Crystal Planet is my favourite Joe Satriani album by far.
I haven’t listened to much after Super Colossal. Any standouts in his more recent output?
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I’m getting it in my feed, so idk but god damn, amazing.
I never listened to Joe before, I’m really admiring him, makes me 
I didn’t really “get” Satch before I heard Crystal Planet. Hearing that album, everything made sense. I enjoyed the rest of his catalogue much more after that.
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Crystal planet is amazing! One of my favourites! Joe is disgustingly melodic, and I love it.
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My mum is a fan, asked her to show me more. Hopefully I’ll see some good stuff.
As the resident “Satch Worshiper” of the forum, I’m gonna have a lot of fun in this thread lol
Mine as well, though Flying In A Blue Dream is my favorite song of his. It wasn’t before, but its the reason I decided to try playing again earlier this year. So, yeah… It kinda has to be my favorite song of all time now, doesn’t it? Crystal Planet is the album I knew how to play the most songs from. I knew almost all of SWtA, about 1/2 of FIABD, a good amount of The Extremist and a few from the self-titled. But I knew this entire album damn near front to back. There were only 4 or 5 “lines” I didn’t spend enough time on, the outro to the song posted being one of them. I love everything about this album. The tour for it was the first time I actually got to see him live and I cried like a baby when he walked out on stage.
I lost touch with his music not long after EoC and didn’t catch back up until this year, so I’m not as familiar with it. I stopped listening to guitar based music for a really long when I wasn’t able to play anymore. When I started up again, a handful of my heroes’ albums just didn’t click with me. It’s almost like I didn’t know how to listen to that stuff anymore. But not Joe. I thoroughly enjoyed all of the albums that I’ve heard from him post EoC and the “not quite as good” stuff is on the 2 albums that came out in between EoC and SC. The albums released after that are all great rock and roll guitar music. They don’t have the same kind of experimenting as his first 6, but he settled into a nice groove and it’s just damn good stuff.
I’m getting these clips in my feed as well and I love it, hahaha.
If you’re looking to be WOW’d by him some more, here’s a short list:
Crushing Day
Flying In A Blue Dream
The Mystical Potato Head Groove Thing
The Bells Of Lal Pt 2
War
Banana Mango II
House Full Of Bullets
Crystal Planet
Time
Devil’s Slide
The Power Cosmic 2000 Pt 1&2
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My interest in guitar based music waxes and wanes. I still love many of the “guitar hero” albums that I loved as a teenager, but there’s so much more music in the world to enjoy.
According to Spotify, Eric Johnson has been my favourite artist every year since I started using the service (no surprise there), and my breakdown this year included more guitar music than previous years.
Yeah, Dream Theater was the hardest for me to re-engage with. After my hiatus, aside from the first few records, I didn’t like anything else from them. It’s better now and I do like some of it, but guitar based stuff just made me angry for about a decade.
Same here. It went: Desert Rose, ALC Cliffs, FIABD, Ov Sacrament and Sincest (Infant Annihilator) and Chant (Hadestown)
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I never loved the albums they made after Kevin Moore left. Liked them, never loved them.
It’s great that you’re able to enjoy the guitar again. I remember feeling of absolute dread and despair when my RSIs (from typing) made we wonder if I’d be able to continue playing the guitar at all.
I didn’t think that was the reason for a long time, but eventually I realized that it mostly was. I do think that SFaM just might be masterpiece and Falling Into Infinity has some of my favorites songs of theirs, but anything after that borders on unlistenable for me. I like a few bits here and there, but I can’t even think of a full song that I actually like in its entirety.
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With Satch, it’s good to start way at the beginning. His very first release is interesting as all sounds were created with guitar - there are no other instruments.
This was included as an intro to another tune, for some sort of mini disc that came with a guitar magazine. He later used those arpeggio shapes, and the right hand muting technique, most famously on The Mystical Potato Head Groove Thing, but I’m particularly fond of its origins here:
A highly influential video for me when I was around 15:
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I wore that freaking out when I got it! I like Reel Satriani quite a bit as well, but there are a couple of takes I can’t believe weren’t used on the record. With that band backing you up… My god…
Elephants from Mars is really good too - I thought it’s really unique for Joe, and still… well, Joe! It’s got some sweeeet stuff on there! One of my favourite guitar instrumental albums for sure!
Oh you’re in for a treat - Satch is in the echelon of players who could get by on technique alone… but is a hell of a songwriter to boot and does al this crazy technical and harmonic astuff in deceptively normal song structures. He’s still probably my favorite player and biggest influence.
After Engines of Creation he got spotty for a while - there was probably a solid decade’s worth of albums where you could have strung together one really killer releaase, but instad got seven or eight where most of it was basically a Led Zep or Rage Against The Machine style bluesy riff, melody based on a blues lick with an “outside” note sprinkled in somewhere for color, a modulation for the chorus, and then a solo that sounded like he knew he didn’t have anything left to prove so wasn’t really going for the throat… but was still pretty damned solid. There were some indivual track stabdouts there - Premonition, Searching, Is There Love In Space, Overdriver, Revelation, Andalusia… The album with the last three, Professor Satchafunkus and the Musterion of Rock, I think was start of a reeturn to form for him, and honestly I think a big part of it was with Chickenfoot, he had an outlet for the Led Zep side of his playing so he started getting a little more adventurous on his own stuff.
Shockwave Suprnova has some great tracks but would be worth a listen simply because it’s Satch with the other 2/3 of The Aristocrats, so there’s some incredible musicianship across the board there. What Happens Next is probably my favrite of his newer albums (and has the drummer from the Red Hot Chili Peppers playing on it, the guy who looks like a dead ringer for Will Ferrell), and his latest, The Elephants of Mars, has a few weak spots but in “feel” reminds me the most of Surfing of anything he’s doe since (probably in part because it was also mostly cut direct?).
Strange Beautiful Music and Super Colossal are, IMO, the low point.
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