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Many of Van Halen’s greatest songs were played on Eddie’s homemade “Frankenstrat” guitar.
Eddie Van Halen, who died at the age of 65, opened up dozens of new possibilities for the electric guitar with his wildly inventive and largely self-taught techniques.
Combining ultra-fast two-hand picking techniques with hammers, starts, complex harmonics, and a variety of innovative devices that he patented, the guitarist became a pole star for generations of musicians.
“Ed is a type of person who repeats himself once or twice in a century,” said his friend Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains earlier this year. “There’s Hendrix and there’s Eddie Van Halen. Those two guys turned the world on its axis.”
- Tributes paid to ‘Rock Mozart’ Eddie Van Halen
His partner, guitar legend Joe Satriani, reflected in 2015: “Eddie smiled back at rock guitar at a time when everything was getting a little melancholic. He also scared a million guitarists terribly because he was so good. “.
‘Beyond incredible’
The son of the leader of a Dutch band, Van Halen was originally a pianist and played at weddings and bar mitzvahs with his family after they immigrated to Pasadena, California, in 1962.
A prodigious talent, he beat 5,000 students to first prize at a local piano recital for four years in a row, despite not being able to read a musical note.
“I cheated on my teacher for six years,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1995. “He never knew. He looked at his fingers and touched him.”
In his teens, he switched to drums, then guitar, and formed his first band with his brother Alex in 1964. The Broken Combs made their debut one noon at Pasadena elementary school and cemented the brothers’ desire to become musicians. professionals.
Eddie began by imitating the British rock trio Cream, learning Eric Clapton’s solos note by note.
But it was seeing Led Zeppelin at the Los Angeles Forum in the early 1970s that changed his guitar playing forever. A lightbulb lit up as Jimmy Page played the Heartbreaker solo, using both hands to play notes on the guitar neck.
For Page, it was an opportunity to show off, but Eddie took the technique and refined it, allowing him to play a seemingly impossible burst of notes and pinched harmonics.
“It’s like having a sixth finger on your left hand,” he explained in 1978. “Instead of playing, you’re playing a note on the fretboard.”
The approach was so revolutionary that Alex encouraged his brother to play with his back to the public so other bands wouldn’t steal it before Van Halen had a record deal.
However, once his self-titled debut album was released in 1978, Eddie’s fellow guitarists were dazzled.
“It was unbelievable,” said Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wyld. “I say, ‘That can’t be a guitar. What is that?”
Los Angeles punk musician Phast Phreddie Patterson wrote in a 1978 issue of Waxpaper: “Edward cries his guitar like his life depends on it. Smiling like a child … like a child with a new toy, he tries to get as much noise out of your instrument as electronically as possible. The results are incredible. “
‘No’ to long solos
Eddie never claimed to have invented the “two-handed tap” technique (classical guitarists had been using their hands to play notes that their fretted hand would normally cover for years), but he popularized it for rock audiences.
“And on top of that, I never heard anyone do what I did with him,” he said in a 2017 interview. “That they were real pieces of music.”
That really is the key. Eddie always prioritized melody and sentiment over outrageous technique. And although the Van Halen material leaned towards hard rock, they always employed catchy hooks and memorable riffs.
Some of his best jobs were the cheapest. In Jamie’s Cryin ‘Chorus, she responds to David Lee Roth’s voice (“Oh-oh-oh, Jamie’s crying”) with a simple two-note phrase that has all the taut precision of a Motown chorus.
On the record, he even kept his solos short, structuring them as mini-movements within songs, with a defined beginning, middle, and end.
“I haven’t heard anyone make a long and interesting guitar solo outside of early Clapton,” he observed.
One exception comes with Eruption, from Van Halen’s debut album, which is just 102 seconds of fiery solos as Eddie plummets over the fingerboard, incorporating classic scales and his “two-hand touch.”
The song was originally the guitarist’s warm-up exercise, but when producer Ted Templeman heard it, he realized it was worth showing off.
“I played it two or three times for the record, and we kept the one that seemed to flow,” Eddie later recalled. “I didn’t even play it right. There’s a bug at the top end. Whenever I hear it, I always think, man, I could have played better.
Always a perfectionist, he even surpassed Michael Jackson. After being asked to play on 1983’s Beat It, Eddie not only recorded one of pop’s most memorable solos, but rearranged the song.
“I didn’t know how he would react,” Eddie told CNN. So I warned him before he listened. I said, ‘Look, I changed the middle section of your song.’
“Now, in my mind, either he’s going to get his bodyguards kick me out for killing his song, or he’s going to like it. So he listened to it, turned to me and said, ‘Wow, thank you very much for having the passion. Not just to go in and solo, but to care about the song and improve it. ‘
According to legend, Eddie’s 20-second solo on Beat It was so incendiary that the speakers in the studio’s control room caught fire. In the heat, the seemingly insurmountable barrier between white rock and black pop was smashed.
In the late 1980s, Van Halen’s fingerprints were on all rock music, but the star dismissed many of his acolytes as “typewriter players.”
“Everyone plays as fast as they can, as loud as they can, they scream as loud as they can. But they don’t even scream or play fast with a unique quality,” he said in 1985. “It leaves me cold.”
‘Always a retoucher’
But while his playstyle launched thousands of copycats, it wasn’t Eddie’s only innovation.
In 1985, he patented a device that allows musicians to hang a guitar around their neck and lock it in a horizontal position to “create new techniques and sounds previously unknown to any musician.”
He also created a new type of guitar headstock and invented a device, known as the D-Tuna, that allows guitarists to switch between alternate tunings on the fly. Together with guitarist Floyd Rose, he even created a hit bar that worked without leaving the strings out of tune.
Speaking to Popular Mechanics in 2015, Eddie said that he had “always been a retoucher” and began modifying his own instruments out of necessity.
“My playing style really grew from the fact that I couldn’t afford a distortion pedal. I had to try to get those sounds out of my guitar … so I started hammering with a screwdriver.”
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Van Halen was more modest and ironic than the progressive rock giants of the 1970s.
Eddie’s custom-made guitars gave Van Halen a unique tone and sound, while his famous Shark, which was cut into a ‘Flying V’ with a chainsaw, inspired dozens of aspiring guitarists to smash their instruments.
His improved “Frankenstrat” even appeared in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last year.
“Nobody taught me to play the guitar: I learned by trial and error,” he told Guitar Player magazine. “I’ve messed up a lot of good guitars that way, but now I know what I’m doing and I can do whatever I want to get them the way I want them. I hate store bought, ready-to-use guitars.”
The craftsmanship was evidence of an almost obsessive urge to evoke the sounds Eddie Van Halen heard in his head. He probably didn’t make working with him easy (the band’s internal politics and line-up changes were complicated, to say the least), but his love and impact on rock music is hard to underestimate.
“When I’m home on a break, I lock myself in my room and play the guitar,” he told Guitar World in 1981. “After two or three hours, I begin to immerse myself in this total meditation. It is a feeling few people do. They experiment, and that’s when weird things come to me, it just flows.
“If you are a musician, you play until you die. It is not an ordinary job.”
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