SHRED! Joe Satriani
This month in the ‘shred shed’ Charlie Griffiths surfs over to the crystal planet to study Professor Satchafunkilus’ time machine. Get ready to fly!
In 2020 Joe Satriani released his 17th solo album Shapeshifting and it features the trademark songwriting, melody and smooth legato that has kept Joe at the top of the guitar legend list since 1986 when he released Not of This Earth. He followed this with other landmark albums such as Surfing With The Alien, Flying In A Blue Dream, The Extremist and too many more to mention here.
As well has his solo career, Joe has also collaborated with artists such as Brian May, Ian Gillan, Spinal Tap and as a backing vocalist on Crowded House’s debut album! The year 2009 saw Satch team up with Michael Anthony, Sammy Hagar and Chad Smith to form Chickenfoot, which allowed us to see the guitarist in a traditional rock band setting. As well as his creative output, Joe is known as one of rock guitar’s most respected educators, with students Steve Vai, Kirk Hammett, Alex Skolnik and Andy Timmons featuring on his books.
In this lesson we will look at some of the riffs, licks, tricks and technical approaches that permeate Joe’s style. Example 1 is an arpeggiated chord riff that’s very much in the Satriani style. A big part of Joe’s style is his songwriting and the ability to give the composition a strong foundation upon which to apply lead guitar motifs. This riff serves as a picking-hand challenge as picking each string evenly and in perfect time takes practice if you want to do it as well as Joe.
Our second example is a fretting-hand tapping idea based around creating arpeggios “A big part of Joe’s style is his songwriting and the ability to give the composition a strong foundation” along the strings rather than across them as in conventional arpeggio playing. This approach requires us to hammer-on the notes using only the fretting-hand fingers, so accuracy is everything here; with the added challenge of switching between tapped notes and strummed chords.
Example 3 focuses on Joe’s high-speed pick tapping. For this technique Joe uses the edge of his pick, to rapidly and repeatedly tap a note while adding a melody with the fretting hand. This is a unique sound, more defined and clean than traditional finger tapping.
Example 4 is a look at Joe’s slippery legato lines, which is the most prominent part of his playing. The idea here is to master playing lines which snake their way through scales like liquid metal, with rhythmic phrasing to add musicality. Our final example is a two-handed chord tapping piece. This is played with a clean sound and uses two fingers on each hand to create interesting, wide interval arpeggios.