Hey, it's Joe Satriani, here I am on tour,
the Wormhole Wizards tour and I'm going to show you my guitars. This guitar here was
one of the prototypes for the JS-2400, beautiful guitar, it's orange, I had this idea that
we could have this hugger orange guitar, after that '73 Camero I saw across the street from
Sammy's studio last year. It wound up looking like a little bit candy corn or pumpkin or
something like that so we thought maybe not so much. It's made out of alder wood which
is different from the usual JS guitars and it's got a very small bubinga stripe at the
back, gives it a bit more upper mid range maybe I'm not quite sure about it yet. I think
it's one of those things where you can feel it but the audience may not hear it, so it's
my second favourite guitar. My main guitar though is this one right over here, thank
you Mike Manning. This one is your production JS-2400 in white, it's basswood so it's got
more of a musical tone to it, overall great souding guitar and I've been using this thing
like crazy I love it, the combinations of the pickups is fantastic and of course it's
got all the little groovy things including this little piece of white tape so I remember
exactly where some of the song levels should be, volume levels, very important for melodies
and stuff like that. Anyway we want to show you this other guitar right here, that we
use for a number of songs, this of course is the JS1200, this beautiful candy apple
red colour, but it's got a sustainiac pickup in here so I use that for Wind in the Trees
and what else do we use this for? The song Why and I think I play a Littleworth Lane on this
one, maybe a few other songs like that. Since the set list was stolen last night, I've forgotten what
songs I use it on, anyway love this guitar and I'm really getting into this sustainiac
pickup. We also play the JSA acoustic during the set and Mike's bringing it out right now.
Here it is, it's amazing how quickly we get these guitars out, it's fantastic. This we
use for Andalusia and it's a beautiful sounding acoustic guitar, of course it's plugged in
when we do the stuff live and this is great, I just love the colour, it's my favourite
colour. It's a great sounding guitar and it plays like butter, as we used to say back
in New York, like butter wherever you play it, sounds like butter. Ssounds like a million bucks.
Anyway those are the guitars, and now I'm going to show you the pedals and the amps, see you
there. Hey, here we are looking at my pedal board,
so come on down here and it all starts right over here with the big bad wah and most of
the tunes I'm playing it like this, in this setting, wah 1 I use and wah 2 I use for Wind
in the Trees take that big throaty sound, I've got the voicing down on the lower setting
there. This pedal board now is designed to give me a number of different options I've
got the Voodoo Lab: Proctavia there and what am I using them for this time. I think I'm using
that for Crystal Planet. I've got a little Boss Super Chorus there and I think that's
also for Crystal Planet and maybe the very end of Wind in the Tree. The Voodoo Vibe,
great sounding little box and I'm using that for Pyrrhic Victoria, it's got that groovy little solo
on there. Of course you see the Einstein overdrive and the Saturator and the TimeMachine, those
are pretty self explanatory and then right here it's the Marshall and I've got to explain
all of these tapes. This is the, basically the, the 6 banger foot pedal that controls
all the different channels and modes of the JVM410 and I've got all these little pieces
of tape here because we keep changing the settings because these are prototype amps
that have been modified for me by Marshall and I'll explain that to you later. Of course
the Whammy pedal, use that for one song, just for Revalation and then the mysterious pedal,
if we go back here, Ben Fartane built that for us and that allows me to access the Digitec
33B which is a funky old rack effect I can show you later but I need that to play the
song Why but you definitely don't want to be plugged into that thing when you're not
playing that song, it's a funky old piece of gear so we use Ben's tube bypass box to
get us out of the signal and that's pretty much it, it's actually a very minimal pedal
board because a lot of the stuff I only use for one or two songs. It's not the kind of thing where you
play, except for the wah wah, that does most of the work and the delays. Next we're going to go and
take a look at those amps. One last thing before we look at the Marshall heads, is the
secret and mysterious Digitech 33B, these things were called SuperHarmony Machines and
they actually have this one programme in here, actually they've got 2 programmes that I really
like, one of them is like a self tuning feature that I used on the song Down Down Down many
years ago but the other thing that's really cool is that is provides this very interesting
E minor chord harmony that we use on the melodies for the song Why and for some reason I decided
to save that patch as number 72, I don't know why. There's 2 of them here, big thanks to
Kirkwood Rough back in San Francisco for fixing them, becuase these things breaks, they can't
do anything but Kirkwood got them working again. This is where they reside behind the
Marshall cabinets, back stage away from vibration and all that kind of stuff and but I tell
you what let's go to the front of those Marshall heads so I can show you what they look like. Alright here we are, at the power station,
this is right here where all the sound is coming out, the most important button though
is the one that says yes, this is Mike's way of reminding me to hit this button not this
button! Hence; Yes, No, Yes, No. Remember that. You'll see that later on in the show,
anyway these heads here are JVM-410s but they're not, they're modified JVM-410s, modified by
Marshall engineer Santiago Alberez a brilliant engineer and guitar play in his own right
and he's made my version of these 410s so punchy and full sounding it's really amazing
but we've kept the basic idea that you've got 4 channels, 3 modes for each channel,
we've got a noise gate going through each channel and we've adjusted the resonance and
the presence controls all to make the thing really scream be very full sounding. And generally
what I do, is I run it right into a 1960 bottom and I've got one head that I use for the show
I've got another head right over here that's set up exactly the same and it's just here
waiting just in case I do something silly to piss off this head and it wants to stop
working and then we've got another one over here. This is generally for guests, Mr Patchuchi
is going to be joining us in a few days so this is what he's going to be playing through.
It's going to be great hearing him play through that and I've been loving these thing. I've
been working with them for over a year, we've had them in the studio and we've had them
out on tour for the last, what, 8/9/10 weeks and in Europe and here the US and they sound
fantastic, really huge. I'm going to plug in and show you what they sound like, wait
right there. Now that goes right, feed into this channel here, no
noise gate so you can hear a little bit against that That's making it a little sweeter sounding. For some high gain stuff. We've got a little
bit more open, a little bit more saturated, if may use that tone for this guy. Try that at home kids, let's see what else I've got here
for you, I've got this here, this is a nice tone here. How about this now, this is
the 33B, it's got a cool tone. Glorious, it just sounds beautiful. And of
course the wah wah. We'll keep the tone, we've got the little. There you have it, except there's one last
thing, very important part of the show and the little secret that people don't know about.
This is the harp I use for Big Bad Moon and we've got a little slide bar on the back there
so after I'm done with the, and then I launch into this. Like that, well that's not the setting I use
but anyway, it's crazy trying to play slide like this because you can't get your finger
behind the slide which is essential for good slide playing, so it's more showbiz than technique
let's put it that way. And this is little tray, this is the invention of Mike Manning,
so no matter what happens Joe cannot screw that up, you see afterwards it's right there!
And that's it. Kids, tune into Music Radar everyday.