Steve Vai – HuffPost 3.3.11
Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?
Steve Vai: You see, I’m really against teaching my techniques necessarily because it doesn’t matter. My techniques are me, and people who are interested in knowing what I do and playing like me, that’s fine and great. (But) people want to discover their own self on the instrument, they want to do their own thing. They want to play all different kinds of songs or just find themselves. It’s called “Steve Vai’s Techniques,” the class, but in reality, I show various ways that I do things, and I’m always encouraging people to discover themselves and to find the thing they are most interested in. It may have nothing to do with what I do on the guitar. So the way I like to teach is all encompassing, it’s not from the bottom looking out, it’s from the top looking down. When I’m speaking to somebody that’s interested in playing the guitar, a good teacher tries to identify with the goals of the student, he helps cultivate those goals and the right path to discover them. That’s what I try to do. It’s not like, “Sign up here and play like Steve Vai” or “Watch this online guitar lesson and learn how Steve does stuff.” There is a small minority of people that I think want to do that, but there are a lot of people that want to play the guitar. There are just a few principles that I’ve discovered through 32 years of being a touring musician and making records that I think can be helpful.
MR: That boils down to saying you have to find your own inner artist.
SV: I think you have to find your own inner goal, that’s number one. What is it that you want to do? You have to know that; a lot of people don’t know that. They know that they want to play, but a lot of people are just very apprehensive to play because of insecurities or they think they aren’t good enough. The truth is it’s because of the thinking, that’s what I approach more. If I was going to give any one piece of advice, I would say try and discover what it is that excites you the most about playing an instrument. Visualize that, set some goals, and take it step by step. There’s no way you can’t achieve it, you just have to keep the excitement and stay excited about it. Nothing can stop you.