All of the electric guitar tones we hear on The Sea of Emotion, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai’s first-ever studio album together, are wholly thrilling yet reassuringly familiar.
There is something unmistakable about how each of these players address the instrument, their tones distinct yet complementary. Within a couple of notes you know exactly who is playing what.
But in a new interview with Guitarist, Steve Vai admits that all is not what it seems – when engineering the tones, he leaned heavily on guitar plugins. They both did.
Vai credits Satriani for the idea. Though, Vai blames Satriani might be the more appropriate construction – because he was definitely not onboard with plugins until he heard what Satriani did with them on 2022’s The Elephants of Mars.
“After I heard Joe’s album, The Elephants Of Mars, he told me he’d used plugins, and I was stunned,” admits Vai. “Because I had a very snobbish attitude: ‘Oh, you have to have microphones.’ So I started fooling around with SansAmp and realised how easy it is.”
Satriani was well versed in this “no amps, no mics” approach. He had a bundle of plugins from SansAmp, Tonex, Brainworx, and Neural DSP. The Neural plugins especially pleased Vai, but he’s not decommissioning his quote/unquote real guitar amps just yet.
“Now, it’s mostly the Neural stuff that I use,” he says. “There were a couple of things where I still used a combination of my [Carvin] Legacy 3 amp and my Synergy module.”
And no one is going to wean Vai off mic’ing his guitars.
“I would mic things ad nauseum,” says Vai. “I’d have two stereo cabs, three mics on the front of each, one in the back, then 4ft away. And then sets of stereo [AKG] 414 room mics. And it’s nice… but it’s a lot of setup, a lot of work.”
The pair also unpack some of the guitars they used to track the album. Satch was using his Chrome Boy JS Ibanez signature guitar and its gold sibling – Gold Boy? He used his Paisley finish prototype and a Taylor nylon-string guitar.
Vai leaned upon his usual complement of Ibanez PIA and JEM guitars, all the familiar faces – Evo, Flo III and friends.
If you are a long-time fan of Satriani and Vai, it should not come as a surprise to learn that there are sitars on the recording.
“Steve and I are always putting sitars on our albums,” says Satriani. Only this time out there was something really radical, a seven-string sitar custom-made by Sterling Ball.
You can read this Satch/Vai interview in full in the latest issue of Guitarist – better still, save and subscribe.
The Sea of Emotion is available to preorder, out November 6 via earMUSIC.
