Crystal Planet

This is the seventh studio album, released by Epic on 3 March 1998 as EK 68018, fifteen tracks. His previous six had all come out on Relativity, so this is the first of the Epic years; the Japanese edition, SRCS-8588, carries sixteen tracks with a bonus. The single Ceremony holds the first seven-string guitar Satriani ever recorded with, an Ibanez Universe. Steve Vai had co-designed that instrument, so the teacher-and-pupil relationship turned up in the gear itself. A Peavey 5150 was used to record the title track. The album reached number 50 on the Billboard 200, stayed eight weeks and made the top hundred in five other countries. Stephen Thomas Erlewine at AllMusic called it an instrumental record with a difference and Satriani's finest all-instrumental effort since Surfing With the Alien, praising him for taking more chances than ever and for developing his technique into what Erlewine called new, uncharted waters. A Train of Angels brought a ninth Grammy nomination in 1999. The running order here is the import CD's as printed.