GuitarPlayer.com recently caught up with guitar legends Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen and Paul Gilbert to discuss how aspiring guitar gods can build their chops. Mark Tremontie, Joe Bonamassa and Mike Stern are also featured. An excerpt is available below:

Steve Vai: "I would get extremely disciplinarian with myself when it came to building chops. When I would sit down to practice a lick, like the one here, I’d tell myself, 'Until you can play this lick properly, you will not get up, eat, go to sleep.' That’s a pretty intense thing for a 14-year-old boy to do—it’s a reflection of a psychological imperfection, actually, or a crack in the cosmic eggshell. I was very intense about it. I don’t need to sit and practice for 10 hours a day anymore, but I do try to be as proficient as possible."

Paul Gilbert: "I played for about eight years without having any significant picking technique. It was all hammer-ons and pull-offs. For me, what it took was learning to use the metronome—slowing a repeating lick down to where I could do it perfectly, then gradually speeding it up. I learned a really simple six-note picking lick on one string, and within a couple weeks I could play it really fast. But the hardest thing about fast picking is to go from string to string, so to improve at crossing the strings I practiced this one here, which gets progressively trickier with each section."

Go to this location for the complete article and exercises offered by the players featured.

Back in August, Vai took part in his first ever Reddit online Q&A session with the fans. Premier Guitar followed the discussion and have posted the following update:

"At this point in his 30-year career, there’s not much about Steve Vai that hasn’t been covered before. Luckily, some of our more astute Facebook fans kept Vai busy for nearly two hours to talk about everything from the influence of his former boss Frank Zappa to some setlist spoilers for his upcoming Rock in Rio gig. Check out a few highlights from Vai’s expansive Q&A below."

Tone is a supremely unique journey: "The ultimate goal is to find whatever it is that makes you—and I mean you personally, nobody else, including society, your friends, your parents, or anything that anyone might say to you—feel good. You are unique, so the things you desire are unique. What is it that you desire that brings you the feeling of fulfillment and enjoyment? So both of your options, or one of them, or neither of them, can be the right answer for you, but you’re the only one who can choose what feels best for you. And there are no wrong answers."

Vai is digging into his archives for his next project: "Right now I’m working on the record that will be included in the 25th anniversary edition of Passion and Warfare that will come out next year. It’s music I’ve written or tracked between Flex-able and Passion and Warfare, kinda like the missing link. It’s pretty bizarre and wild. As a matter of fact, I just played Andy Alt one of the weirdest solos I think I ever did and he said, “That was the most inside-out, backwards, and flipped thing that ends up being so right!"

Whammy-bar antics are a little less destructive with Vai’s latest guitars: "Since Ibanez came out with these new titanium bars, I usually am only victorious at breaking one every two years or so. Thomas Nordegg (Vai’s guitar tech) is very happy about it. But still I try."

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