Steve Vai says he was on the cusp of becoming a teenager when his fascination for the electric guitar — and, more specifically, shredding — began. Practicing became an “addiction,” and now he’s revealed just how intensive his routine used to be.
Few guitarists have as many notches on their belt as Vai. He served as Frank Zappa's "stunt guitarist," helped kickstart David Lee Roth’s solo career, joined Whitesnake and launched his own incredibly successful solo career. These days, he's writing music with Joe Satriani as part of their SatchVai Band. The virtuoso journeyman has rarely kept still.
But getting to that point took a lot of effort.
“When I was younger, I chose the route of being fascinated by chops,” he tells Billy Corgan on The Magnificent Others podcast. “It was an interesting discovery, and it was just something as simple as, ‘Look, if you sit down and just practice, you get better.’
“And when I started getting better, it gave me a feeling of enthusiasm, self-respect, which I needed at the time,” he continues. “So it becomes sort of like an addiction.”
Tom Morello has often spoken about how he regularly practiced for eight hours a day to get his chops up, and he and Vai aren’t alone in their diligent approaches to guitar craft.
But Vai accepts they are outliers in many ways.
“Practicing endlessly is not for everybody. It’s only for those who have a pull to do it. You can try to force it, but if it doesn’t feel natural to you,” he says, it won't happen.
“My schedule back then — I was happy if I got nine hours a day. I was very neurotic, very myopic.”
A desire to play, he adds, was a defining factor in him honing his skills. The “pull” and “attraction” of the instrument, of tracing his fingers across its fretboard, kept him on the straight and narrow. Moreover, it took the chore out of the most off-putting thing about learning a creative skill.
“The funny thing was, it didn’t feel like discipline,” Vai explains. “People say, ‘You must have been very disciplined.’ Sometimes I would go to sleep early on a Friday so I could wake up and practice all the way ‘til Monday. It was a passion. Passion is a much more powerful engine of creation than discipline.
“Discipline implies you have to fight something, you have to push yourself to do something that you don’t really wanna do. But passion says, ‘You’re gonna do this because you want to do it. It’s in your heart.'”
Vai’s chat with the Smashing Pumpkins bandleader also saw him reflecting on moving away from making “weird music” to become a rock god in David Lee Roth’s band in 1985. It’s no secret that Roth had grown tired of Eddie Van Halen hogging the limelight in Van Halen, and he was driven to forge a career under his own name, and create a band that would be bigger and better.
But Vai, who had immense respect for EVH, didn’t see it that way. He knew bettering the virtuoso was an impossible job.
“It was a good time, we were young, we wore the most outlandish clothes, the stages were the size of a football field, and we played our asses off,” he reflects. “I knew that I wasn't going to try to sound like Edward or do anything like him.”
Meanwhile, other players have shared their top tips for becoming a better guitar player that are less time-consuming. Vinnie Moore has said what players should do to avoid being too mechanical, which goes against a long-standing rule, and Marty Friedman says players need to do this, or else they'll never up their game.
If intensive regimes are your bag, check out Ben Harper’s gig-day routine. It’s not for the faint-hearted.
