STEVE VAI

Upon discovering his aunt’s piano at the age of four, Steve Vai
had what he describes as two epiphanies. The first one being that
when he played notes to the right, he noticed they got higher.
When he went to the left, they got lower. “Right at that moment,
music just became very clear to me. That’s how music is created.”
The second epiphany was realizing the infinite nature of the
creation of music. “I was immediately flooded with the
understanding of musical creativity. It was almost as if I was
picking up from where I left off in another life or something
like that.” He knew right then and there that music was all he
wanted to do, and that he would never stray from the path of
music. When he was a teenager he started taking guitar
lessons from Joe Satriani, and started playing in local bands
throughout high school. He attended Berklee College of Music and
started working as a transcriptionist for Frank Zappa. Vai left
Berklee to tour with the Frank Zappa band in 1980. Throughout the
Eighties, Vai toured and recorded with David Lee Roth,
Whitesnake, and many more bands. In 1990 he released his
studio album, Passion and Warfare.