God gave rock and roll to you steve vai how to#
God gave rock and roll to you steve vai professional#

It was there when I first came to Frank and his bandвЂ™s rehearsal, and immediately found myself in it.

But I was in correspondence with Frank, I was writing down the sheet music for him - and then I moved to California, where my grandpa and grandma lived. There was no talk of joining Frank's band yet, I was too young - as I said, I had just turned 18 years old. After that, Frank hired me, as I knew musical notation well, for the role of a notation transcriber for his guitar parts, including solos - heвЂ™d send me these recordings, and IвЂ™d transfer them to paper. I was 18 when I enrolled in Berkeley - that is when I sent Frank a cassette tape of my band's demos, as well as a notation score for one of his super complicated numbers, Black Beach. VB: They say that you received an invitation to Frank's band after you transcribed one of his complex compositions into a sheet music notation, and that work fell into his hands. After school, I decided to get a serious musical education and entered the Berkeley College of Music, where I became seriously interested in the music of Frank Zappa - I donвЂ™t want to say that I was not familiar with his work before, but it was in Berkeley that I began to analyze his compositions in a serious way. It was called Sweet Little Poor Caroline and was performed by our high school orchestra. At that time I thought of myself more as a composer - so I wrote my first symphonic work, studying in the ninth grade. So in high school I already had a decent rock band, and at school, of course, we were kings - you know!Д«ut at the same time, I was more interested in the process of writing music than performing cover versions of rock material in front of fellow students - you will not believe it, but as a child I dreamed of becoming a composer and created the first serious work even before I really learned to play the guitar.

God gave rock and roll to you steve vai professional#

I'm not kidding - Joe is always great! It is to him that I owe the fact that I became a professional guitarist. It was he who gave me the phone number of his friend Joe Satriani, who lived in Manhattan, who was already giving guitar lessons at that time, and with whom my neighbor studied - and I began to study more or less professionally.Д«ut at first, at 13 years old, I was a very modest and shy student - and Joe was then 16 or 17 years old, and he was already a great musician back then.

God gave rock and roll to you steve vai how to#

And my first influence as a musician was my neighbor - a guy a little older than me, but he knew how to play a few Jethro Tull songs on the guitar, and he seemed to me a real magician. That's how I began to try to play the songs of these bands on the guitar with my friend - we were 13 years old then. Soon I started listening to records from the collection of my older sister - the albums of Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple - in general, all those records on which there was a heavy guitar sound. To tell the truth, I hated these lessons, and the guitar somehow didn't work out well at first either. But at first, it was very, very difficult for me to learn the guitar: you see, I turned out to be not the very first musician in our family, so already at that tender age I learned to play the accordion. SV: Well, I can't say that there was such an idea at all - I just wanted to play the guitar from the very moment I saw this instrument! I was then six or seven years old, and our neighbor knew how to play the guitar. How did you get the idea to become a guitarist? VB: Everyone knows very well that Steve Vai's professional career began in Frank Zappa's band, but what preceded your transition to become a professional is rather unknown. Steve's answers, of course, sometimes radiate hints of the aforementioned eccentricity and that's why they are good: they allow you to look at familiar concepts from a completely unexpected side, which, perhaps, would never have occurred to a person who is not a rock guitarist of a truly galactic level.

Surprisingly, when communicating in person, Steve turned out to be not at all the character that his music and stage shows represent, but a very polite interlocutor who answers even the trickiest questions in great detail.

What is eccentricity for a world-class rock musician? Play 20 notes per second? To patent a seven-string electric guitar? To record a live album with an unheard-of and unimaginable creative concept? Or, finally, go on tour with master classes in Russia, not excluding cities like Ryazan that are quite unique for a musician of such level? Well, since Steve Vai, who does not need the introduction as the electric guitar maestro, did all of the above, we can award him the title of rock eccentric #1.