pedal to do you know not to repeat itself you know so um yeah so we had all them uh lined up in a row in the studio and then we would uh reamp we use this here it's all around you all the tools yes john kuniberti's original ream that he invented uh way back in the early 90s when we were doing the time machine album um we that wound up being the one uh and and i think i got this on ebay actually because uh i kept giving all the ones that i had i gave away to all my friends and and then i realized hey i don't have one so um anyway um that's a great device uh it had it just i don't know it loves guitars and basses and it loves the amp that it sends it to so we did a lot of reamping of solos that i had done at home and then we added guitars as well fresh new guitars and um it's really interesting i mean that that's one of those songs that's got a lot of equipment on it it's just you know i made a list of everything that i i sent to uh to journalists when the album was first coming out because it came out april 10th so i was doing a lot of press at the beginning of the year and i you know i realized i can't remember the whole list of things i did so i made a a text file and i just you know starting the interview i said look i'm just going to send you this text file just whatever you want to do with it but because i i may i may screw it up i may forget you know what i what pedal i used on what solo because there's like six of them on there yes well that's an awesome album and also like it came out obviously at the weirdest time in human history and i'm never gonna forget that and i'm always gonna associate it with just the time like a couple things you know during this time that came out like for john petrucci's album too like they're they're gonna be tied to a certain point in a positive light as just being like this awesome cool little distraction if you will if nothing else because sometimes that's what music has to be um it is you know where we're musicians john's record is amazing i love the fact that he did it and he released it uh our job is to make music for people so why would we stop if we can do it that's what we should keep doing and and uh you know we'll get over the current crisis and the music will last forever so um there's no reason for anybody to hold back you know the music business is always weird by the way it's never it's never right it is always chaos and every seems like every two years now you have to reevaluate what exactly the music business is but um as i've been in the music business since i was 14 and it has always been weird and chaotic and crazy there's never the right time for anything so you just make music give it to people and then make more music that's a good philosophy i'm going to live by that i have a couple little wind down questions you can answer in one sentence or as long as you'd like your favorite airplane album favorite thing to listen to flying on an airplane oh something that really makes me think i mean i've spent a lot of time you know 30 000 feet in the air as you can imagine touring the world so many times um i like the weird records uh you know can i a really quick story first time i heard videotape by radiohead was on an airplane and i didn't realize that the the cassette or whatever it is that they play music on was warped so i just remember it came on and i'm listening to it and i'm thinking this is genius they've they literally went and they put a warped sounding song on their record and of course this the subject matter and everything about the song is weird anyway yeah and i just i just remember having like a you know uh a cathartic moment all the way up there in the air you know flying in a little metal tube listening to this war piece of music i was a little disappointed when i got home and i i got the album and i listened to it and i thought oh that doesn't sound weird at all but um it was a momentary uh yeah that that is very interesting it goes to show you that when a piece of music hits you yeah that it's got nothing to do with technicalities you know what i mean and so like when when guitar players are freaking out over their mixes and they're you know they'll be one db more of 6k or whatever ultimately it doesn't matter you're just really stroking yourself you know that people are going to like it or they're not going to like it and but not for reasons that you can ever control that's true that's very true and i think maybe your secret weapon to writing a good song might simply just be titling the song whatever the album name is because i i have this list here i'm gonna go real quick surfing with the alien flying in a blue dream not of this earth the extremist crystal planet super colossal shape-shifting shockwave supernova what happens next and your best title track in my opinion unstoppable momentum so wow there's something about the title tracks that maybe if you're you know in a rut you're like all right well i'm going to write the title track and this is going to be an amazing song so there you go i just write them i i remember you said that unstoppable momentum i was sitting right over there in that corner when this room looked uh quite different but um yeah i um oh i'm glad you loved that song there was i got to tell you there was a moment in the studio when we recorded unstoppable momentum where we had we had done a lot of really good takes and and i thought i just got a weird idea guys and i said what about vinnie like when we get towards the end you just like freak out and we'll we'll just keep playing the riff you but you just just completely go nuts i love that and he looked at me like like are you ready would you like to unleash the fire and so so all of a sudden we we go to do this one take and it's you know everyone's playing it cool they want to you know get to the song right we get to that moment in this song and he just goes so crazy berserk and i'm looking and we're we're at uh you know skywalker so it's a huge room but i can see all the way like 40 feet across the music room that people in the control room are losing their minds i look over everyone is like screaming like trying to follow the click in their headphones because vinnie has finally unleashed the fury and then he comes right back right at the end and he just nails the ending it was like oh my god that's going on the record yeah some things you just need one pass and you know it's just like that was it that's it that was that you know i know i'm sure it's sort of it was one of those things like well if you put it on the record it's not a single that's for sure but i said well no that's that's going on the record because that was a moment that all of us shared it was a beautiful moment in the history of the universe and and i want it to be preserved forever no i'm glad i'm glad that moment happened i've enjoyed it many many times so final uh one final little game here very quickly build a band what four others in a band living or dead would you want to play with so you're on guitar four other people anyone you want any instrument go oh well i think um i think uh elvin jones on the drums and uh giacco pistorius on the base i i think uh i have to have i think ray thistlethwaite my new keyboard player i i put rey on the keyboards um do i get one more guy yep one more well yeah i wonder if you take it bringing this thing maybe i get robert plant to sing uh i love how robert knows how to step out of the way you know when you listen to those uh what was it called how the west was one all the live stuff that yeah the zeppelin stuff first of all jimmy page is godlike i mean he's just like an improvising freakazoid you know um and he just like no matter how everybody all the fans hang on to every note that he played on the albums he just will not play it the way it's on the out he's just like every performance he does something so risky yeah so out there and robert plant just hangs in there with the band it's absolutely amazing uh he's he's like a holliday and and miles davis rolled into uh uh you know a white rock and roll singer from england hard to do that as a singer to like have that talent of like existing on the stage when you're not singing it's an underrated talent yeah but he's part of the energy you know which is really interesting um if anyone hasn't listened to the his podcast he's got some great podcasts where he you can really tap into the the heart and soul and the mind uh of robert plant robert has a podcast yes he does oh wow digging deep i think it's called i'm gonna have to check that out that's cool yeah so finally joe to loop in your guitar super villain alter ego i have one final question for you okay what do you believe about guitar that most guitar players would think is crazy and this could be a hard truth guitar players need to hear or something you know that others don't maybe a misconception about the instrument or whatever you want what do you believe about the guitar or guitar playing that others may not um well um one thing's for certain if you're if you're a guitar player and your finger is touching the strings and people can hear it um they will they will hear your story so you better have something to say this is a this is just a truth you know and um and the reason why i mention this is because you know as guitar players we admire people who take technique into the stratosphere you know we we can't help it you know because we identify with how difficult it is to play the guitar it's always going out of tune it's it's convoluted it's you know it's hard to fit into especially to modern music and the younger players today are doing just things on the guitar that are astounding absolutely astounding really amazing uh however the truth about guitar playing uh that they had that every younger generation even the ones that haven't started yet are going to have to understand is that if they want to be known for for their uniqueness they actually have to learn how to play less because the more you play the less time the audience has to hear that connection between your fingertip and the string because it's too fast they can't hear it uh the more fingers you use you know like you know when i'm using my little pick on the on the strings to flutter that you that's not joe anymore that's just a pick anybody can imitate me doing that and so you know this this was i think one of the brilliant things about eddie van halen was that when he started with his tapping thing he he took it only so far you could still hear it was eddie when he did it and there are millions of others who can do it better than he but you can't tell who they are so what does that tell you it tells you that as the technique and the note quantity gets higher and higher your the average audience cannot hear the difference unless you've somehow created a compositional context that is so original from everybody else kind of like beethoven you know when beethoven came on he played so many ideas in one piece of music everyone thought he was crazy and they hated him for it but they couldn't ignore the fact that taken as a whole he'd done something with the compositional quality and the message and he couldn't be ignored uh and and that's why we know his name today from the compositional content not because he played a lot of notes a lot of people can play a lot of notes and uh so when you're sitting there and and you can play as fast as the fastest guitar player and and you sit here and you go now how come everybody knows bb king's name you just think about that for a second yeah every note that bibi played he made sure you could hear it was him his fingertip telling you his story showing you his feeling and the faster you go the harder it is to send that message out so you got to make that connection between the message you're trying to send out the story you're trying to tell and how you're doing it you may be working against yourself sometimes you need to be the fastest guy ever and and so i'm all for technique i love all the players that play faster than i will ever play and more complicated i literally love it and i watch them every day because it makes me feel good but i've often said to my students all techniques are the same all chords are the same all notes are the same there is no scale better than any other scale it's all equal they're just tools in a toolbox that us as musicians have to understand we use them to elicit emotions to make music to accompany people's lives that's what we do so don't get freaky about the technique that's it's just tools you know what i mean i know what you mean i appreciate those words those are wise pieces of advice i definitely appreciate it so joe as we uh sorry for the long answer oh no man i would i would sit here and talk to you all day i know you have other things to do so uh as we wind down here i'd like to thank you for taking the time to be on guitar villains today uh it's been a great honor to talk to you uh you've been a huge inspiration in my guitar life for a long time so this has been a huge privilege for me and it was a lot of fun i'll look forward to seeing which treacherous plots you devise next in your musical endeavors oh yes yes treacherous plots yeah well you know i you know identify with this guy here because he was you know metaphysically uh challenged you know the poor guy he was in love and then he gets turned into this and uh he's been both villain uh and good guy uh mostly good guy in this comic strip but uh turned into a bad guy uh in the marvel films but um yeah one of these days we'll have to get him some clothes you know at least some sunglasses[Applause] you