“I wasn’t a big fan of the Marshall sound.”

Steve Vai explained why he never primarily relied on Marshall amplifiers and looked back on his relationship with Carvin, whose Legacy I amp Vai called his favorite.Most high-profile guitarists have had at least a brush with Marshalls at one point or another, and Steve Vai tells Dean Delray in a recent interview that playing Marshalls retouched by the legendary mod-god Jose Arredondo during his David Lee Roth days, but later found out the Marshall sound to be too aggressive for a full night of electric guitar that are his solo performances (transcribed by Ultimate Guitar):”I used the Marshalls that were heavily customized by Jose Arredondo in the Roth days. They’re great amps. I still have a couple of them. But they’re Marshalls — and Marshalls, of course, were the workhorses of the Hendrixes and all that — but I wanted to have a tone that was different than everybody else… Because I’m getting on the stage and playing melodies and solos all night on the guitar, it needs to be a friendly sound; it needs to be something that’s not going to be like an ice pick in the forehead.”

As Vai explains, his first contact with Carvin occurred while he was still playing with Frank Zappa, adding that they were the first amps he had ever owned:

“In the early days, Carvin approached Frank and gave him some amps. I liked the one I got. I never owned amps — if I wasn’t spending money on drugs, I wasn’t spending it on amps, because they were really expensive; I just saved and bought a house. But, at one point, Carvin did give me a whole X-100B amp stack. That was my first stack, and I was just nuts about it; I mean, I’d just sit and stare at it. It sounded okay. I wasn’t a big fan of the Marshall sound. So, I played that for a little while, and then I moved on.”

“Legacy I was the amp for me”

When Carvin contacted him again later in his career about doing a project together, Vai recalls going on a bender of learning everything there is to know about amps to be able to come up with the exact sound he was looking for. Recalling the “back-and-forth” that eventually resulted in his “favorite” amp, Vai said:

“I just said, ‘I want all this.’ Because they were a home-run kind of business, they could build very high-tech things at a reasonable cost to the consumer. We spent probably three years on the Legacy. It was a great opportunity for me to sculpt my inner ear with the outer world, like, ‘What am I hearing? And why is this not delivering, and how can we change it?'”

“It was a great situation. I mean, that’s really a fantastic place to be, and Carvin was all too willing to make it just perfect for me. So, when we came out with the Legacy I [in 1999], I mean, that was the amp for me. To this day, it’s still my favorite amp.”

In a new interview with Ultimate Guitar, Steve Vai also reflected on his role in popularizing the seven-string electric guitar, noting how he never regretted his role in making it happen:

“No, not at all. As a matter of fact, I remember I was on tour, and I walked into this hotel bar, and there was a little jazz band that was playing. The guy had a seven-string, and he was doing walking bass lines. But my heart was full when I saw that.”