mentoneman
Well-known member
blue powder was recorded with a carvin and it was the best tone on the lp. i wish i could get into vai's music because he's prolific so i'd have lots of stuff to listen to, but man i just can't take it....danyeo":3b0h82op said:
Digital Jams":3b0h82op said:Pat can swirl his sniffer all he wants, the 80s fire still burns inside for him......
i still love the idea of a rock player who is also a soloist, if they have the technique and heart, from which great tone eventually emerges from, but i just don't care for much of the musicality of what's going on these days.
guthrie, landau, allan hinds, andy timmons, andy wood, pete thorn...gear page guys like scott lerner and andy most and chuck daiola are great too, because they are very musical beneath the technique and solos.
vai could be way more respectable, because i think he's good enough to be able to play many styles and very technically difficult things, but he always reverts to being so stinkin silly on the guitar with tjikistanian funeral waltzes and egyptian polka prom anthems, and that accursed whammy bar and wah wah abuse, two of the most gimmicky things in all of guitardom when overused, and he definitely overuses them more than anyone. it's a disorder with that guy! "step away from the whammy and wah steve...."
i think yngwie/uli/schenker opened the euro/exotic scale door and made it attractive because that was a natural evolution process for them and their musical environments, eddie blended clapton's blues boxes and hendrix's dive bombs with his family brewed musical understanding and melodic and rhythmic virtuosity,
but with vai all of his mystical exotic scales and whammy nonsense sound artifically inseminated via schooling and trendiness...looks like it, sounds like it, because it IS him trying to be something he's truly not natural at, and i'm not even sure if he can identify what the problem is. he doesn't live and breathe it but he knows what notes to play, knows the mood a certain mode evokes, understands vocalizing on the guitar, but doesn't realize how nerdy he truly looks when he does it, thus the phony pantomime yodelling comes across so baffoony...how the heck (or better yet why) is one supposed to act out and feel a hungarian wedding scale if you are from yonkers or wherever he's from? i'd pay to see him in concert with simon cowell commenting after every song
he'd get murdered!but one thing is that he sure seems blindly confident about what he's doing. something ej could take a lesson from. i could listen to ej music all day but man he comes across as very nervous and worried sometimes when he plays, like he has to play every note in a scale he predetermined to be correct, at the expense of time and feel. and bloom lacked magic tones, without which ej is like superman sans cape...just a dude in blue and red tights.
