Steve Vai has offered invaluable advice to guitarists wanting to improve their guitar tone during a new interview with Guitar Center to promote his new signature Spark Mini amp.
The electric guitar virtuoso, who recently announced he's starting a new band with Joe Satriani and Pete Thorn, concedes that gear does indeed matter, but focusing on technique makes the biggest difference to an individual's sound – and technical experimentation should be your first port of call.
“People say the tone is in the amp, the tone is in the guitar, the tone is in the neck, the tone is in the body or the pickups,” he begins. “On one level, yes. There is a tone in all of those things, but you’re the boss of the tone because you’re the one playing it, and you’re the one hitting the note.”
He stresses that players who are unhappy with their tone needn’t rush out and replace their guitar amp outright. Instead, players should look inward before opening their wallets.
“The tone of the note has so many moving parts to it,” he instructs. “One of them is just where you hit the string.
“It’s the way you pick. How hard are you holding the pick? The intonation is dictated by how hard you push, how hard you pull this way, what your vibrato is like. All of these things go into discovering your unique tone. There are so many parameters in creating the tone that comes off your fingers.”
Indeed, it’s easy for players – especially those at the start of their journey and eager to hear tangible results as quickly as possible – to overlook the amount of nuance that comes from hand positioning and pick attack.
Play towards the bridge, and the tone will get snarly and trebly; play towards the neck, and the tone mellows out. Even without changing the dials on an amp, players can achieve different sounds by interacting with their instrument differently.
Vai speaks from experience. In the early 1980s, he revamped his picking style because he was unhappy with the tone it gave him. He got fed up with buying shiny new amps and not seeing results, too, so he dragged himself back to the drawing board.
“I just was getting tired of not having a great tone,” he confesses. “I went through all these amplifiers. I was searching for something that sounded like some of the things I was hearing at the time. Edward van Halen had hit the scene. You had Yngwie. So many players. And I could never figure out why don’t I sound good.
“I started to experiment with the way that I pick, where I pick, how I pick, the angle, all of these things. You get to a point where you hear it and you know it, and then the work starts.”
Vibrato has also proven to be a key skill for Vai, and it can make or break a player’s tone. He underlined the value of intonation with MusicRadar in 2022, having had that particular lesson drilled into him by Joe Satriani when he was much younger and far less experienced.
“Joe Satriani has an ear like none other,” he said. “When I was a kid, he would say, ‘No, don’t vibrate it out of tune. You’ll sound like an idiot!’”
Meanwhile, Vai recently revealed that he also received picking advice from Robert Fripp to help him nail the trickiest parts of the BEAT tour last year. Even the pros need pointers every now and then.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
“He was my Michael Jordan growing up. I’m in it because of him”: D’Wayne Wiggins, influential Tony! Toni! Toné! guitarist who helped pioneer neo soul, dies aged 64
“It was under my dad’s bed when I was a kid. When it slid out from underneath the bed… it was like the heavens were opening up”: How Zakk Wylde’s sparring partner Dario Lorina started a new chapter – with the help of a holy grail Les Paul
