Joe Satriani, the best-selling instrumental rock guitarist of all time, opened up about his opinions on Deep Purple‘s legendary guitarist Ritchie Blackmore during an interview with Music Is Win.

Ritchie Blackmore was a founding member of the iconic band Deep Purple and worked with the band and released numerous successful albums and songs until leaving Deep Purple for good in November 1993 during the band’s Japanese tour following The Battle Rages On album.

During Blackmore’s absence, Joe Satriani joined Deep Purple as a temporary replacement during the tour. Since all the concerts were a huge success, Satriani was asked to join the band permanently yet he declined due to his deal with Sony.

During a recent interview, some parts from Joe Satriani‘s new song named Falling Stars in his new album titled Shapeshifting were a matter of question and the interviewer asked about it since it is quite recognizable. Satriani humorously stated that he stole that part from Ritchie Blackmore and he sounded like he feels blessed to be a part of Deep Purple even it was only for 6 months.

Here is what Satriani said:

“Oh my God, I stole that right from Ritchie Blackmore! I love Ritchie Blackmore and, of course, I spent six months playing with Deep Purple.

So I had the rare opportunity as a fan to join the epic lineup of Deep Purple and to experience doing that and to make-believe just for a microsecond, like, ‘Hey, I’m in Deep Purple!’

Of course, I always knew I was just an American kid from Long Island, I got to play with an epic British band, and always above me was Ritchie Blackmore looking down at me, going, ‘Really? You’re going to play an Ibanez guitar?'”

He, later on, praised Ritchie and added:

“Ritchie’s a guy you can’t copy, you can’t replace him, he’s just… So many guitar players from that era put so much personality into their sound and they had such limited tools that their personality just came out.

So you can copy the notes and figure out the fingering but you can never actually figure out their essence and the magic that goes into it.

It’s like Jimmy Page – you can’t contain that. There’ll never be a book that can explain the genius of Jimmy Page! You can’t do it! He’s just too creative every microsecond that he plays the guitar. Any attempt to sort of reign it in and codify it is – forget about it!”

You can reach the source of the statement here.