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It is only the most elite of elite musicians whose unconventional approach becomes convention.
Steve Vai
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Steve Vai
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: June 6
Actor
Composer
Guitarist
Musician
Record Producer
Songwriter
Carle Place
New York
Elites
Conventions
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Musician
Whose
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Unconventional
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Convention
Elite
More quotes by Steve Vai
I wanted to be a composer before anything else. And my sister was listening to Led Zeppelin in the other room! When I heard that, it was a game-changer.
Steve Vai
The classical guitar has a dynamic to it unlike a regular acoustic guitar or an electric guitar. You know, there's times when you should play and there's times when you gotta hold back. It's an extremely dynamic instrument.
Steve Vai
I'm a big fan of cultural music, and that's how I try to expand my playing, by listening to music that is not conventionally American.
Steve Vai
I think the thing that I got most from working with Frank Zappa is that I was able to see someone who completely independent. The most beautiful thing about Frank was that he was completely in the moment and present and eternally creative.
Steve Vai
I was about seven or eight years old when I first heard West Side Story, and it had a huge impact on me. If you look at the elements of that record, it contains many of the things I enjoy doing today.
Steve Vai
I've been approached many times to write all sorts of books about my past and my personal life. I get interest from people who want to do reality shows, and somebody just offered me a huge amount of money to write my spiritual memoirs. I'm just not interested.
Steve Vai
If you want to play something that you can't, you need to see and hear yourself doing it in your minds eye. It will start to happen
Steve Vai
So that's the challenge for me and that has always been the challenge - finding that melody, that riff, that thing that just lights me up and makes me feel like it's Christmas.
Steve Vai
The blues scale was the first thing I learned. It's just a pentatonic scale with a flat seventh and a few notes that sound cool when you bend them. And because people have amalgamated the blues into this rock-blues scale, if you're using it, you better sound like a real authentic blues player.
Steve Vai
I loved the guitar, and I had all of this music in my head. My passion for the guitar and the ideas for what I could create musically were equal. So that's where I was.
Steve Vai
Possessing a healthy imagination is a necessary ingredient for creativity.
Steve Vai
Find what you're best at and exaggerate it.
Steve Vai
I loved the idea of recording. The idea of sound-on-sound-recording captured me as a young kid, and once I realized what it was I had an epiphany. Before I was even playing the guitar, I would create these lists of how I would record things and overdub them, like Led Zeppelin song, 'I could put this guitar on this track...' and so on.
Steve Vai
I've never really heard anybody imitating anything of mine the way they do with Edward Van Halen's stuff.
Steve Vai
When I was growing up, the blues did seem too simple to me. I was just a muso.
Steve Vai
I could never overstate the importance of a musician's need to develop his or her ear. Actually, I believe that developing a good 'inner ear' - the art of being able to decipher musical components solely through listening - is the most important element in becoming a good musician.
Steve Vai
I was a kid, 12 or something, when the Partridge Family was big on TV. I liked the curly cord running from the bass to the amps, which were real fancy. That cord looked so cool. I said, 'Wow! I gotta play something like that!'
Steve Vai
I think every artist subconsciously wants to evolve themselves. Sometimes they get stuck in ruts because of pop culture, peer pressure, stuff like that. But what excites me most is exploring my own musical insights and expanding upon them.
Steve Vai
A lot of those little things that I really like doing are just moments of cool articulation, just little moments of phrasing that probably go over everybody's head.
Steve Vai
That's the thing about great artists: They find the thing that's most obvious to themselves, what's most conscious and natural, and they put it out there and the audience comes.
Steve Vai
