We live about 400 miles apart but we speak all the time.

TAC - Have you played Guitar Hero? What do you think about it?

JS - I've never played it. I've stood behind people playing and watched people playing it, but I'm worried that once I get my hands around those little buttons, I'm not going to want to pick up another guitar again.

TAC - Do you prefer to tour solo or with the G3? (Joe's guitar tour with Steve Vai and one other guest guitarist)

JS - Well actually, there a cycle of writing material and that urge to play it live. With your own shows, there's this urge to go out there and showcase what you can do and by the end of it, you're thinking “Oh man, I'm so tired, I just want to go back to the studio”

At G3 it's great because you get to play cover songs and there's less emphasis on one particular player; you're usually going to be playing for about 50 minutes and then playing your favourite songs at the end, so I really look forward to it.

But I think that anything that is worth doing takes a phenomenal amount of effort, so after G3, you
get this urge to go back and work on some more material.

TAC - How much do you practice each day and what do you consider practice?

JS - Well, I don't really practice as such because I'm beyond that point where I need to learn anything new. When I was starting out, there was so much I didn't know, I didn't know how to play melodic harmonic tones for example, so I learnt that but eventually I learnt everything. There was a point where I worked up from practising from three to six to eight to even 12-13 hours a day for about a week at a time.

Now the main challenge for me is “how do I write and improvise good music?”. And how I play this is really important. No one wants to hear a didactic sound, no one wants to hear music that sounds like it's being practised.

And when I was teaching, that's one of the things I used to tell my students “Don't spend too much time playing scales”.

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