Steve Vai Masterclass in Sydney (Oct 15, 2011)

I attended this marathon of guitar geekery at the Wesley conference centre on Pitt St. At 80 bucks for a 3 and a half hour audience with the maestro, it would be to hard to say this event was over-priced. However, I came away mildly disappointed and disillusioned. Sure, he covered some interesting stuff, but it could have been so much better. I think my chief objection is that he spent the majority of the time sermonising repetitively on what one might describe as the "philosophy" of being a musician. That's all well and good but not quite what you might expect when you come to see Steve Vai talk guitar for three hours.

The event was organized by local company Thump Music, who are taking the show to each capital city around Australia. They didn't pass up the opportunity for a bit of advertising, and early on I worried that the "masterclass" was going to turn out to be an orgy of shameless product placement. This wasn't helped when Steve, almost as soon as he came on stage, drew attention to his Apple gadgetry: "i'm just gonna use my IPAD here" (for a backing track in GarageBand),  and a little later "i love my iphone" (using it as a stop-watch). Fortunately, however, my fears proved unfounded.

After a brief perfomanee intro, in the form of a flawless rendition of The Crying Machine (accompanied by afore-mentioned iPad), the self-help theme was established early on when he discussed the importance of identifying your goal and repeating it to yourself every day (yeah, all that positive-thinking mumbo jumbo). He asked people in the crowd to state their goals, and responded to each one with "uhuh, yes, that's a beautiful goal".

Having said that, one point that did resonate was when he discussed the importance of finding your "burning desire" because that's what you'll do best. The idea being that you'll never really succeed at something you're not passionate about, because no matter what the endeavour, there'll be others who are passionate about that. I think that's quite a powerful idea, since it runs counter to the usual notion of working on your weak points. And clearly it is not limited to guitar playing or music. Steve's attitude is "find what you're really really good at, and exaggerate it".

Another feature was to bring a young player up on stage for a "mini-lesson". This worked quite well, as he would ask them to play something, and then proceed to critique aspects of their playing, for the benefit of them and, presumably, the rest of the audience. The first kid played "Sweet Child O'Mine" (I was impressed that kids are still playing that riff as it was one of the first that I tried to play at about the same age!). The second was a bit older and more advanced and played some shreddy pentatonic thing. The general issues that Steve pointed out here were:

1. when learning a piece of music, break it down into bite-size chunks and master these one by one. Crucially, you should master it at slow tempos before even thinking about trying to play at full tempo. The idea is to practice it to the point where you "own" the riff. He suggested as a yardstick to aim to play it 11 times perfectly before moving on (to the next chunk, or to higher speeds).
   
2. the importance of practising the different types of vibrato: slow/fast, various places on the neck, two notes at once, bent. I was interested to notice that when he vibratos on a bent note, he shakes the guitar slightly.
   
Interspersed throughout the class were 3 songs that he played accompanied by his trusty iPad. I've mentioned the The Crying Machine. Additionally, there was a ballad (whose name escapes me for the moment -- was it Tender Surrender?), Building the Church (which opens with a blistering two-handed tapping sequence that sounds like Joe Satriani's Midnight on speed). These were as impressive and flawlessly executed as you'd expect. What made it more impressive was that he was playing "cold": after sitting ranting on for about an hour cradling, but not playing, his instrument. Interesting to see him blowing his hands before Building the Church.

As proceedings wore on, the sermonising tone became a little tedious. I lost count of how many times he started a sentence with "and this is the most important thing...", or "but here's the kicker..." To his credit, he acknowledged this habit at one point -- and then promptly completely lost his train of thought, before someone from the crowd put him back on track.

Eventually, it became clear that he wasn't going to cover the kind of technical ground that many people, myself included, were probably hoping to see. He seemed to sense this at one point as he made a comment to the effect that some point he was making more important than "all that technical stuff that you guys are waiting for me to talk about but that you can learn from any teacher or book". Fair point, but I still think guitar teacher Steve would have been more interesting than self-help Guru Steve.

He wrapped things up with a bit of audience participation in the form a brief jam session. Five players got to come on stage for a minute or two, play a solo, then trade a few bars with the man himself. The first player had been pre-selected (I think there had been a competition for this) and he had pretty impressive chops. The rest had been plucked from the crowd at random and were of varying levels (though -- and yes, it pains me to say this -- all were significantly more impressive than yours truly, who sat anonymously near the back, grudgingly accepting this harsh truth). Unsurprisingly, they were all doing their best to show off some shredder chops. Their mixed success was evident in Steve's parting words of advice: ".....and above all, SLOOOOOOW down!".

So, in the end I was left a little disenchanted. I think Steve is a phenomenal musician and guitar player, but I think he laid on the self-help positive-thinking stuff a bit thick. But maybe I'm just getting a bit cynical in my old age...