Guitarist Steve Vai has issued the following studio updates on his latest project, Sound Current:

Noon:

"Today, before I started working. A gentleman from Germany came by with a new kind of instant tuner for the guitar. It’s not ordinary. You can program various alternative tunings into it and it automatically changes the tuning of your guitar to the tuning you punch in. It’s extraordinary.

When he first demonstrated it I was a bit stunned. I gave him a Strat to install the technology in. Before I put it in any other guitars I thought it would be a good idea to test it on an instrument that could really use it.

Then I started working on 'Lotus Feet'.

I noticed that I transferred all the audio from the five different shows into one mix session while I was on the ZPZ tour so that saves me several hours. This track will only be on the DVD, as it wouldn’t make sense to put in on the CD since it was just released on Real Illusions. The version on the DVD will be a different take then what appeared on Real Illusions.

I was nervous to take a listen to this because I didn’t want to have to cut from different shows if my guitar part was not right, but low and behold, my performance the night of the DVD shoot was actually pretty good, so I have a wonderful version of 'Lotus Feet' here. There are only two bad notes but hey, I have a very large pair of tweezers with me.

The first thing I have to do is move all the tracks incrementally forward some frames. While making the original transfer there were enough plug-ins on the tracks that they caused slight delays in the play back of the track. It’s a form of latency. The tracks can fall behind anywhere from 0-200 samples. Pro Tools will show you exactly how much delay is involved with each track but then I have to go in and manually move the tracks frame by frame one at a time. There are 48 tracks. It takes about an hour."

2:00 pm:

"Next is work on the drums. Worked on adding kick sample and building all the EQ’s and then adding reverbs etc.

My friend from Digidesign came by today and loaded the newest version of Pro Tools onto the Harmony Hut computer. This took three hours. Chipping away at it…"

For complete details on Sound Current check out Vai's in-depth report here.