“This is how the process works,” Vai announces, soon stopping, and smiling defiantly at his masterclass attendees, who have just been given a first-hand (if ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek) demonstration of the mystical process of getting from a snippet of an idea to a finished melody. “Ideas come from inner melody, not from your fingers,” he explains.

Vai looks lanky and sharp in his camel colour linen trousers and a tight black t-shirt, brown eyes smiling behind tinted glasses. His slender frame leans effortlessly against the back of a chair as he sits down to continue one of the two masterclasses he’s given in London this June.

It’s not only the subjects he touches upon (which range from borderline spiritual matters such as meditation to specific techniques such as the vibrato) that make his seminars stand out among those taught by other virtuosos. What makes them truly unique is the deeply idiosyncratic, at times eccentric angle Vai adopts to illustrate each point as he’s done just a moment ago when talking about how singing helps the writing process.

What is also unmatchable is his degree of openness (at one time he even shares a name of a particular supplement he takes), as well as the fact that he doesn’t shy away from talking about deeply personal things, the kind of subjects that few other musicians would ever share with a room full of strangers. “When I was a young boy,” Vai confesses in the beginning of the class, “I was so enamoured with the guitar, I loved it so much, I was intimidated by it. Sometimes I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. I was like a teenager in love.”

It’s hard to imagine how one of the most prominent figures of the guitar pantheon, a guitar superhero responsible for some of the most mind-bending musical extrapolations in music history, had started his career from the same point as anyone else, viewing his instrument with a mixture of love, fear, and reverence. After all, hasn’t a major American guitar mag reporter recently asked him in a semi-earnest question, if he really was an alien in disguise, after all? But apparently those childhood memories are very much alive to Vai to this day, and it’s this memory that drives him to share his experiences with others.

“I know that there are kids out there that love the instrument the way I did and do,” he says during our interview in London a few days before the masterclasses. “And I really enjoy speaking about things that I found to be important in my career. There are so many different things that I’ve discovered when I was young, and even recently. I see pivotal moments and I like to discuss those things.”

The way Vai teaches could, in fact, be just as distinctive as his music. His “Alien Guitar Secrets” masterclasses is his experience of 30 years of playing, writing, and recording music distilled into three hours with nothing held back—be it practical day-to-day stuff on going about establishing your musical goals to the nature of Vai’s relationship with the divine. In fact, at times Vai falls short of sounding like a spiritual guru, although he is careful to point out that he his not an authority on esoteric matters, a second later refuting himself when he says, “Within the core of the human consciousness is the seat of god. It’s only something that can be perceived within. Inside are the tools that transcend the physical.”

But things revert back to music when Vai begins to discuss some key points of the three-hour class: the nature of the creative process, the effort and the focus it takes to keep evolving as a player, and, most importantly, developing your own identity as a musician. “Keep the focus on your goal,” Vai says. “That’s how you develop your unique voice on the instrument. After you’ve run out of your Stevie Ray Vaughan riffs you will be able to go beyond that and discover who you are.”

Uniqueness being a concept so fiercely emphasised when Vai teaches, one of the first questions I ask him during our interview is about the other side of the medal—an ability to assume different personas and different characters in one’s art, to go beyond the confines to the established self.

“Well, you are not going to have a choice,” Vai replies. “Because you can only be who you are. And who we are works in progress. We are constantly changing. Many of us have preconceived notions of what we should be. And the process of life is helping us to discover how to let go of those preconceived notions. And I’m talking musically, I’m speaking about guitar playing. It’s a process and I go through it constantly.”

“Every year that goes by and I look back at what I’ve done and where I’m going and where I wanna go, I learn to get rid of more and more of preconceived notions, of stereotypes, of hang-ups and empty concerns. You just let go and this frees you up to find yourself more. Uniqueness exists in all of us because we are all different.”

“Now, if you hear somebody who plays an instrument in a way that encourages you and you are inspired by it, you might learn to play just like that guy. That’s a statement of who you are. It’s not a bad thing. It just shows that you never took the desires to find out what you are interested in. And then there are people who don’t have a choice. They can’t play like anybody else, they can’t make music like anybody else. Once you find out who you are, actually cultivating it and bringing it out into the world is a personal statement and a lot of people have a lot of hang-ups about that because we have these little voices in our head that tell us what we think we can’t do or what we shouldn’t do.”

A lot in this answer doesn’t come in unexpected as Vai’s own methods have always been fiercely independent in their refusal to follow conventions. Instead of aiming to lay claim on as many established styles a possible, as a lot of second-tier shredders do in order to secure continued employment through versatility, Vai was always dug deeper rather than wider.

The expansion of musical possibilities that others look for on the outside, for Vai were to be found within, each layer of his descent into the gold mine of self-discovery imparting onto him its own voice, its own character and its own flavour. And being a seeker and a student of esoteric traditions Vai certainly knows that any descent is a climb, just like any stadium is a pyramid.

It’s not that Vai refuses to experience everything that’s musically possible, but it’s the way in which he does it—through exploration of the self as opposed to stretching over the superficial variety of the external—that makes his path inimitable.

So the notion of becoming anyone else even for the duration of one song isn’t something that Vai is prepared to seriously contemplate, as in the process of exploring his own nature he has been too earnest and has gone too far to concede to anyone else’s vision.

What also is telling is that being aware of this aspect to his character, Vai also acknowledges that he has lately “been becoming less and less introspective, and becoming more and more of a musical extravert,” as he puts it during the London masterclass. Fully familiar with the fine line between self-exploration and self-absorption, and the one-sidedness the emphasis on the self can lead to, he adds: “You perpetuate the side of yourself that you embrace. We all have different sides. Whatever side you embrace, you overwhelm the others.”

Talking about the benefits of musical extraversion and dangers of one-dimensionality, Vai proves his point in practice with miraculous grace the next day after our interview, while on stage with Phil Hilbourne, Nicko McBrain, and Neil Murray at the London International Music Show. His rendition of Hendrix’s “Little Wing” was one of the three songs he performed on the stage that day at LIMS, the other two being “Goin’ Down” and Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper”. But it was Hendrix’s gem that stood out by a long mile, showcasing both perfect understanding of the original, and an amazing sense of freedom with which Vai went about offering his own rendition of the classic.

The tactful yet powerful handling of Hendrix’s material, the balance of energies from sprawling abandon of the solos to effortless outlines of the harmonic shape of the song, was all about the way of understanding music that goes beyond personal dispositions or confines of any given time or culture.

Hearing Vai distil Hendrix’s number into a such a persuasively personal form of expression, you’d think he was born with this kind of confidence, but he confesses to his masterclass attendees that he hardly expected anyone to like his stuff when he was just starting out, and had no expectations for his first solo album.

Within this paradox lies the explanation, as he is firmly convinced that, “If you are not expecting anything, you do better stuff than when you are attacked by expectations.” That, coupled with the fact that Vai wasn’t desperate for a record deal and found the notion of fame daunting, in the end made it easy for him to make the transition from a little-known young player to a global phenomenon.

Despite Vai’s reserved expectations for his first album—1983’s Flex-Able—this at once bizarre and inspired record has since then sold quarter of a million copies. To mark the 25th anniversary of its release Vai is currently preparing a remastered version of the album with bonus tracks that would include some previously unreleased material dating back even earlier.

When Vai moves on to talk about Passion And Warfare, his best known album, which followed Flex-Able and really launched his solo career, he recalls the moment he’d heard about it reaching number 18 in the Billboard charts: “This guy comes up to me and says, “Congratulations on your album going up to 18.” I said, “Yeah, thanks,” thinking, “This guy clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’m not gonna blow his balloon.” And I was stunned when it really turned out that it did go to number 18 and then went gold two weeks later.”

“Albums are like snapshots of your life, “Vai continues. “I look through my life and I see certain songs, and I think, “That was important to me then. I remember how important it was.” And I remember what I was saying or what I was trying to get across, and right now I would never do that. I would do other things, but then again, in several years I may look back and say, “I remember that guy! I remember what he was trying to say!”

“But what are you going to do? Not create anything? One of the things that I learnt is that whatever you create, you are self-perpetuating your own life. We all have various levels of emotions. We all can be angry, we all can be happy. We all can be all these things. When we are going to be creative, we gravitate towards things that are most important to us. It’s really easy to be angry and pissed off with the world and as of the past 10 years a lot of metal and rock music is geared solely around how much people hate themselves.”

When I suggest that those instances are the examples of the “Life is a struggle” paradigm at work, Vai immediately shoots back: “Yeah, but guess what? That’s what life is. Life is a struggle. Life is a series of problems with little rest spots in between. In the end your success is gauged by how you’ve dealt with the problems, not how much money or fame you have.”

“There was a period in my life when I was very young and I went through a very dark period in my life. I was writing very dark music and I was getting really into that music. But guess what, my world became very dark and I went into deep depression. Because when you create something, you perpetuate it. And here’s the thing—you are inspiring others with your perpetuation.”

“So I felt after a while, “I don’t want to be miserable, I don’t want to be unhappy.” It’s really bad. You think it’s cool, but after a while you enter this dark hole that you just can’t get out of. It’s all in your head. For me, I had to make a conscious mental directional decision. I started telling myself things that I didn’t even believe. But after a while you start believing them. And then you are perpetuating that.”

“So it’s a big responsibility, I think, when you are an artist. I know people don’t see it that way, especially artists. They don’t see the responsibility they have. Or not the responsibility as much as the effect. We don’t know the effect that we can have in the world by the things we do or say. You don’t have to make sweeping changes to be effective. The universe doesn’t care about that. But it’s every little thing, every little decision.”

Talking about records being snapshots of an artist’s life, the re-issued Flex-Able is not the only one of Vai’s 2009 releases to remind us on the stages in his development. Back at the London class, to illustrate a particular technique or concept, Vai sometimes demonstrates them on his guitar, and sometimes shows the audience snippets of his brand new live DVD Where The Wild Things Are recorded in 2007 in Minneapolis and due to be released later on this year.

The DVD proves to be a remarkable account of what a Steve Vai show is like these days—an orgy of unexpected thrills delivered with the fire and assertiveness of someone who is having a helluva time while remaining in total control. “When I play, I want to be uplifted and see things that defy reality,” he says during his masterclass. “I want my emotional dynamics to be whipped. I am fiercely confident in my abilities.”

His phenomenal chops aside, the sheer versatility of things Vai is captured doing on the DVD—musically, technically, and stylistically—as well as the whopping vigour of his stage presence, both make up for a remarkably dense, rousing musical experience. From the call-and-response interaction with the two violins to expansive guitar solos, the show is an overwhelming testimony to the musical range, imagination, and pure feeling that Vai puts into his shows.

When asked in our interview if he is happy with the way the DVD has turned out, Vai sounds exceptionally positive. “I am,” he says. “It’s a great band because I have these two violin players who are just extraordinary, really great,” he says. “They add this whole different dimension. And I try to do things that are relatively unexpected and different than what might be considered the norm. It’s funny because when I mention having two violin players in the band to people, they go, “Oh, so you are doing classical music?” “No!” Vai laughs.

“The way that these people play! I tried auditioning rock violin players and none of them were any good. They all had bad intonation and didn’t understand music. The classical players I auditioned just… God… The moment I turned up my amp they went “Pooooohhhhh…” Vai raises his index finger and moves it down as he utters a puny descending sound that is both frail and cartoonishly comical. He smiles.

“So it took finding the right people, and I really found them: Ann Marie Calhoon and Alex DePue, these tremendous players. And it really allowed me to take the music into a different dimension with them. It’s really very intense Vai music, whatever that is. So I didn’t record a record with them yet, but I’ve decided to do some smattering of touring, and we did a month in Europe and a month in America, and it was really great. I recorded one of the shows, it took me forever to edit it and to get it done, and now it’s done and it’s coming out.”

Visually the performance that Vai puts up on the DVD is aiming to be almost as entertaining as the music, with the colours, the stage design and the clothes creating just the right amount of theatricality to be visually stimulating but at the same time keeping the focus on the music. And, of course, Vai’s stage presence and his legerity add exceptionally well to the emotional posture of the music.

“When I’m on stage,” Vai says, “I feel like I own the world. I am fiercely confident in what I do and I know that when I’m doing it, I am demanding that people are being sucked in. It’s a process of making a connection. Because primarily what am I here for, what are we here for? I am here to create things for people that are interested in it to enjoy.”

“I’m not going to change the world. My music isn’t of historical brilliance. And if it is, it’s not for me to determine, it’s for the historians to do that. My job is like anybody else’s. I have certain tools and I have certain gifts and I want to do my very best to create them in the most imaginative and powerful way I can so other people can enjoy them.”

“I work for other people. Artists are here so that people can dream while they are awake. That’s what you do when you watch and it takes you away, and that’s the goal for me. I want to create something that people can enjoy and be stimulated. I want to take control of their emotional equilibrium and bring them to different places, and let them let go of the world, let go of everything in their life and just enjoy this particular thing.”

“The only way to do that effectively for me or anybody else, I think, is to find a thing that you are most comfortable with, that’s most natural to you, that seems simple to you. That is when you are going to be your most effective. I don’t work on things I’m not good at. I find the things I’m good at and I exaggerate them.”

The DVD showcasing both the spontaneity and the intellectual effort it takes to perform his music, I ask Vai if the actual process of writing and composing to him is the combination of both, or if it purely involves him playing out the ideas that are in his head. Or maybe sometimes he even allows himself to be led by his instrument?

“My creative process is very simple and I don’t think it differs from anybody else’s,” he replies. “The impetus of an idea has to start some place. And it doesn’t start in the physical world, it starts in the mental. You get an idea for something and you see it. We all do it. The process of making ideas real in the world varies. And according to the complexity of the idea or the tools that are at your disposal, that is going to determine how much work has to go into it.”

“There are various ways of expressing those ideas. When I’m just playing the guitar, a lot of things go through my head. Sometimes I’m thinking, “What’s coming up next? Am I prepared for this? Make sure that you get to your pedal in time, make sure that you look good while you are doing this.” Whatever it is. Or, “Oh my god, am I in tune?” Sometimes there are all those things that are going on, but for most part it’s just letting go and you know that you are in control.”

Despite the irreproachable virtuosity of his technique, the ground-breaking quality of his material, and the sheer confidence with which he creates his music, Vai says he still knows how criticised he’s been throughout the years. “I am probably one of the most criticised guitar players in history,” he says.

“None of us wants to be criticised,” he continues. “When you create something, whether you are an artist, a poet, a guy building a motorcycle, or a guitar player, whenever you enter into that creative element, it’s an expression of who you are. When we do those things, they are little snapshots of who we are. And really we are naked when we play an instrument. Because you don’t really have a choice.”

“So when an artist takes their work and then puts it in the world and it’s open up for criticism, or for people’s enjoyment or whatever, what happens is that they are not saying, “How do you like my song?” or, “How do you like my art?” They are saying, “How do you like me?” And it’s traumatising for a lot of people because you can be criticised tremendously. I am probably one of the most criticised guitar players in history simply because of what I do.”

“There was a period where I couldn’t open a magazine to read terrible, terrible things about me, like in the ‘90s when things changed. Guys who were doing what I was doing with the guitar have taken to a particular level… You have to understand, it took us a whole lifetime of study, and focus, and determination, and drive, and passion to get to. And then you get guys who come along and say, “I don’t want to put that kind of time in, but I want to play the guitar.” And they do other things, and people say, “Yeah, that’s good and that sucks.” And you just become a pin-up, so to speak. And what happens is that it’s just a trend. Trends come and go.”

“There was a time when the Beatles were really out of fashion, and people wouldn’t even say they owned a Beatles record. Or Elvis. It happened to Elvis, to Led Zeppelin, to Beethoven. It happens to everybody because once you so identify with the particular genre or trend, and that trend gets copied and watered down and insipid because of all the people who aren’t really inspired but they are pantomiming the genius of somebody else by creating things that their imagination is capable of more or less copying. But it doesn’t have that spark of brilliance that the originators had. The whole genre becomes insipid and it’s time for a change.”

“It happens in clothing design, it happens in house architecture, it’s just evolution. But eventually history doesn’t remember those things. History doesn’t remember the critics who tear you apart because you’re not trendy. History remembers the genres and respects those people who were pioneers. You would never look back and say anything about Elvis except, “Holy mackerel, what a contribution!” Or Led Zeppelin, or Beethoven, or any of those people. That’s one of the good things about history—it doesn’t suffer journalistic foolery.”

While Vai may not have any warm feelings toward the journalistic hacks, things are diametrically different when it comes to aspiring young players. He has great things to say about young guitarist Zach Weisinger who has recently opened for Vai on a number of occasions. “This kid is truly brilliant from head to foot,” says Vai. “I’ve never seen anybody so excited about their ideas and their own creations. And that’s a sign of greatness. It takes a lot of courage for some people to execute their ideas.”

As well as being generous with praise for young players, at the end of each London masterclass Vai offered attendees to jam with him. Kids took turn to stand at the front of the room trading licks and ideas with Vai, faces lighting up as they found themselves standing in front of their hero.

The enjoyment, apparently, is mutual. “I’ve discovered that I really enjoyed just speaking about the things that I have found to be important to me in my career,” Vai said to me during the interview. “It’s a very easy kind of thing to do also because when I’m on tour I have to rehearse, you’ve got a band and the show is a presentation. These masterclasses are day and night to a show. It’s something I’ve experimented with and it was so well-received, I thought, “Well, let me take a little time and do this because I really enjoy it.”

Vai’s strongest idea his masterclass attendees are unlikely to ever forget—the one that concerns the importance of finding your own voice—couldn’t have been brought home more convincingly than by his own example. And it’s not only in his music that Vai sees the results of this search, not only in his guitar hero status or his huge fan following, but also in the way he feels about the world and experiences his life. It becomes apparent when I put to him my semi-absurd question on what he would ask if he was granted a true answer to any question in the universe.

“The answers that I need to know I feel like I know,” he replies. “I’m not concerned with the past, really, I’m not concerned with the creation. Obviously, I’m a seeker of spiritual equilibrium and truth, and what has been the primary concern of my entire life more than music, more than anything, is, “What’s going on? What the heck is going on?”

“Through my years of study and seeking I got the answer. And the answer is basically is the answer that’s at the core of all fundamental religions. It’s a simple answer that they all give, and I’m not talking about all the religious doctrines and stuff that spawned from religions. I’m talking about the guys who were really inspired. And what they said is that all the answers are within the core of the human consciousness. As a matter of fact, the whole creation and the creator himself emanate from within the core of the consciousness. And it’s closer than our hands and feet and it’s closer than our life. We don’t even take our life with us.”

“But you can only understand things that make sense to you. And that makes real sense. But you can only believe things that you experience really first-hand. Having a feeling about something isn’t good enough for me. I have to experience it. And the answers that I get is that in order to experience it you have to go within. You have to go within your own consciousness, and that makes sense to me. And then all the answers will be there. Of everything.”

“Frankly, as odd as it might sound, I’ve studied many religions, and there is so much that just doesn’t make sense to me. Crazy stuff, superstitions, weird things that were obviously the product of fear and guilt, and all this stuff that doesn’t make sense to me. But what all these leaders say has made sense. So for me to ask a question, I don’t really care because I know the answer. Not the literal answer, but the answer to me is that to know everything you have to go within your own consciousness and it will be there. That makes sense.”

While the answers may be right there within us, the path to them has rarely been easy, just like the path to true musical greatness. And just like with spiritual insights, it takes a special gift to be able to share unique musical discoveries with a widespread audience. For Vai it took discipline, passion, and long-term commitment to start operating on the musical plane at which he now finds himself, to be able not only to perceive some novel, advanced concepts but also to successfully communicate them.

Amazingly, his spiritual advancement never lagged behind. The fact that the two have been interconnected throughout his career, is, however, not entirely mystifying. After all, didn’t Beethoven once say that music is the mediator between spiritual and sensual life? If this is so, Vai has managed to prove that whatever you are able to perceive is bound to happen on both spiritual and sensual planes if you work hard enough and continue being a seeker.