Satriana Kicks Out Steve Vai During Guitar Lesson

There’s this crazy story about Steve Vai getting kicked out of a guitar lesson with Joe Satriani… 

The year was 1973 and at the early age of 13. Vai started taking lessons from Satriani, who was roughly four years older.

In one of Vai’s first lessons, Satriani assigned him this: 

“Memorize all the notes on the guitar in one week.” 

Vai, overwhelmed by the guitar neck, had no idea what to do. He thought there was no way he could do it. His memory wasn’t that good.

So he came back the next week and Satriani said, “OK play an F# on the B string.”

Vai got immediately flustered. He was muttering and fumbling as he looked down at the guitar neck, and Satriani said, “Stop!..lesson over.” 

Then he wrote down in Vai's book, which he says he still has to this day.

“If you don’t know your notes, you don’t know SH-*!” And then sent him home.

Back in the day, this was the old-school hard a*$ way of teaching. And I get it. I had some teachers like this.

But to be honest, I think it’s crap teaching. It may be good to toughen you up, which is fine. And if that’s the real point then I get it. But here’s the thing…if Satriani just said “Memorize all the notes on the guitar” and didn’t give him tactical advantages. Didn’t show him the patterns to the fretboard. The hidden keys that make everything so much easier. Then he is setting Vai up to fail. And I think he’s not doing his job. I think it shows a lack of real method. 

Imagine hiring a fitness trainer. Showing up for the first training session, and having them say, “OK come back next week in shape.” 

What? 

But I too was an 18-year guitar teacher at one time, and I had barely any real methods developed like I have now. Mine took decades to create. I had to spend years in the trenches teaching people one-on-one. Seeing what works and what makes students have those lightbulb moments and taking notes. But most pro guitarists are often “Too good to be bothered”. To actually hunker down and focus on a system that can change a student’s whole world. Because, it’s not about them at that point.

But this is the job of a good instructor. 

When it comes to learning the notes on the fretboard. I remember as a kid having these printouts of the entire guitar neck with every note labeled on it. They made posters of this you could buy at Guitar Center and hang on your wall. Or they were in the opening pages of guitar method books. But just staring at them and trying to learn the neck through rot memorization didn’t work for me. In fact, I think it's a terrible approach, And if Steve Vai couldn’t get it. What hope does anyone else have?

Early on I had guitar students who actually tried all kinds of creative things to learn the note names on the neck. Like painting the letters on the fretboard. Or putting stickers on the fret markers, so when they looked down at the neck they could see the names. But these things only wore off and left them with a gunky fretboard.

Finally, after years of trial and error, I figured out a much better method. It works because it requires very little memorization. It’s about seeing the patterns of the guitar neck.

But I do agree with Satriani, in that every player needs these foundations to really fly.

While I don’t agree with his approach, you can't discredit the fact that he did help lay the foundations for Vai. And Vai obviously took them and ran with it…

What will you do with them?

If you need help with this grab my free fretboard guide at the link below. On it, I show you a simple framework for mapping out the entire guitar neck. It’s really quite simple, once you see how it works. 

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Jon MacLennan