Mike Ragogna: Steve, you and Berklee are trying to set a record in Guinness by attempting to teach as many guitarists online as possible within a single lesson. How're you going to pull that off?
Steve Vai: Well, believe it or not, I don't do drugs. (laughs) I don't know how it came about, it's more or less for the promotion of the online class that's being taught at Berklee. When I graduated from high school, I went to the Berklee College of Music, I really enjoyed it. Through the years, I've been in contact with them on various things. They kicked off these online music lessons for virtually anything, you can go to Berklee and take these classes on all sorts of things about music. They are really great because you can be anywhere in the world--you sign in, the classes hold twenty people and have an instructor. It's very interactive...they wanted to develop these classes that were more specific to the techniques of artists. So, they approached me and I liked the idea because I always like teaching, I'm also a big proponent of music education.
I went to Boston and recorded an entire day of videos based on my experiences and the things I think are important. The way I approach teaching is more esoterically. So, they chopped all up and created these classes, it's over one semester, you can sign up and there is an instructor and they watch a video of me and they discuss it and they talk about the things I talk about. Once a semester, I go online and participate in the class and do a Q&A. They launched this in September and it did wildly well. In order to promote the class, the marketing geniuses came up with this idea, "Hey let's get Steve to create the biggest online live guitar lesson in history."
My first question was, "Did anybody ever do this before and is there actually a record?" You can make a record for anything,
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