Alex Skolnick has weighed up what social media has given musicians against what it has cost them, landing on a split verdict: it freed artists from the press, and it handed a microphone to people who have not earned one.
The Testament guitarist was talking to Jack Mangan and Mark Pruett of “S.L.A.M. Support Life And Music“.
“Social media, it’s been around a while now — it’s nothing new — but it’s continuing to have a big impact on musicians. We’re all on there, and I think it’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing,” he began (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
He continued: “I was scrolling the other day, and suddenly the feed gives me this image — it’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, 1972 on the BBC, Billy Cobham doing the most insane drum solo I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know this footage existed. I would not see this if it wasn’t for the Internet and my social media account. In this case, it was Facebook. I also like the fact that we can be our own brands.”
Skolnick made his first record as a teenager, and remembers how narrow the channel to an audience was then.
“I started my professional career pretty young. I was 18 when we did the first Testament record, and it was nice to get some exposure, but it was very limited. I was very kind of under the control of whatever media piece on the group would come out. And there were some good ones, there were some not great ones. But basically that’s your image. The interview that I would give to the magazine, whatever it was, Metal Edge or the ones that were around back then… But that was your whole presentation, and you were sort of dependent on the editor who would do these interviews, and you were limited. And now I’m not dependent on that press or the official band photos or whatever. I have these pages where I can be myself and put out what I wanna put out. And I think that’s a great thing,” he explained.
He drew the same line through studio software, where the tools that make records easier to build also make them easier to fake.
“As somebody who was doing art before all this, you have such an appreciation for it, as well as the technology of being able to record music,” he added. “It’s so much easier than when we started recording music, and being able to cut and paste parts of music, started by Pro Tools, but now we have Logic. So on the one hand, the technology is great, but like all technology, it gets abused. And there are artists — air quotes, ‘artists’ — out there who are putting out music, building brands, that can barely play live. And some of them have had big… There’s been drama because they’ll go on some show or some clip of them actually playing comes out, and it’s nothing like what they’ve been putting out there.”
He went on: “The recording technology is abused. You can hear that in so much of popular music. You can just tell everything is overly perfected. You’re hearing the same verse — the musicians are playing the same exact same verse that you heard the first time around because they’re cutting and pasting. And that’s a problem.”
“As an artist, it’s great to have a voice, but does everybody need to have a voice now?” Skolnick said. “Every fan can express their opinion in the form of comment sections. And some of them are valid, but some of them are just trolls and really unqualified to make opinions.”
He closed the answer there: “So, I’m sorry for the long-winded answer, but, yeah, the many aspects of technology has both positive and negative connotations.”
Skolnick studied under Joe Satriani, as did Steve Vai and Metallica‘s Kirk Hammett, and played a UK show with Ozzy Osbourne in 1995.
He joined Testament as a teenager in the mid-1980s and left in the early 1990s after The Ritual, going on to study at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. He rejoined in 2005 and has held the lead guitar seat since. The band’s current lineup is Skolnick, founding guitarist Eric Peterson, singer Chuck Billy, bassist Steve Di Giorgio and drummer Chris Dovas, who joined in 2023. Their fourteenth album, Para Bellum, came out in October 2025 through Nuclear Blast, and they spent this spring on the “Thrash Of The Titans” tour with Overkill and Destruction.
His Brooklyn jazz-rock group, the Alex Skolnick Trio, released their sixth album, Prove You’re Not A Robot, in November 2025 through Flatiron Recordings, their first in seven years. Skolnick plays it with bassist Nathan Peck and drummer Matt Zebroski. The eight tracks include a version of Tom Petty‘s “Breakdown” and “Armando’s Mood“, which folds Chick Corea and Steve Howe together. The video for the title track was directed by Frankie Fulleda and features a cameo from Lamb Of God‘s Randy Blythe, who also shot the band’s photographs.
The trio formed in the early 2000s, drawing on Wes Montgomery, Black Sabbath, Prince, tango, calypso and Western swing, and has played venues from the Larvik Guitar Festival in Norway to The Olympia in Paris and Radio City Music Hall. Skolnick also works in the group PAKT and has played as a sideman with Percy Jones of Brand X and Stuart Hamm, alongside earlier work with vocalist Ishtar of Alabina and folk singer Debbie Friedman, and a guest appearance on a Rodrigo Y Gabriela album.
