I dedicated all the time I had to it. The 10 hour workout was just what I put in the magazine at the time, but for me it was every waking moment.
Steve VaiRead
I think every artist subconsciously wants to evolve themselves. Sometimes they get stuck in ruts because of pop culture, peer pressure, stuff like that. But what excites me most is exploring my own musical insights and expanding upon them.
Interpretation
Artists strive for personal growth, but external influences can hinder their evolution.
Steve Vai emphasizes the inherent desire of artists to develop and innovate their craft. However, he acknowledges that external factors like pop culture and peer pressure can create obstacles, leading to periods where artists may feel stagnant. The excitement and drive to explore one's unique artistic insights are crucial for true evolution in their work.
In practice
A speaker at an art workshop reflecting on the challenges artists face in staying authentic.
I dedicated all the time I had to it. The 10 hour workout was just what I put in the magazine at the time, but for me it was every waking moment.
If you want to play something that you hear, you need to listen with your mind's eye. You've heard of the mind's eye, right? Your mind has an ear too. It's a kind of listening, but it's not using your ears to listen. It's listening with your inner ear, and that's what you want to translate onto the guitar.
The tone is in your fingers, not in your amp or effects.
I could never overstate the importance of a musician's need to develop his or her ear. Actually, I believe that developing a good 'inner ear' - the art of being able to decipher musical components solely through listening - is the most important element in becoming a good musician.
If you want to play something that you can't, you need to see and hear yourself doing it in your minds eye. It will start to happen
A good solo is like a book. It will start out in a phrase, it will go on in paragraphs, and then it will have a great ending.
I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.
Some of the most intense affairs are between actors and characters. There's a fire in the human heart and we jump into it with the same obsession as we have with our lovers.
I ain't never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.
Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?' That's terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for director. So I became a director.
The music comes through me, and I let it come the way it comes, and it shapes itself. I just hold space for it. I don't intend to write it for a purpose, but it comes as it comes and am proud of the way it can support change because I believe strongly in what I sing about.
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