Los Angeles, CA (October 30, 2026)—Steve Vai does not sit still. The legendary guitar virtuoso tours incessantly—he’ll close out 2026 having played nearly 100 gigs this year—and yet he also found time to record a new album coming out November 6. The collection, The Sea of Emotion, is the long-awaited studio debut of SatchVai, his band with fellow celebrated guitarist Joe Satriani, also featuring drummer Kenny Aronoff, bassist Marco Mendoza and guitarist Pete Thorn.
“Joe and I go way back,” says Vai. “I started taking lessons from him when I was 12 or 13, and he was my mentor and lifelong friend. We’ve toured together and we’ve jammed endlessly together—but we never created one band and made a record and wrote music together.”
The two guitarists have often toured together since the early 2000s under the guise of G3, highlighting themselves and a third guitarist—tours over the years have included Yngwie Malmsteen, John Petrucci and often Eric Johnson—and it was during a 2024 G3 run with Johnson that the seeds of the SatchVai project took root.
“That happened very organically, very beautifully, very seamlessly,” says Vai. “We booked a tour and that was great, but it was too short. Joe and I wanted to continue, so we did, but we did more like ‘G2’ where there’s two bands and then we come out together at the end to jam on a classic rock song. We were going to do more of that, but somebody suggested, ‘Why not have a new song? What if you got new music so that when you go to do your jam, you don’t have to play only classic rock songs? You can have a new song.’
“Once that happened, the next thing I know, I got these two beautiful tracks in my email from Joe and I was like, ‘Okay, game on—we’re doing it.’ That led to ‘Why don’t we create one band, do a tour and have almost like tag team.’ That started to happen and it turned out brilliant and beautiful.”
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Vai’s fluid playing and creative approaches to guitar are well-known, but that skill is also supported by meticulously chosen technology brought to bear on the sound and tone of his playing. While his private studios have often had a myriad of outboard units on hand, touring naturally requires a pared back, more narrowly focused selection of equipment, such as Fractal Audio Systems amp modeling and effects processors and Synergy Vai preamp modules. While gear chosen for road work can do a lot of heavy lifting, it needs support as well, and Vai protects the units—and his guitar tones passing through them—by using Furman power conditioners, both in the U.S. and abroad.
“If you’re touring outside of America, you have to have it [power conditioning],” Vai notes. “When I toured with my own band, I had various stages of protection. All of the gear…everything that you could turn on that involved me as the guitar player was protected—and then I had another layer, outside of the stage, with the power coming in.”
That attention to detail isn’t just part of his live work, however; you can find it in his personal recording studios as well. The facilities may provide Vai with the opportunity and room to bring far more equipment to bear on his recordings, but his habit of fueling it all with clean power remains.
Over the years, Vai has had multiple studios with evocative names—The Mothership, Harmony Hut and now the Secret Jewel Box; currently being built out, the newest facility is designed for producing spatial audio-ready music from the ground up. There, much as in Vai’s other studio, power is a crucial tool.
“If you looked around the walls and the outlets in the Harmony Hut, which is my Encino studio, there’s two outlets every time there’s a need for an outlet,” he says. “There are four black outlets and four orange outlets—the orange outlets are the power coming into the studio. The black outlets are for things like plugging vacuum cleaners and other things into.”
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Vai says the new Secret Jewel Box recording studio shares many similarities with The Mothership and Harmony Hut, but with small improvements. He explains, “I have a similar setup that I had at the Mothership and at the Harmony Hut: All of the racks have Furman protectors. I’ve got a server that has 200 terabytes, which is everything digital I’ve ever had or recorded or created—every computer from the past, every photo, every recording, everything. They need to be protected.
“Then I have the rack with all the computers, audio converters and more. That’s very important that they’re protected. What else do I have in that rack? Well, there’s various kinds of gear in there that’s specific for the studio, and everything goes into the [Furman] protection.”
Vai will finally get some more time in that new studio when his current tour with BEAT, performing the music of King Crimson, wraps up in early December, though he already has some European dates planned for 2027. For those who can’t wait that long to hear his searing guitar tones, however, there’s the SatchVai The Sea of Emotion album, out November 6, which is being released on CD, double-LP vinyl and online.