Joe Satriani Quotes

What I want to happen is to be really creative, and to play something new in the improvisations, every time.

The rule is to try and never play the same thing twice when you have the freedom to do that in the song.

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.

The fun for me musically is that you never quite know what works and why. So why pretend you do? Why not just put things together and discover, in the creative process, if and why they work? That approach has served me well.

All of my solos were improvised initially - I would go in and get my bearings and see what I came up with.

It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent. Therefore I keep reaching for instruments I don't particularly know how to play, and then I become excited.

You just keep playing. If someone special comes along and organizes it in a new way, then you'll have another approach and everybody will jump on it to try to learn.

What I always try to do is to respond to the song; I've always rebelled against theory.

With Zeppelin, I tried to play something different every night in my solos. I'd play for 20 minutes but the longest ever was 30 minutes. It's a long time, but whenI was playing it seemed to fly by.

What I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music.

There is no such thing as a wrong note.

I've always done very 'composed' music and worked-out solos. But sometimes it's fun not knowing where you're going.

I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.

This band makes sure that we have whole sections of stuff that are free form so that they don't know what we are doing next, that is the fun part of playing. You are playing something that you haven't ever played before.

I look at my clarinet sometimes and I think, I wonder what's going to come out of there tonight? You never know.

Especially with Fantomas, i'm just trying to stretch out what the band can do. Figuring out, really, on the job or on recordings, what I can or can't get away with.

The musicians in the band, and myself as a performer, love the risks of the unpredictable and the feeling of jumping off cliffs musically.

One thing people always ask me is 'How do you play outside?' ... I have no idea how to teach that, but when I was discussing this with our bass player Jesse Murphy, he said 'tell them to go cliff diving'... In other words, when you're jamming, you have to take risks if you want to find new sounds.

The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.

Don't play the saxophone. Let it play you.

When you're playing the same dirty dozen night after night, the moments that keep it fresh are those when you just let go and trust everyone.

I think it's always important to constantly keep the band on their toes and try new things that you hope will work. That's how 'Apologize' was born, and maybe down the line another little song will be born by that mentality. I've always really liked that song.

I'm definitely a risk-taker with my music.

With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.

I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record.