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Legendary guitarist and bandleader Carlos Santana has announced a two-year residency at the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. The stint will kick off in May of this year, and Santana reportedly will play 80 shows a year in 2012 and 2013.

The show has been named “Greatest Hits Live: Santana – Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow,” and Santana says the “tomorrow” portion of the shows will be new territory for both the band and the audience.

“Tomorrow is the unknown, so how do you rehearse the unknown?” Santana told the Los Angeles Times. “To me, the unknown is inviting African musicians to join us, or Buddy Guy or Derek Trucks or Ben Harper, people from Phish, Warren Haynes – that’s what “Tomorrow” is bringing to the House of Blues.”

“I call it a living laboratory,” he continued. “We play the beginning [of a set] and we play the end, but in the middle, we’re going to create some experimentation so you can witness a backward flip into the unknown. In other words, there’s no set list in the middle. We will create something so you can just close your eyes and go on a journey with us.”

This isn’t the first residency the Mexican born artist has had in the city. He played a show called “Supernatural Santana – a Trip through the Hits” at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in a stretch that ended in 2011.

Santana also said he hopes to use the time he’s in Las Vegas to record, and says he already has three albums in mind.

“I’d like to do two with the band – one just in Spanish for the Latino audience, and one that hopefully will be radio-friendly,” he said. “And I want to do one just for family – with and for the family, with my wife, my son, my two daughters, who are all musicians.