The most unique guitarist in history, according to Eddie Van Halen
You might hear the guitar playing of Eddie Van Halen and not immediately think of the word “unique”. A lot of artists in hard rock and metal bands are playing upbeat riffs and using the tapping shredding technique that Eddie championed, so what’s the big deal? Well, it might be popular now, but when Eddie did it, no one had utilised that technique to the extent he did, and his music achieved new heights as a result.
Eddie is a musical innovator. He knew the basics when it came to playing guitar and then tapped into (literally) a new way of playing so that the music he was responsible for was unlike anything else on the market. It’s hard to listen to the opening riffs of ‘Hot For Teacher’ or ‘Panama’ and not get excited by the hard rock energy of the whole thing. That’s Eddie.
There’s a lot to him when it comes to playing guitar. First, the guitar he chose to play was a merging of the two significant makes at the time, a Gibson Les Paul and a Fender Stratocaster. “I would have to start with the people who gave us the electric guitar, which is Les Paul and Leo Fender,” he said when asked about major musical influences, “Because without them we wouldn’t have the guitar to play.”
Fender and Gibson were both very different when it came to their approach to the guitar. Gibson used to play frequently and made guitars for guitarists. Fender didn’t play as much, but he surrounded himself with guitarists so that he could help them make a sound unlike anything else. Eddie ended up playing an EVH guitar, his own concoction, which combined the exciting elements of the two. “I didn’t like a Les Paul or a Fender. So I cross-pollinated the two – I took the best parts of each one and made my own guitar.”
One of the first guitarists he ever started paying attention to was Eric Clapton, specifically his work with Cream. “What attracted me to his playing style and vibe was the basic simplicity in his approach and his tone, his sound,” he said. “He just basically took a Gibson guitar and plugged it straight into a Marshall, and that was it. The basics. The blues.”
Of course, when you have a playing style like Eddie Van Halen, you are influenced by more than just one player. He loved the work of Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page, but someone who stood out for him was Jeff Beck. With Beck, it wasn’t that he played the basics well in the same way Clapton did that drew in Eddie; his unpredictability as a guitarist got him on side.
“I didn’t get into him until Blow by Blow. Just the instrumentalness of it. And Wired. Interesting stuff in there. I guess it was just the experimentation in there that I liked. Jeff Beck is definitely a standalone,” he said, “You never know what the hell he’s gonna do. My brother and I were in France 20 years ago, and Jeff Beck was playing, and he was doing a rockabilly thing. And we’re like, ‘What the hell is this?’ You never know what to expect with him.”
In the same way that Eddie Van Halen merged the Gibson and Les Paul guitars, he merged what he loved about Clapton and Beck together to create a sound unlike anybody else. He played the basics very well, and a lot of the scales he solos over are simple blues scales, but he introduces various effects, pitched harmonics and the tapping technique he borrowed from the unpredictability of Beck. It shows that despite making a brand new sound, Eddie was influenced by the lessons he picked up from his idols, and we have the music he made to reflect on as a result.