The Masterclass We’ve Been Waiting For
I loved this book. I’m a moderately advanced player (and a Steve Vai fan since his days with Frank Zappa!) and this is a great book for guitar players of all levels — from novices to advanced. This is also the closest most of us will get from getting music lessons from Steve Vai himself.
Book Structure
First, let’s talk about what this book isn’t. This book is not about technique — There are no shredding arpeggio patterns, speed exercises or tremolo tricks. This is not a tab book — Although there’s a chapter on tabs, most of the books is about standard staff notation. How to read it, write it & use it for composing. This is not a chord library or dictionary — Vai encourages you to use the knowledge acquired through this book to create your own chord library.
Now, on to what this book is about. Vai’s approach was to create a companion book for his Vai Academy camp retreat. That approach has the advantage of being tied to a specific teaching experience, which helps keep it short and focused. This mean that it doesn’t cover everything that can be learned on the guitar — just Vai’s selection of fundamental topics. After reading and working through this book, you’ll have a solid grasp of the fundamentals of music with a particular focus on the guitar.
As a side note: the e-book version is basically a PDF in order to preserve Steve’s cool artwork and original book layout. This wasn’t a problem for me, but it may be for some.
Vai’s Approach
Vai is not pattern-based, meaning that he does not lay out the pentatonic scales as “visual blocks”. Instead, he relies on knowing the intervals. Most guitarists do not know every note on the fretboard, let alone the intervals of the chords and scales they play. Therefore, to get the most out of this book requires first learning the names of of the notes and the intervals between them and how they flow from one string to another. From this knowledge, chords, scales an arpeggios can be found on the fly.
Practicin’s Take
I’d recommend this book to any serious guitar player interested in solidifying their knowledge of music and staff notation. Steve Vai is a highly intelligent player and those looking for simplified “shredding” patterns & tablatures will be better served by other books.
In conclusion: this is the book I wished I had written. Do yourself a favor, ignore the haters and read it from cover to cover. The principles it teaches will last you a lifetime.
I really enjoyed this book. Although I knew most of the material in this book, it was nice to read Vai’s perspective on music.
(Amazon: Vaideology, By Steve Vai)