Guitarist Steve Vai has issued the following studio update on his forthcoming live album and DVD, Sound Current, which has been renamed Sound Theories:

April 9th, 2007:

"I changed the name of the record to Sound Theories.

I just finished the stereo and 5.1 mixes of the record. It’s stunning to hear this stuff in 5.1. I opted to place the rock band (bass drums, and myself) in the stereo portion of the mix for the most part, and delegate the orchestra to all of the 5.1 areas. Hearing this kind of a robust spread is a bird of a different color. It’s rich dense and magnificent to be embraced by the surround audio experience.

I mixed the surround sound with the specification that the listener should have in their set up five of the same exact speakers. These speakers would take the place of the two front stereo pair, the two rear surround pair and the middle center speaker. All speakers should be set to the same output level. The sweet spot for the listener would be right in the middle of the configuration.

Most 5.1 mixes of live shows have the entire mix in the front stereo pair and the audience ambient tracks in the rear. This creates the awareness of being in the venue and hearing things from the perspective of being in the audience, but with my mix I decided to create a listening environment as if the listener was standing where the conductor is and is surrounded by the orchestra.

The only down side to this is that if you’re at home watching this DVD and listening to the 5.1 mix, your system would need to be set up as described above or it could end up sounding kind of odd. I’ll have to put a notice on the DVD that explains the set up and that I would recommend listening to the stereo DVD mix instead of the 5.1 mix if your set up is not balanced the way the mix intended it to be.

You see, I even want to control the way you set up your home listening environment. Good thing I’m to too much of a control freak or I would have to visit your house and set it up properly myself.

Thanks for hanging in there. More to come."

April 10th, 2007::

"Last night I finished the 5.1 mixes and was finally able to start thinking about playing the guitar again. I took to my private little guitar room in the Harmony Hut and started to just play. After floating for about 15 minutes I had the realization that I had made a mistake with the 5.1 mixes. While importing session data from other sessions and pasting them into the 5.1 auxiliary tracks, I realized that certain information did not transfer and the mixes were thrown off so I have to go back and re-do all the 5.1 mixes. It felt as though I was hit by a train right in the middle of the light at the end of the tunnel.

I’m cursed with this need to do things systematically and immediately realized I could not concentrate on playing until the mixes were done. I lost about two days, ouch!

Oh well, I guess if the pressure wasn’t excruciating then I wouldn’t feel normal, ha.

Going back under."