TS: Steve Vai vs Joe Satriani

In Steve's favor, he did the soundtrack to "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure."

In Joe's, he sang back-up on the first Crowded House record (!!!).

In Steve's, he played with Zappa and David Lee Roth.

In Joe's, he didn't.

In Steve's, he played the devil in "Crossroads," versus Ralph Macchio.

In Joe's, he went bald.

Yesterday, I picked up his 2005 release "Real Illusions: Reflections." So, now I have Ultra Zone and this new one and I like them both. In fact, I liked the new one enough to listen to the Ultra Zone again last night and I liked it more than I ever have before. His music is kind of funny because it feels like it exists in a vacuum, sort of influenced by certain obvious musicians but also stripped of the popular appeal of those musicians and distilled into his own completely foreign style. I read an interview where he said he's not interested in making "better" music than other people, just different. He likes to make stuff he's never heard before and it shows! I am going down the used record store tonight and see what other Vai I can dig up.

Although... Buckethead has a major problem with sounding exactly the same. For instance, I swear he is playing the exact same two-handed crawl every time. Cuckoo Clocks of Hell is great and all, but it might as well be one song (although I do realize the length of such repetitive riffing is what makes the album so cool, I rarely bother finishing it). Same with Thanatopsis. Same with Giant Robot (the album, not the band's s/t, which is excellent!). Same with Colma. Same with Electric Tears, which is like Colma without the canned drums. Monsters and Robots just sucks, although the 2 decent songs on it sound like leftovers from Giant Robot, which was already repetitive enough and slightly too long, so we don't need more. Cobra Strike sounds like he pressed record and played some scales over a drum machine. Cobra Strike II sounds like he pressed record and played some scales over a DJ's backing track. What else? Oh, I guess that's enough to make my point, anyway.

I think both JS and SV have more soul and writing abilities than Buckethead. And, not that it really matters, but the they both are better technical players. Buckethead is really sloppy live. I'm not sure if it's the mask getting in his way or if he's just ploughing through it half-assed or if he really can't play as perfectly as he does in a studio environment. Maybe it's sitting vs. standing playing?

Buckethead plays well with electronica and dj backing, but JS and SV actually sound like electronica and dj backing themselves. They are both able to get all these bizarre sounds from their guitars that sound very much like the kind of washy, blippy and warped weirdness people squeeze out of computers, but they have perfect control and can play it all live flawlessly. JS and SV also have well-crafted compositions. Buckethead often sounds like there is no composotion, just simple phrasing of scales that go nowhere.

Buckethead is really good at making music that sounds deranged, especially Island of Lost Minds, but he's not so good at evoking any other emotions. Colma is good for chilling out because it has a cold, canned feel and it meanders so aimlessly that you can't pay attention to it if you try. It leads to mental wandering. I know it's supposed to sound emotional, but it doesn't because the tone is not there. Electric Tears seems like an attempt to sound more emotional by dropping the canned drums, getting a bluesier tone and bending the strings with some electric songs thrown in toward the end. But, this too fails to elicit emotion from me. It sounds like background chill out music. Both are a little too long and a little too boring, oddly with Electric Tears being the more boring of the two, despite its seeming attempt to emote.

But what about joy? The sheer playfulness of Giant Robot does emote some joy. Yes, it is fun to listen to. But, it's about as fun as The Fucking Champs and nobody is calling them Guitar Gods. It's flat and has no tone, too repetitive and too long. SV and JS can really emote joy and not in just a flat representation of what joy should sound like. You feel like your mind is actually being taken for a ride that's like a combination of maze, rollercoaster and flying saucer with ups and downs of dynamic composition and gobs of delicious, golden tone. SV also has a flair for unexpected, complex twists obviously stolen from Zappa, but without the goofiness. I had always wondered if Zappa's music would be less annoying without the goofy factor. Well, now I know. It would have been. SV proves you can throw cartoony-sounding passages in the middle of a song without it sounding goofy or hodge-podge. Satriani's first 3 or 4 albums weren't that great as far as tone or composition, but his songwriting got less "paint-by-numbers" sounding on his later albums and much more expressive.

I fully realize, however, that Buckethead's lack of tone in favor of distorto shred is a more popular sound at this time, after years of punk, grunge and metal and as soon as some people hear the clarity of production values on a JS or SV album, it sounds "thin" and cheesy. But, it's really a different sound for a different style of music, similar to the clarity one would expect on a classical record or certain jazz records.

As even Zappa must have realized, "stunt guitar" is pretty cool to listen to when it's an interesting piece of music played by a capable performer. Even more dazzling when it sounds beyond human ability. Think of how lucky we are that anybody can actually play that impossible shit, let alone write it, and we actually get to hear it.
Or is it only cool when weird sounds and impossible pieces of music are made on a computer now?

There are less odd faces associated with it. Or rather, the odd faces are different.

I can't see with my ears, so they could be eating their own head for all I care. ;-)

Fuck Steve Vai, I don't care if he played with Roth and PiL. Dude is a straight up ass clown.

Listening to Surfing With the Alien right now, which I had pretty much memorized in the last 80s, and it still holds up. Satriani = less dramatic guitarist than Vai, but way more musical.

this makes it pretty hard to defend steve...lord i sat through this whole thing in horror once

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhE8KEcXSiU

ugh, what a goon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2rkyBQayL8

That's the best non-official video for a song on youtube I've ever watched.

i miss dave q

i am listening to steve vai's MODERN PRIMITIVE (2016) and not really enjoying it much tbh

Apologies if this is the wrong Rig Rundown, but I thought Satch's tech nerdery was unparalleled here (if predictably so). The only one of these installments that comes close, iirc, is Vernon Reid. Anyway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaO0yObNfV4

(The specific thing I remember from this, assuming this is the right rundown, is that Satriani has a pedal that can artificially alter the length of his guitar cords, which is a level of specificity that I can't imagine many caring about.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui_kEJ7C3O0

I hate to admit I'll probably watch that even though I'm not a fan.

Speaking of which, the other day I was listening to the classic rock station and I caught the last minute or so of "Just like Paradise." The song ends and the DJ, to my shock, sort of exhales and says, "wow, that sucked." And I thought, huh, I've never heard a commercial radio DJ say a single bad thing about anything they played, let alone something in their wheelhouse. I guess they were trying out some "Terrible Tuesday" gimmick or something? But anyway, just coincidentally a couple of days later I heard a *different* DLR song from the same album, and I was impressed by Vai's acoustic chops:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMMMG3WPl7w

I get no feeling from Vai’s music , even when he makes faces and bends notes

It's soulless because he is the Devil, which is why he tried to take the soul of the Karate Kid in a guitar duel.

Dude is like a robot

Ime Crossroads is far more popular with teenaged and twentysomething guitarists in the present day than I would have ever expected.

this reminds me geeta is in london and we need to organise a fap

in london soon i mean

King of the guitar magazine covers

Today in ‘words you wish you never saw together’:

“Vai Gash Busted”

Out this Thursday! Pre-save 'Busted' here: https://t.co/yemMbC8Mvo pic.twitter.com/CBdP2CQzFo

— Steve Vai (@stevevai) December 5, 2022

“Gash?” Uhh