Joe Satriani Quotes

I'm not going for a soft sound. I ain't lookin' for a warm sound. My sound is warm, but I don't need tubes to do it. The Randall RG-100 is the best amp for what I do.

I've really gotten over pedals. I can't keep up with this craze of boutique pedals that make you sound like everything but your guitar. I can't get my head around it.

My basic setup is my Ibanez Fireman guitars and for pedals, the TC Electronic MojoMojo is the mainstay of my board, along with a Catalinbread Calissto Chorus.

It is the universe where all rock players live- we all use distortion, overdrive, gain and saturation. I call it 'fuzz.'

I like the sound of a Silvertone amp for myself. It's kind of cleaner guitar sounds when necessary, maybe a little less metal-sounding. But it really doesn't matter what amp I play through; it's really the way I voice chords and play guitar, how I strike the strings.

It's good to have certain restrictions sometimes, but it's definitely more fun to play really loud, with distortion.

I play a Fender Jazzmaster and three stacks and a combo, two old Marshall Plexis and a Hiwatt combo and a Hiwatt combo with Marshall cabs.

In the studio, my brother and I have always used a lot of Marshall amps. We like to keep it pretty basic. We just use a couple of cabinets each - sometimes just one, if we think that's enough. We mainly go for 100-watt and 50-watt heads.

Using double coil pickups kills a lot of the guitar tone - you lose the acoustic mechanics. With my single-coils driven through the Marshalls and overdrive, it sounds massive.

On 'Honeybabysweetiedoll' I used a Whammy, a Boss OC-3 octave box, a Sustainer and a Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler. That's only on the intro, where all those weird noises are happening.

I never liked mellow sounding guitar.

You can muck around with different guitars for certain bits, but you have to have your own sound. That's your benchmark, that's your sound. I also play a Black Beauty. It sounds amazing.

I'm pretty basic as far as technique is concerned. I don't use many gadgets, and I like the sound my guitar makes, anyway.

A wah-wah is important as well. I love it; it makes the guitar scream.

When you're first starting out, there's always the temptation to hide behind distortion because it lets you get away with murder. But, when it comes to rhythm work, you've gotta back off that gain control a bit, especially if you're playing with another guitarist.

I'm obsessed with fuzz pedals.

The heavy guitars are the ones that sound good. They are not that comfortable, but they do sound great.

I'm on this eternal quest to get the best guitar sound in the world, but my vision of what is 'the best' changes every time I go into the studio. Sometimes my goal is to make my guitar jump out, and sometimes I want it to lay back.

The Telecaster doesn't really sound that good for the kind of rock and roll that a lot of people played.

These days, my main guitar amps have been Magnatone. They're beautiful. Magnatones have actual tremolo, which I recently learned about guitar amps. Often what guitar amps call vibrato is really just a volume Up and Down. But Magnatone has a true vibrato, which is pitch bending. And so, it's just a lush sound.

I think when I began, I played distortion more than the guitar. The results of my strumming. Now I play the twang of the string, which is a lot closer to the source of the sound making.

Still others want a traditional guitar sound if they call you for guitar.

I've always liked the electric guitar better. Even though the acoustic can be a very sexy and mysterious instrument, I can go to way more places with an electric.

I couldn't not play a Les Paul guitar. Les always used to point to my Strat and say, 'Why do you have that piece of crap around your neck?' I'd say, 'Yours are too heavy. I had to drill holes in it.'

All my racks are the same between Slipknot and Stone Sour. The only thing I'll do is switch out pedals in the GCX system. But it's the same heads, same wireless, same GCX.