Surfing With The Alien Guitar Lesson – Joe Satriani


In this Surfing With The Alien guitar lesson video series,  I will show you note-for-note how to play this instrumental shred classic by the great Joe Satriani.

This awesome rock guitar instrumental was released in 1987 and contains highly melodic licks with incredible guitar acrobatics throughout.

In the first Surfing With The Alien guitar lesson below, we will only concentrate on the main melody which still provides lots of cool hooks and licks the sink your teeth into.

I do think this lesson could easily be approached by the intermediate level guitarist. We only have a couple of half-step and quarter-step bends to deal with that may be a bit tricky.

Other than that it is all about the groove and the cool melodic hooks. You will probably see during video lesson I had add a liberal amount of vibrato to the notes as well. Doing that helps make this melody sing.

Starting in the second video we will be turning up the difficulty level quite a bit. I will go back and show you the opening riffs and the rhythm guitar track under the 1st theme.

After that, we go straight into the first solo which contains fast pick tapped trills, a long Satriani signature legato run, fast bluesy licks, a very unorthodox and monster stretch legato lick and more.

I will demonstrate the solo phrase-by-phrase, to make it easier to get under your fingers.

In the third and final video lesson, I will show you the second version of theme number two, and the outro solo.

The outro solo starts with a very fast lick that is based around a consistent pattern. So I will focus on getting you to work on that pattern individually before playing the entire section. This section also requires the ability to perform very wide stretches.

The outro solo has lots of whammy bar madness, high octane blues based licks and more pick tapping trills and double-stops. There is a lot to work on here. 🙂

I hope you guys enjoy the learning this great instrumental and I appreciate your support in liking the first video enough to make the next two happen.

Thanks!

Carl...

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Surfing With The Alien Guitar Lesson - Main Riff

Surfing With The Alien Guitar Lesson - Part 2

Surfing With The Alien Guitar Lesson - Part 3

11 Comments

  1. michael whitley on January 10, 2015 at 7:17 pm

    can you do the guitar solo to this song?

    • Carl Brown on January 11, 2015 at 9:48 am

      If enough people request it I will do the whole song. 🙂

      • Pilotguy210 on October 30, 2015 at 3:20 pm

        One of my favorite satriani songs… Please do!

  2. algavilan on May 9, 2015 at 7:45 pm

    I am all for the solos. I have been trying to learn this darn song for months.

  3. Ivan Peter on July 1, 2015 at 9:01 am

    Yeah, ever since I heard the song I’ve been wanting to learn the whole song! Can you do the whole song?

  4. Cliffsofblue on February 25, 2016 at 4:19 pm

    Hey Carl
    if u haven’t already, check out Neil Zaza. Guitarist from Cleveland, O.H. He has a lot of instrumental guitar work, in fact instrumental guitar is all he does, Maybe you might consider doing lessons on some of his material. He has an awesome one called “melodically”

  5. Cliffsofblue on February 25, 2016 at 6:08 pm

    That songs called “melodica” it’s a live version from the album “sing”

  6. Gary Foster on July 2, 2017 at 7:04 am

    Awesome lesson Carl! Do you think you could do a lesson on Satriani’s “Ten Words”?

  7. michael whitley on July 19, 2018 at 4:43 pm

    HI Carl thanks for doing this solo it’s been a long time coming, I been wanting to do this song for a long time. I appreciate the time you take to teach these songs thanks so much keep rocking on man, your the best.

  8. Caleb Rice on August 14, 2018 at 11:59 am

    Hi Carl,
    Can you please do a tutorial for “Relativity (Instrumental)” by Lincoln Brewster? It’s very melodic and has some great riffs in it.
    Thanks!

  9. keith scott on March 22, 2020 at 9:24 am

    Carl..would you consider giving a lesson on “crushing day”? Satriani

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