Joe Satriani
30 years on from its release, Joe Satriani’s Surfing With The Alien remains one of instrumental guitar’s landmark albums. Here, Satch looks back and shares the lessons learned while recording a multi-platinum record on a shoestring budget…
If you’re a guitarist of any kind, chances are you’ve at least heard Surfing With The Alien. Over the three decades since its release, the album has become essential listening for legions of players – a masterclass in fusing technique and melody. But in the run-up to its recording, Joe Satriani didn’t exactly fit the guitar hero mould he occupies today.
Back in the mid-80s, Satch was working in guitar stores and sharing his knowledge with eager young players. Thanks to the help of former student Steve Vai, he’d landed a record deal and already had one album to his name, but high hopes for his second release were scuppered when he received word of its $13,000 budget, in an age where albums routinely cost $100,000-plus. It left Joe and producer John Cuniberti to stretch their limited resources to the limit in San Francisco’s Hyde Street Studios. But even when time was tight and the gear selection even tighter, Joe somehow made it work, and the resultant album gave life to shred staples such as Always With Me, Always With You,
Satch Boogie and the iconic title track. This is the inside story of a true labour of love, an album that changed instrumental guitar forever and one that guitarists of all stripes can learn from. Take it away, Joe…
Go with your gut “The idea for the album was to celebrate everything that I liked about electric guitar, my roots, and the players I still really like.
So, it went from Chuck Berry to Hendrix, from Wes Montgomery to Allan Holdsworth, I wanted to celebrate all of it. I grew up listening to The Beatles and the Stones, and Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, and I wanted all of that in there. But at the same time a large part of my playing is Tony Iommi and Billy Gibbons. I’m just a sum of all of the guitar players I thought were really cool. And I wanted to make an album that was about that.
“I pitched the album to Relativity Records’ president, Barry Kobrin, in that exact way. And he looked at me funny, because it was such an untrendy thing to do, but he said, ‘Well, okay.’ He’d heard me play Satch Boogie at a club in New York, and so he said, ‘Is the album going to be like that?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, pretty much, with a couple of left turns here and there!’”
Even the cheapest ge ar has its uses “For that particular record, I had two Kramer guitars.
They were both Pacers and one was put together from parts at the Guitar Center. Eventually, I realised that the thing was
really great if you wanted to play out of tune all the time! But I had a connection with it, and that became the guitar that I used for my first EP and Not Of This Earth, and then with Surfing With The Alien. And by then I had purchased a second, cheaper version of that Kramer that had three single-coil pickups. It had the thinnest, brightest sound I’d ever heard, and that’s what I used for those very clear sounds for the song
Ice 9. It’s such a poorly constructed guitar, but it was inexpensive and I’m just grateful that companies do that. They make guitars and they sell them for cheap for people who don’t have a lot of money, because that’s who I was at the time, and, so, it helped me out at a time when I needed it.”
Switch up your sound “I also had a guitar that I put together from parts.
It was a Boogie Body Strat body made out of hard-rock maple. It had an ESP neck that was a ’59 vintage style, 7.5[-inch] radius, ebony fretboard. If I didn’t need the whammy bar, I’d use that guitar: clean, funky, bluesy. I still
“IT WAS VERY IMPORTANT THAT WE GOT IT RIGHT BE CAUSE I COULD ONLY AFFORD TWO REE LS OF TAPE!”
have that guitar today. It’s on every record I’ve made doing something. I had [Joe’s guitar tech] Gary Brawer make me two or three different pickguards that were preloaded with different kinds of pickups.
“So, for the ‘humbuckers in the Strat body’ sound, I had a black pickguard with two Seymour Duncan pickups in it. It was a 59 in the neck and a JB in the bridge, and I would screw that one in when I needed that kind of a sound, and then when I needed to do really Stratty kind of sounds, I would tell John Cuniberti to take a break, I’d take the strings off, unscrew the pickguard, put in a new pickguard with the Strat pickups, screw it, and string it up, and then do that part.
“That was because I couldn’t afford all these different guitars; I basically had three guitars and a bunch of pickguards. The poor man’s guitar arsenal!”
“It was very important that we got it right, because we were recording to two-inch recording tape, and I could only afford two reels of tape! There was no editing after the fact, and none of this cut-and-paste thing that you can do 24 hours a day like we do today. Editing was destructive: it was done with a razor blade back then.
“So, the decision was made: ‘Okay, the hell with that part; who needs a pre-chorus, right?’ And it was a good decision because it focused more on the fun aspect of the song.”
Kee p it fresh “Crushing Day’s guitar solo was really long, and so I thought, ‘I’d better work some of this shit out.’
All the other ones are improvised. But, in retrospect, I regret [working that one out] because I’ve always found that when you’re on stage and you’re playing
night after night, that sticking to the script is one of the things that will kill you in the end: it’s a solo killer. And songs that are pliable, songs that have built into them improvisations are the ones that can keep you in them, they can keep growing, and the audience still feels the original intent of the song, even though you’re still working within that improvisation. So even songs like
Always With Me, Always With You or Satch Boogie or Echo or Surfing With The Alien, there’s so much improvisation built into them they can still be played around with live and remain intact.”
Sometimes simplicity is ke y “I had a moment when I was writing in my apartment for the record where I was saying that I should not be afraid of the power and the beauty of major keys.
And that year after year I hear people using I-IV-V progressions, I-VI-IV-V progressions, and the musos will always roll their eyes because they’re looking for cluster chords and unusual time signatures and challenging things.
“But if you walk around in the real world you see, ‘Wow’. I went to a stadium and there were 100,000 people singing the song that had three chords in it and you go, ‘This is humanity. This is people coming together, being united by a simple melody over a simple chord, that hits to the core of their very being.’ They’re not getting together 100,000 people at a time to sing something in 17/8 that traverses four different key signatures!
“I love the simplicity and the power behind getting those three chords right and not throwing in 17 other chords when they’re really unnecessary. I mean, the chord progression for the solo in Circles is so simple. It’s based on I-IV-V and there’s three chords. But it’s the juxtaposition with the beginning and the end that makes it such a release, in a way. And that’s what I’ve learned when listening to the great classical composers: that they use complexity and simplicity like they were equal tools.”
Think ahead “When I came in to record Always
With Me, Always With You, I played John the rhythm part and it had stereo chorus and echoes everywhere.
And he looked at me and said, ‘Well, I’m not recording that crap. We’ll never be able to mix that. Can we just plug you directly into the tape machine?’
“And so we used that black Boogie Strat and we recorded the arpeggios totally dry, no amplifier, just into a mic preamp into the tape machine. And then, of course, as we went to layer the track, I realised that he was completely right and he was looking ahead. He was saying, ‘If there’s going to be percussion and there’s going to be this melody that’s got some delay and reverb on it, we can’t have these arpeggios piling up on each other with all these delays.’ Being that I’m usually the guitar player with his head in the clouds and out of space not thinking at times, it hadn’t dawned on me that it would be a problem if we recorded everything that way. So we have to thank John for taking control of the situation!”
Take your inspiration somewhere new “I wanted to take two-handed tapping to some different level, so with Midnight and with Satch Boogie’s middle section, I was thinking, ‘What has Eddie [Van Halen] not done?’
I mean, Eddie is a genius. He’s the number one guitar player of my generation, but I thought, ‘I’m not going to step on his toes.’
“And so I applied things to the idea of tapping the ’board that I thought moved into an area that Eddie hadn’t explored. And that was one of the things I felt, ‘Well, I know he hasn’t done this kind of a swing, groove, and I know that he doesn’t work with pitch axis things, so I’ll take the technique and do something different with it.’ And then using it as a bridge in a boogie song I thought was the weirdest thing!”
Find your trusted ears “Most of the time, I like to improvise in the studio and I create an environment in the room where I’m performing, not just for myself but for, in this case, John Cuniberti.
And John’s always really good at looking at me and saying, ‘Oh, that really sucked. There’s no way I’m letting you keep that one,’ or, ‘There’s no way I’m erasing that. That’s really great.’ And when you’re playing, you really don’t have any idea what’s good or what’s not good. That’s why I think producers are really good, or at least having a good friend who is not afraid to tell you that you’re sucking, or to remind you that you’ve just played something really great and you’d be an idiot to erase it.
“I remember playing the record to Steve Vai. He really loved the record, and he was really helping me out quite a bit with my career back then – he connected me to Relativity Records and he introduced me to A&R wizard Cliff Cultreri back in 1985. But when it came to talking about Crushing Day, Steve just said, ‘Yes, it’s a really cool song... the solo’s kind of worked out though, isn’t it?’ And it was that little comment between friends that was very telling, because I knew that, out of everybody, he knows everything; when he listens to me play, he knows the backstory just because he knows me.
“We’ve been with each other since we were kids, but he noticed there was something fishy about it right away. It’s not in my nature to do that, and he thought it was weird that I would work out a solo when he knows that’s not generally what I do. And what I should have known when he said that was, that was going to haunt me for the rest of my career!”