Joe Satriani Quotes

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Joe Satriani

Profession : Musician

Birth : July 15, 1956

I think you've gotta be smart enough to be competent, but you've gotta be crazy enough to go out there and just let it all happen. I mean, you can rehearse and still not be musical, be tight and not be musical; we all hated that.

Joe Satriani

Most of the time, I write songs with the arrangements all at once, in my head. There's the producer side of me that's always thinking sounds, like, 'Wouldn't this be a great sound if it existed to put in front of a song, to open it up, and then, when it did its thing, something else would happen?

Joe Satriani

I was doing clubs when I was 16. I grew up in New York, so back then, you could do that.

Joe Satriani

Success came to me in my late 20s. I started touring when I was a teenager, so I had already seen the good, the bad, and the ugly side of the music business. Plus, setting up my own record company taught me a lot.

Joe Satriani

If you're always playing the correct notes, there's something wrong - you're not searching; you're not reaching for anything.

Joe Satriani

I really dislike flavoured potato chips, and so I always insist on just potatoes and salt, y'know? But that's not weird.

Joe Satriani

When I went into this, I knew that public life was going to be a very weird, fantastic and cruel sort of situation to be in. I think I'm ready for any lumps to come.

Joe Satriani

I was a guitar player in a band that had two keyboard players, sometimes two other guitarists, a bass player, and a drummer, four or five singers, and percussion. We did a two-and-a-half hour show where the music spanned from the early Sixties to the present. Whereas the David Lee Roth thing was like, Now. Very big and intense.

Joe Satriani

I did tons of gigs where I didn't move around very much because I couldn't. There's a pole over here and wires and a monitor there.

Joe Satriani

I just want to play like Jimi Hendrix. I love other forms of music and wish I could play classical piano, or saxophone like John Coltrane, but that will never happen. Because my nature is to play electric guitar really well and to emulate my heroes from the late 1960s.

Joe Satriani

We don't test out the songs live, and we don't play them for weeks on end in the studio. We have, like, one day to get two songs down. So what happens is, everybody's attention and energy gets ratcheted up. But it's good because it helps us focus.

Joe Satriani

I'm pretty sure I was about the only kid in school who knew who Jimi Hendrix even was. Through my older siblings, I was getting turned on to all the great music that was happening at the time, and I really loved Hendrix.

Joe Satriani

Here's something weird, though: I loved Jimi's music so much that I would never perform it for people. Throughout my teens and playing in various bands, I refused to play Hendrix songs. I know that sounds strange, but Jimi's music was so special to me that it was like works of art that shouldn't be touched or altered.

Joe Satriani