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One of the founders of the popular 80s hard rock band Van Halen passed away after a long battle with cancer.
Legendary guitar virtuoso, creator and leader of Van Halen, Eddie Van Halen, has died at the age of 65 after battling tongue cancer for years.
He was the pioneer of the Floyd Rose tremolo and tapping system. Van Halen is also known for his own guitars and amps. Correspondent.net talks about a rock legend.
Guitar god
“I can’t believe I have to write this, but my father, Edward Ludovic van Halen, lost his long and difficult battle with throat cancer. It happened this morning,” the musician’s son Wolfgang Van Halen wrote on Twitter.
– Wolf Van Halen (@WolfVanHalen) October 6, 2020
The son says that Van Halen Sr. was the best father. “Every moment I shared with him on and off stage was a gift,” Wolf said.
Ozzy Osbourne, frontman of the cult rock band Black Sabbath, paid tribute to Van Halen on social media.
“Eddie Van Halen was one of the nicest guys I’ve ever worked with. We laughed a lot together. His influence on music, especially when it comes to playing guitar, was immeasurable. He was an absolute legend.” See you on the other side, my friend. With love, Ozzy, “wrote the musician.
One of the founders of another cult band, Kiss Gene Simmons, called Van Halen “The Mozart of rock music.”
Renowned guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani only saw Van Halen once, but was in awe of his performance.
“He was running at a speed of a million miles per hour when he was playing. I wanted to stop him and tell him how amazing he is, but all I could do was watch,” he said in an interview.
Edward Van Halen was born on January 26, 1955 in the Dutch city of Nijmegen. In 1962, his family moved to the Californian city of Pasadena.
“When we came to America, I listened to Jimi Hendrix and Cream and I said, ‘Forget the piano, I don’t want to sit down. I want to get up and go crazy “- said Van Halen.
In 1972, at the age of 17, Eddie Van Halen, along with his drummer brother Alex, formed a group. As early as 1974, a classical line-up was formed, with Michael Anthony on bass and David Lee Roth on microphone, and it was called Van Halen.
The young guitarist immediately showed the world his own style of playing, based largely on tapping, when a guitarist with his right hand emits a sound not with a traditional plucking, but with a finger tap on the neck, exciting the vibrations of the rope.
He did not invent tapping, but he made it popular and made many people believe in it. Van Halen’s playing style was unequivocally defined in one of the band’s earliest compositions: the instrumental Eruption.
In fact, from the beginning of his career, Eddie Van Halen played a guitar assembled with his own hands, there was simply no money for others. The guitar was called Frankenstrat.
Four years after the band’s formation, Gene Simmons helped them record the demo and a year later, in 1977, Van Halen signed with Warner Bros.
The first album of the same name, which was released in 1978, contained compositions that have become hard rock classics. Among them is Ain’t Talkin ” Bout Love with one of the most recognizable riffs in the history of hard ‘n’ heavy music.
Van Halen didn’t like questions like “who inspires you”, but said he admired Les Paul and Leo Fender, who opened the world to electric guitar. Then Eric Clapton came in and topped Van Halen’s list of musical favorites.
“What attracted me to his playing, style and atmosphere was the simplicity of his approach, his tone, his sound,” said the guitarist in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
By 1996, Van Halen had sold more than ten million copies and achieved diamond status. At that time, the album had been purchased more than 12 million times in the United States alone.
The album’s lead single, 1984 Jump, became an international hit and topped the US Billboard Hot 100. The composition was quite suitable for discos.
Eddie Van Halen not only shone with guitar ideas, but he also proved to be an excellent keyboard player. He demonstrated phenomenal speed and created catchy synth riffs that other artists tried more than once.
On the charts, the 1984 album was second only to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, an album for which Eddie Van Halen, at the singer’s request, recorded a riff and solo on the song Beat It. Van Halen recorded it for free. , “as a favor” to Jackson and producer Quincy Jones.
During the studio session, even though the solo lasted only 20 seconds and the recording itself half an hour, his guitar amp caught fire.
According to the musician, it was invented on the fly. Spontaneity, according to Van Halen, is the main engine of progress.
“I do what I want. I don’t think too much, and that’s the beauty of the band. It all happens quite spontaneously,” he said in his first big interview with Guitar Player in 1978.
Van Halen not only influenced the technique of playing the guitar, he changed the idea of the very nature of the instrument: how it can be arranged and, consequently, how it sounds. His Frankenstrat was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in 2019.
Frankenstrat / EPA
Another guitar by the musician was exhibited at the Smithsonian Research Institute. Van Halen worked on the Floyd Rose vibrato, also popularized it.
With their help and in conjunction with harmonics (a technique for playing stringed instruments), Van Halen created sound effects that were called the horse sound or the elephant sound for their unusual and wild sound. Van Halen also became famous as a designer of amplification equipment.
Robert Downey Jr presents Van Halen with the 2009 / Getty award
In 2001, Eddie Van Halen was diagnosed with cancer and had a third of his tongue removed. He underwent chemotherapy, but the disease could not be overcome.
According to Guitar World magazine, Eddie Van Galen is the best guitarist in history, he was even called “the god of the guitar”.
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, Van Halen is the 19th best-selling artist in American history (more than 56 million album copies). In 2007, the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Van Halen with his son / Getty
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