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He was one of the most influential guitarists of our time. When Eddie Van Halen started a solo, the rock world held its breath. He made guitars sing with his hands. The five most defining guitar solos and trademarks of the recently deceased musical hero.
The climax of Eddie Van Halen’s music was at another time. When he made music history with his hard rock band Van Halen in the 1980s with “Jump,” “Right Now,” or “Ain’t Talking Bout Love,” the standards were different than they are today. Nobody adored limited edition slippers, at the time the fair was mostly about a piece of wood on a string. There were no followers, there were fans. And Eddie Van Halen had a lot of that – his guitar playing motivated millions of aspiring guitarists to lock themselves in their rooms for hours and make the daring attempt to recreate their solos. You have to know these five:
1. «Eruption» (Van Halen, 1978)
Eddie changed the DNA of rock music with the solo piece “Eruption” in the late 1970s. He came up with a plan for the classic rock guitar glut. Children still play this alone today, Link opens in a new windowEddie looks like he has six fingers on his hands.
2. «Mean Street» (Van Halen, 1981)
The song “Mean Street” actually begins with a solo (even if a classic solo follows later). And what Eddie makes in those first 30 seconds is now considered his signature; the two-handed tapping technique, Link opens in a new window». Or: The art of striking the strings of the guitar with the fingers of both hands on the neck of the guitar. This technique was not invented by Eddie Van Halen, it is attributed to the Italian Vittorio Camardese, Link opens in a new window, but it was he who planted the tapping in the history of rock guitar solos.
3. «Cake» (Van Halen, 1991)
Eddie works his guitar with a drill. “Poundcake” is the opener for Van Halen’s ninth album “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge”. The idea of drilling the guitar with a drill supposedly came to him in the studio while a technician was working with a Makita during rehearsals. Eddie turning the drill into a stylistic device for “Poundcake” shows the experimental joy of playing a guitarist at the height of his career.
4. “Beat it” (Michael Jackson, 1982)
Probably the most famous Eddie Van Halen solo in the world can be found in a Michael Jackson song. Actually, Toto’s guitarist Steve Lukather was playing guitar on Jackson’s “Thriller” album. For “Beat It,” producer Quincy Jones settled on Eddie Van Halen. Rightly so: his virtuoso guitar slaughter opens up entirely new musical spaces in the middle of Überhit, breaks down genre barriers, connects cultures, and plays to the point where you want to hear it on a loop.
5. «Jump» (Van Halen, 1984)
Supposedly, it took Eddie a long time to convince his bandmates that he wanted to play not only guitar but also synthesizer on this song. It was good that Eddie persevered, otherwise Van Halen would have missed his only number one hit, and the world was missing a piece of rock history.
