Uploaded May 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
No silly video this time nor is it a TV theme.
There are countless better cover versions of this on Youtube by much better guitarists but this song is a bit of a Holy Grail for me.
I was already a Joe Satriani fan when I was about 16years old and my French teacher at the time who was also a guitarist lent me a video of Seville Expo 92' which featured Joe Satriani amongst others playing live. So Joe played and then out came Steve Vai, who I had never heard of, and he looked like a member of 'Kiss' who had forgotten to put the make up on.
He played a couple of tracks (including one with Satriani and Brian May) and then he announced he was going to play a song which would be the first time he was playing it live and proceeded to play this.
I was immediately blown away by it. It is still to this day my favourite instrumental guitar piece. Everything about it is perfect.
It became a goal of mine to play it so I bought the tablature book for the album it was from (Passion and Warfare - which is awesome) and proceeded to learn the opening melody...and that was it. Never got past it. Just couldn't get my head round it nor did I have the ability.
I subsequently ended up putting the guitar down around 20 years ago due to various circumstances only to pick it up sporadically every few weeks, and fiddle around for a few minutes and nothing more. It was only last year I started doing the TV themes for a laugh and recording them for friends that I started to play regularly again and decided to make a concerted effort to improve my playing.
Cut to a year later and I thought I would give it a go again. Not using the book so much as it turns out the transcription is utter crap and completely wrong in several places. Credit to 'guitarlessons365song' on here whose tutorial videos for the song I mostly used to get my head round it.
I practised every day for about 3 weeks or so and then recorded it. It's still not perfect by any means but is probably as good as I'll get it without spending a lot longer practising. Even then it was a 3 take edit due to unwanted noise during a couple of the sections.
I'll still keep at it intermittently trying to bring it up to a better standard but at least I can say I finally played it.
No silly video this time nor is it a TV theme.
There are countless better cover versions of this on Youtube by much better guitarists but this song is a bit of a Holy Grail for me.
I was already a Joe Satriani fan when I was about 16years old and my French teacher at the time who was also a guitarist lent me a video of Seville Expo 92' which featured Joe Satriani amongst others playing live. So Joe played and then out came Steve Vai, who I had never heard of, and he looked like a member of 'Kiss' who had forgotten to put the make up on.
He played a couple of tracks (including one with Satriani and Brian May) and then he announced he was going to play a song which would be the first time he was playing it live and proceeded to play this.
I was immediately blown away by it. It is still to this day my favourite instrumental guitar piece. Everything about it is perfect.
It became a goal of mine to play it so I bought the tablature book for the album it was from (Passion and Warfare - which is awesome) and proceeded to learn the opening melody...and that was it. Never got past it. Just couldn't get my head round it nor did I have the ability.
I subsequently ended up putting the guitar down around 20 years ago due to various circumstances only to pick it up sporadically every few weeks, and fiddle around for a few minutes and nothing more. It was only last year I started doing the TV themes for a laugh and recording them for friends that I started to play regularly again and decided to make a concerted effort to improve my playing.
Cut to a year later and I thought I would give it a go again. Not using the book so much as it turns out the transcription is utter crap and completely wrong in several places. Credit to 'guitarlessons365song' on here whose tutorial videos for the song I mostly used to get my head round it.
I practised every day for about 3 weeks or so and then recorded it. It's still not perfect by any means but is probably as good as I'll get it without spending a lot longer practising. Even then it was a 3 take edit due to unwanted noise during a couple of the sections.
I'll still keep at it intermittently trying to bring it up to a better standard but at least I can say I finally played it.
