steve vai

hopefully this profile will give some people interested in steve vai a good run down of him and his music.

steve vai is one of the most famous and well regarded guitarists in guitar-land today, and has been for the past 25 years or so.

his music is mainly instrumental and very strange, quirky and unique. vai is a huge innovated and if the saying goes "think outside the box", vai says "what box...?"


vai is one of the most schooled and well versed players you will ever find. he claims to have practiced for up to 15 hours a day in his youth and has 10 hour guitar workouts available on the internet. once you hear his music, you can start to believe that he speaks the truth.

he studied at the prestigious berklee college of music and worked for frank zappa as a transcriber (listening to music and notating it into musical notation form; vai has said he would spend 12 hours a day listening to 1 minute of music) and eventually played in his band before launching his solo career.

his second solo album, passion and warfare, broke major ground back in 1991. it opened a whole new genre of music and introduced a slew of new playing techniques to guitar, as well as inspiring a whole generation of young guitarists.

vai has a very, very unique sound, instantly recognizable to guitarists; small slides, bends, dips of the whammy bar (the bridge of the guitar "floats" on a pivot and the tension of the strings is coutneracted by springs in the back of the guitar, allowing notes to be bent sharp and flat) and many lydian sounding songs (lydian is a mode. in very basic terms, you can compose a song in one of the seven modes, each mode having it's own distinct sound). he has mastered fast alternate picking, sweeping, legato and the whammy bar. most of these techniques can be shown in this demonstration. note his subtle use of the whammy bar.



vai also helped ibanez become one of the biggest guitar manufacturers with the ibanez jem, steve vai's signature guitar. characterized by it's "monkey grip", lion claw routing, 24 fret, thin, wide and flat neck (to facilitate fast playing), floating tremelo, high, wide frets, humbucker-single-humbucker electronics and sharp, sleek, colourful looks, the ibanez jem is now in it's 22nd year of production and has spawned many variants.

vai's music is quite inaccessible to most non-guitar playing people and even to a lot of guitarists, as it is complex, strange and weird.

vai hasn't released an album for 4 years, although he has been touring a lot recently and has a new live dvd in the works. i'm sure his next album will be another solid effort.