Eddie Van Halen is the lead guitarist with a one of the iconic seventies loud and uncouth metal bands. The personalities of the group's members have always been too individualistic to make for harmonious music, and the world thanks them for that. The personnel changes in the group have always tended to overshadow the music but in this article we will look at what is special about the guitar solos of Eddie Van Halen. Some of his most well-known solos are on the tracks "Eruption", "Hot For Teacher", "Mean Street" and on the Michael Jackson track, "Beat It".
"Eruption" is an instrumental track that features tapping on the guitar fretboard using both the left and right hands. This technique has always been surrounded by controversy because the fans of many guitar players want guitar tapping to be attributed to their idol. Eddie Van Halen himself is credited by many people to be the inventor of guitar tapping technique but Steve Hackett from Genesis was using the technique in the early seventies and two handed guitar tapping can be traced back to Jimmy Webster in the early nineteen fifties. Nevertheless the guitar tapping on "Eruption" helped make Eddie Van Halen a guitar legend, and Eddie himself says he simply got the idea from Jimmy Page's "Heartbreaker".
"Hot For Teacher" opens with Alex and Eddie Van Halen competing for our attention like little boys doing handstands for their parents. The video of this track was a babefest directed by David Lee Roth, the group's vocalist at the time, and was enormously popular with MTV audiences. On this highly theatrical number Eddie played Gibson Flying V, switching pickups as the dynamics of the song changed.
"Mean Street" is a showpiece for a Eddie Van Halen riff. This track also contains drama as the volume of the solo guitar, featuring Eddie simply showing off, starts low and increases menacingly. The riff on "Mean Street" is a classic seventies riff that old men will still be humming fifty years from now.
Michael Jackson got himself two Grammy Awards with the album "Thriller" featuring the song "Beat It". Eddie Van Halen was asked to play the solo on this song by Quincy Jones, the co-producer of the album. The lyrics feature violence between gangs and Eddie's guitar solo matched the theme perfectly. The simplicity of the song's main riff provides a stunning backdrop for Eddie's pyrotechnics.
It is Eddie Van Halen's instinctive ability to contrast virtuosity with simplicity that makes him a guitar genius. His unerring use of tremolo in his picking and his penchant for guitar tapping have made him a legend. Eddie used a cheap guitar body fitted with a humbucker pickup, thus proving that the music is in the guitar player, not the guitar. We need to also acknowledge Floyd Rose's fulcrum vibrato that endowed electric guitar vibrato with a flexibility that the guitarists of the sixties would have envied and which has been a crucial element in Eddie Van Halen's playing style.
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