GW What kind of trem was on that Fender at the time?
VAI That was a Floyd Rose. I had one of the first Floyds. It was a pain in the ass, because it didn’t have the fine tuners. It was before the fine tuners came out.
GW A lot of the extreme trem moves—signature Steve Vai stuff—is already in place on that album.
VAI Yeah it is.
GW Were these techniques you developed with Frank? Earlier?
VAI It was just stuff I imagined. “The Attitude Song” was a reflection of knowing in advance that, if I had a bar, I could do those things. Because what anybody was doing with a bar back then was nothing. I mean Eddie Van Halen was doing dive bombs, Hendrix was doing dive bombs; but as far as playing melodies with harmonics and certain dips inside the melodies, that was inspired by the concept of composition rather than what anybody else was doing. If you listen to “The Attitude Song,” it’s got one time signature against another, and it’s got triple harmonies that move in and out of unison. None of that is accidental. It was a matter of having these compositional ideas and then finding a way to use the bar to execute them.
GW Did you start trying to do this stuff with a standard Fender Strat trem? Or was it the advent of the Floyd that enabled you to even begin doing this?
VAI Yes. There was no way I could have done any of that stuff with a regular trem. You couldn’t get the notes and strings to do what they do without something like a Floyd. And then that ability to pull up on the bar was something that no standard guitar could really do.
GW Were you using any kind of sustainer on any of the Flex-Able recordings? That’s another device that’s central to your unique approach.
VAI No. Sustainers did not exist back then, as far as I know. But one thing I used to do was put the headstock of the guitar on the speaker cabinet while I was playing. The resonation would cause the guitar to vibrate like a…well, like a vibrator.
GW You were already using Carvin amps, another standard item of Steve Vai gear, on Flex-Able. How did you get into them?
VAI You know, when you’re a kid and you see pictures of a guitar, you get wood. You get this inner excitement. When I would see pictures of equipment—like amplifiers and guitars—my heart would actually beat faster. I would sit and stare at them. It was like porn. And then one day, I remember, I wrote away to an address in some magazine for a Carvin catalog. They had these beautiful catalogs where they’d have mountains of amplifiers strewn out on these green pastures. Oh my God, that was like the jackpot, man! I knocked myself out when I got that catalog. So I thought, Carvin…when I move out to California I’m gonna get with them. And Frank was working with Carvin, so I got hooked up with them. And they gave me my first stack. Actually the picture that’s on the cover of Flex-Able was drawn from a photo that was used in the first gear ad I ever did, for the Carvin Legacy X100B amp. And I remember when that stack first arrived, I just sat there and stared at it. I couldn’t believe I actually owned a stack, you know? And I used that on the whole record.
GW You just miked one of the speakers?
VAI One mic, yeah…I didn’t even know how to mike it. I just experimented with different ways. You know, the process of recording Flex-Able was tremendously educational for me, because it was how I learned to engineer recordings. Before that, if I had to hook up a stereo I was scared to death. I couldn’t even connect the ins to the outs and the outs to the ins. And then I had to build this studio from scratch, get the console, plug in the gear and figure out how the signal path worked. I made the best of the equipment I had. I had a 1/4-inch eight-track machine, so you can imagine…
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