“I had a two-neck guitar, then Steve Vai came out with his three-neck guitar. My label wanted me to challenge Steve to a duel”: Michael Angelo Batio on the origin of his four-neck guitar

The ever-outrageous shred wizard Michael Angelo Batio has revealed the origins of his iconic quad-necked guitar, which was designed to go toe-to-toe with Steve Vai.

The 1980s was a decade that pushed the electric guitar to new extremes. While Eddie Van Halen lit a fire under a new generation of players with his tapping fireworks, and Yngwie Malmsteen was breaking the speed limit with lightning-fast arpeggios, Michael Angelo Batio was standing out by shredding on not one, not two, but four fretboards at once.

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“Steve Vai came out with his three-neck heart guitar,” Batio says in the new issue of Guitar World. “My label wanted me to challenge Steve to a duel. I didn’t see the point in competitions like that.”

Mark that down as another ‘what if’ moment in music history. Michael Angelo Batio versus Steve Vai would have been a guitar duel for the ages. But luckily, the story didn’t end there.

He continues, “The label went, ‘Michael… Steve’s got three necks, and you have two. You know what you need?’ And I went, ‘Four.’ They loved it.

“As it happened, Wayne Charvel was building all my guitars,” he adds. “I said to him, ‘Can you do this?’ I have a good engineering mind for guitar design, so I designed the Quad. I told him how I thought it should be four separate guitars, and that was that. It was the wildest thing. There was no limit to what we were trying to do.”

When the maverick shredder unleashed the fury of the Quad, playing at Formula One speeds with not a single guitar pick in sight, many thought there was some studio wizardry (read: cheating) going on.

“No, no,” Batio returns. “Those songs were clocking at 200 bpm, which was nothing for me – that’s all 16th notes. That was all analog tape. There were no punches. There are a lot of guitarists who can play like that now.”

Batio’s full interview features in the new issue of Guitar World. Print and digital copies can be ordered from Magazines Direct.

A freelance writer with a penchant for music that gets weird, Phil is a regular contributor to Prog, Guitar World, and Total Guitar magazines and is especially keen on shining a light on unknown artists. Outside of the journalism realm, you can find him writing angular riffs in progressive metal band, Prognosis, in which he slings an 8-string Strandberg Boden Original, churning that low string through a variety of tunings. He’s also a published author and is currently penning his debut novel which chucks fantasy, mythology and humanity into a great big melting pot.