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.