Style and Influence
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Steve Vai has been called a guitar virtuoso. His 1990 album Passion and Warfare is often cited by critics and fans alike as among his best works. Particularly the instrumental "For the Love of God" has received a lot of attention from the music press, and is noteworthy in that the entire six-minute piece was reportedly recorded in just one take. Vai's playing style has been characterized as quirky and angular, due to his technical ability with the guitar instrument and deep knowledge of music theory. He regularly uses odd rhythmic groupings and his melodies often employ the Lydian mode.
Perhaps his most readily-identifiable stylistic feature is his creative use of the floating vibrato, using it to add melodic lines that sound odd to the ear. His playing can be described as lyrical, as if sung by a human voice. During the recording of "Eat 'em and Smile" with David Lee Roth, he employed several guitar techniques that "mimicked" the human voice, as heard in the opening bars of the opening track "Yankee Rose." He is noted for being physically expressive as he plays his guitar. He often uses exotic guitars: he plays both double and triple neck guitars.
Read more about this topic: Steven Siro Vai
Famous quotes containing the words style and, style and/or influence:
“All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.... For me “style” is matter.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)