Modern Guitar Magazine Interviews Joe Satriani

Posted by Chris 23 May, 2006

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Joe Satriani, hands down, is my favourite "instrumental" guitarist. His sense of songwriting and melody is unmatched by any of the other "shred" guitarists out there. He also somehow manages to make that fuzzy over-saturated tone of his listenable.Modern Guitar Magazine has a great interview with him on their site. Here is an excerpt :

The things that drove me to do it were very interesting. We had done about fifteen months of touring. I thought I was going to do a live in the studio record after finishing G3 in Tokyo. We did a week of shows in India. I got back to San Francisco and then went up to Vancouver to do post production for the G3 - Live In Tokyo DVD. Suddenly I thought, why would I want to do another live project? It�s what I was looking at on the screen, you know.

I put the guitar away for a couple of weeks and went on a little holiday. I came back realizing that I wanted to get into the studio by myself and come up with another way of eliciting performances for myself, another way of tweaking the guitar to get more tones, and just come up with some different arrangements and other ways of recording an instrumental guitar record. So I spent about two and a half months at my home studio basically engineering myself, doing all the basses, guitars, and keyboards, before reaching out for Simon Phillips, Jeff Campitelli, Mike Fraser, and Eric Caudieux to help me finish it.

The idea was to write about more interesting perspectives, to make sure that the guitar tones really told the story of what each song was about, and to not hold back in any way, you know, from representing the feel and emotions with respect to the sonic landscape. Sometimes that means being very subtle, other times being very bombastic. From songs such as �Ten Words�, which is a subtle approach, all the way to �Crowd Chant�, which is bombastic. That song kind of hits you over the head, as far as what it�s all about.

Read the full article here.