This started this weekend as a Facebook blog, and now I’ve decided to post it here to see if any other responses are garnered here. Enjoy.
Allow me to take you on a brief journey of enlightenment that I’ve had today.
This all started while I was reading this guitar blog today, and I saw an article on the new Satchurator pedal. So I wound up looking at it, and checking out the link, watching a couple videos about it, whatever.
Then I followed a related video of a performance by Joe of Ice 9 from the late 80’s. Then I found a video of him playing Memories are Montreux in 88. Then I watched him play Echo from the same show.
I’ll stop there and say, holy crap. That was an absolutely incredible performance, in my opinion. Joe seems to have lost a lot of the fire that he used to have back then.
From there I found a video of him playing with Deep Purple a couple years ago, and some really nice dueling between Joe and Steve Morse.
From there I watched a video of Joe and Steve Lukather at NAMM. Right here is where things started to go downhill. You see, Steve tried to outplay Joe left and right, thusly making everything he play, while technically impressive, suck. And he generally came off as an egotistical ass, while Joe just sat right back and just played music. So that made me dislike Lukather.
From there, I wound up looking up some Allan Holdsworth, because I had been meaning to do that anyways. Now, Holdsworth is widely regarded as an absolutely mindblowing player, and I won’t argue with that. However, this video (which actually bored me a bit) made me come to the point that I’ll get to here in a moment.
I’ve read and can tell by listening that Holdsworth wants to sound like a sax player. Which is something I’ve always been told is to listen to saxophone players and to phrase like them. Then I got to thinking… Why? Why does everyone want to sound like sax players? Every sax player I’ve ever heard (including legendary guys that I have mad respect for like Rollins and ‘Trane) has at some point or another, bored the crap out of me. I’ve never heard a sax player that’s completely captured my full attention for more than a few minutes at a time. Why is that? I dunno, but that’s not the point yet.
So then I got to thinking… well, why not play like guitar players? Then I remembered watching Lukather a few minutes ago… So no good there.
Then I finally realized… Guys, we’re supposed to be musicians. Not guitar players, not saxophone players, MUSICIANS!! That means we make music by what we feel through what we’ve learned. You shouldn’t spend your entire life trying to sound like something you’re not. What I mean by that is if you heard Coltrane play something that you dug the heck out of, freakin’ learn to play it! Likewise if you hear Satch play something that you love, learn it! If you hear Bill Evans play something, or Miles Davis, or Segovia, or Hiromi, or Pat Metheny, or John Petrucci, or Dennis Chambers, or Jaco, or ANYONE at all. Learn it. Be a musician. And don’t just play it by rote… really study it and figure out why he played that there. And then when it comes time to play, you let everything flow from that point in time wherever you’re at, and what should come out is you and nothing else. Will there always be influences that you have more than others? Absolutely. Should it be that people hear that instead of you? No.
That is all.
Be a musician.
Mike Willett 
It’s not that Satriani lost anything, but we all evolve and music evolves as well. You can not say that you want to play 20 years from now the same way you do now.
I totally feel you. I’m not saying that because he’s changed that it’s bad. I was just commenting that if you compare that performance to what I’ve seen recently (I saw him at last years G3 and will see him again in October), he’s very VERY chill compared to that very fiery performance of Echo up there. Again, not that it’s a bad thing by any stretch. I was just making a point. And I definitely concur that 20 years from now, I KNOW I won’t be playing how I am now. That’s just a fact of life.
I will say, though that I found Super Colossal to be super boring. There wasn’t a lot of life to it. Still some good playing, but boring. Satchfunkilus seems to have fixed a lot of there, but there are still tracks that are boring to me.