Joe Satriani and Steve Vai have put a band together and are headed to the UK and Europe for an epic 2025 tour – and it might not be long before we hear some new music from the two titans of the electric guitar, too.
The SATCHVAI Band (all caps because this is officially a BFD) will kick off their Surfing With The Hydra Tour on 13 June at the Barbican in York, braving the UK’s hay fever season and uncooperative summer weather before heading out across Europe. Over two dozen dates have been announced. More are coming.
The pair, who have been friends since they were teenagers, first toured together on the G3, but only officially appeared together onstage this year, string of blockbuster US dates, releasing their first co-written single, The Sea Of Emotion Part One, promising more music to come.
“The SATCHVAI Band Tour is happening! I’m so looking forward to sharing the stage with Steve again,” says Satriani. “Every time we play together, it takes me back to when we were teenagers, eating and breathing music every second of the day, pushing, challenging, and helping each other to be the best we could be. I guess we’ve never stopped!”
Vai can attest to that. He was a former student of Satriani’s and told MusicRadar that the New Jersey virtuoso was unsparing in his criticism.
“When I was a kid, he would say, ‘No, don’t vibrate it out of tune! You’ll sound like an idiot!’ When I was 13 years old!” said Vai. “And I said, ‘Okay, I will never vibrate a note ever out of tune for the rest of my life.’”
He is my favourite guitarist to jam with, and now we have another opportunity to take it to the stage
Steve Vai
And as far as we can tell he has stuck to that. Vai says touring with Satch is a “pleasure and an honour” and you can be guaranteed that they will be holding nothing back when they hit the stage.
“He is my favourite guitarist to jam with, and now we have another opportunity to take it to the stage,” says Vai. “I feel as though we are both at the top of our game, and the show will be a powerful celebration of the coolest instrument in the world, the electric guitar!”
There are few details as to the release schedule for new music but we will hear the second instalment of The Sea Of Emotion by the time they hit the stage. The song is a trilogy, with the third part written from a recording that Vai made of the pair when they were teenagers.
Speaking to Derek Thomas on the Masters of Shred YouTube channel, Satriani says it came from an old reel-to-reel recording of 20-minute practice jam of him and Vai as teenagers, playing the same thing over and over again. Vai adapted this for the new track.
“Steve kept the tape,” says Satriani. “He transferred it, got it cleaned up, all digitised, and he still has it, so the beginning of part three is actually that recording when we were just kids playing together and then he built the song around that, so it has been a crazy couple of weeks of this beginning collaboration, and that is what we are going to be unleashing on the world.”
Tickets for the Surfing With The Hydra Tour 2025 will be available via a pre-sale on 11 and 12 December, opening for general sale on 13 December. See SATCHVAI Band for full dates and ticket information.
