What strikes me: the one who draw the guitarist could have done it adding a neutral facial expression (e.g. a jazz musician) but, hell no!, the choice was for a shredding-guitar-solo rock expression. Nice.
That’s like comparing a turn table used for DJ’ing to a record player used to just listen to records. Completely different application, accessories, and technique.
Not really. The patent just takes the guitar and stabilizes it in a horizontal position, instead of a vertical position, allowing you to do something different with the same instrument. Nothing about the guitar itself changes whatsoever, but the orientation provides for the guitar to be used differently.
The better analogy would be, say, if you took an SL-1200 (a turntable manufactured for DJ'ing) and it rotated it "battle style" - same instrument, same accessories, but a different orientation resulting in a fundamentally different use of the device.
I’m not a fan of battle style but is it really fundamentally different? Eddie’s patent is more like rotating the deck about the z axis and holding it like a guitar. Which would be pretty cool and ridiculous come to think of it :-)
That, and the footprint of a setup is reduced when decks are placed battle style. This is important because turntablism requires a lot of very quick manipulation of both decks and mixer, and it's easier to do this if everything is a lot more compact.
That's also why you typically see turntablists using a simple, small two-channel mixer while other DJs tend to employ wider, bulkier 4+-channel mixers.
To OP's point I could've maybe dropped the word "fundamentally" in my post because at the end of the day the fundamentals remain the same, as do the fundamentals of the guitar in the patent vs regular use.
Perhaps, but modern decks have lots of features that record players don't have like effects and EQ. In this case the patented device is basically played in the same way (or can be) just in a different place. It's intended to be for tapping but that's a common pedal steel technique
This is really pedantic, but even in a modern DJ setup the effects and EQ are part of the mixer, not the turntable. The mixer is separate from the turntables, it's the thing with the knobs and faders usually between two turntables.
Your pedantry is outdated: there are Serato-compatible decks that have MIDI pads built into them, not everything is trying to mimic the SL-1200s aesthetic these days.
> It's intended to be for tapping but that's a common pedal steel technique
I have no idea about how to play pedal steel (but I do play guitar), I thought the string action was way too high on a pedal/lap steel steel to be able to tap on it?
Correct, the action on a pedal steel is very high (so high that you'd probably break strings if you managed to bend one to the "fretboard") and played with a bar.
The parent comment was comparing DJ equipment to a record player (to this patent), which I feel is a poor example because modern DJ equipment almost always has different equipment too rather even if you could technically do it with a fader and some record players (as in at a gig, I'm aware people still mix on vinyl - pretentious as it can be).
The patented guitar thing is literally played the same way but in a different place, which I think should really be considered prior art unless the fashion aspect is considered rather than purely functionality.
I think part of the reason people are chiming in on the distinction is that a controller is comparable to a mouse for a computer; a controller requires something else for any functionality, at which point you're comparing a general computing device that can do anything to a much more restricted special use device
I don’t think that’s true at all. The standard DJ turntable (SL-1200/1210) has no specific features for DJing. I use the exact same ones for “just listen[ing] to records”.
The analogy does not hold up. There are quite a lot of differences between a "pedal steel" guitar, and an electric guitar. First, electric guitars do not have pedals. Pedal steel guitars do not have a resonating wood body. They produce very different sounds in very different ways.
Of course they do but the description described "techniques"; he's talking about a horizontal guitar play style.
As my comment said I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the patent itself (and really the claims are the thing) just saying that that part of the description is probably wrong. And that the patent system doesn't care.
FWIW all the pedal steel guitars I've ever seen are in fact electric guitars... but I know what you meant.
From the image, it looks like it’s intended to be used specifically for two-handed tapping, which was made famous by Van Halen and not commonly used (or at all) in pedal steel playing. Not sure if that would be unique enough to qualify for patent or not.
I play both guitar and pedal steel. The tapping techniques that would be used on a horizontal 6-string guitar would be impractical on a steel guitar (lap or pedal) because the action is too high and there are no frets.
To be pedantic, Pedal Steels are supported by legs like a table. You are probably thinking of lap steels. When played standing up, they are usually supported just by repositioning the strap.
Eddie was a tapper, which is why this is innovative (not having to use your thumb to stabilize the neck opens up greater range of motion for tapping with the fingers). Very different method than pedal steel, which is always barred.
Fwiw, I would be surprised if Eddie Van Halen was not aware of the instrument, since they were invented in Southern California ~8 years before the release of "Van Halen".
Yes, but the patent application lists his name as "Halen Edward L Van".
So apparently this was misfiled (under the last name "Halen") or filed correctly, just displayed weirdly on patents.google.com (since it appears correctly on the linked uspto.gov [0]).
I'd heard before they were Dutch born, but still, to hear that Eddie Van Halen was actually called Edward Lodewijk van Halen makes him sound way more Dutch.
And here I was thinking that Jan Akkerman was the best Dutch guitar player ever.
One of the greats, that completely re-defined guitar, and spawned a new class of guitar players, as well as gear.
I remember having played guitar for probably a year, when a friend of mine (who had been playing for the same time) threw on Van Halen 1 on a cassette, and we listened to Eruption. It sounded out of this world, like nothing else I had heard.
After listening to Eddie play guitar (on/off) for decades, I've come to love his dynamics and touch, as well as his rhythm playing. He mastered the the technique of blending lead and rhythm into one, in a tight yet loose-feeling way.
There are, and have been, many much more advanced guitar players since Eddie started - but few are as fun to listen to as Eddie, and most of them (in hard-rock and metal) stand on the shoulders of greats like Eddie, either through his playing and style, or gear used. He made 80's superstrats what they are today, he made hot-rodded/modified Marshalls what the are today, hell, he even made the Peavey 5150 what it is today - which in turn spawned a whole slew of metal amps.
It's been a tough year so far, as far as my heroes dying goes. I've been lucky enough to not have lost too many idols in the past, but with the passing of Neil Peart and Eddie - two of my top 5 musicians and music idols of all time, it's been a real blow.
It's been no secret that Eddie has suffered from cancer for years now, but still, you kind of forget about that, until the day comes.
Yes, though Eddie's solos tend to get the notoriety, his rhythm playing was brilliant, arguably his best side. (I thought his lead guitar was kind of haphazard at times.) For rhythm work, I love the title track from "5150". And of course almost anything from the first album. "Unchained" from "Fair Warning" has one of the all-time great opening riffs.
I think maybe Randy Rhoads, had he lived longer could have been as much a trailblazer. He was a consummate and eager learner who apparently in his spare time took lessons from varied styles of guitar players.
I studied classical guitar in university, Randy Rhoads was a favorite amongst the metal guys who turned classical because he played classical guitar too. The Van Halen brothers are both multi instrumentalists, both of them took piano lessons from a young age.
Eddie and Alex’s father Jan Van Halen was a hell of a clarinetist and was featured on the dixeland track Big Bad Bill from VH’s Diver Down album. Give it a listen, it’s a treat: https://youtu.be/9RPx6A3gKiA
Yeah, EVH was majestic and a true sonic innovator! Unlike 99% of other shredders he had a tremendous grasp of pop songcraft, natural showmanship and a sense of musical humor...plus you'd see as many females as dudes at a VH concert! So many Eddie solos are chock full of "Sounds great, ooh where the hell did that left turn come from?! Even better!!" moments. And of course - brilliant rhythm playing with that rich, aggressive tone. RIP Maestro!
When I was a Sophomore in college (1978) me and some buddies got tickets to see Black Sabbath with Van Halen opening. We were driving up the freeway to go see the show and had 4 of us in our buddy's Mom's Datsun Station wagon he borrowed from her. We were smoking weed to get ready for the concert and had the windows rolled down part way to try to keep from reeking out the car. An ember flew into the back of the wagon and we didn't notice it but the car just kept getting more and more smoky so we kept rolling the windows down more and more which just fanned the flames. The next thing you know the car was in flames in the back. We pulled over and stood by the side of the freeway and watched our buddy's Mom's car burn up.
The cops and fire department came and put it out eventually. The Cop asked us where we were going and if we needed a ride or to call someone. We told him we were going to see Black Sabbath and Van Halen and he said oh wow, you can't miss that I will drive you there. Our buddy said OK he could call his Mom when we got there and arrange rides for after the show.
When we got there our high was blown so we toked out more. When I got in there and the show started, I will never forget Eddie sliding out on the stage on his knees hammering out Eruption. I don't know if it was the weed or the music or both but I swear I had an out of body experience. I had never heard it like that, live was just a whole 'nother level.
Never knew until recently, that the amazing guitar solo on Michael Jacksons Beat it was played by him.
I can't find any transcripts, but in an interview on the Howard Stern show, van Halen said (if I remember correctly) that the infamous knocking at the beginning of his solo was him knocking on his guitar, like a professional who is giving his workhorse a friendly tap before the race - and that he was amazed Michael and Quincy left it in.
He didn't just contribute the solo—he rearranged part of the song! [1]
> Michael [Jackson] left to go across the hall to do some children's speaking record. I think it was "E.T." or something. So I asked Quincy [Jones], "What do you want me to do?" And he goes, "Whatever you want to do." And I go, "Be careful when you say that. If you know anything about me, be careful when you say, "Do anything you want!"
> I listened to the song, and I immediately go, "Can I change some parts?" I turned to the engineer and I go, "OK, from the breakdown, chop in this part, go to this piece, pre-chorus, to the chorus, out." Took him maybe 10 minutes to put it together. And I proceeded to improvise two solos over it.
I was just finishing the second solo when Michael walked in.
> And you know artists are kind of crazy people. We're all a little bit strange. I didn't know how he would react to what I was doing. So I warned him before he listened. I said, "Look, I changed the middle section of your song."
> Now in my mind, he's either going to have his bodyguards kick me out for butchering his song, or he's going to like it. And so he gave it a listen, and he turned to me and went, "Wow, thank you so much for having the passion to not just come in and blaze a solo, but to actually care about the song, and make it better."
I can't think of a more innovative and imaginative musician in history.
I've read the same article, but as a non native speaker wasn't sure, whether he just rearranged his part or the whole song. It did read like the latter, but, after all, this was not just a random song from some random musician, but from Micheal Jackson and Quincy Jones. Amazing.
He wanted no credit for it - he didn't want other Van Halen members to know about it because they agreed to never do side projects. He wanted no payment for it except a case of beer and Michael teaching him to dance "sometime".
Wikipedia disputes this story, although it does not cite any sources on the "real" story:
> Right before Van Halen's guitar solo begins, a noise is heard that sounds like somebody knocking at a door. It is reported that the knock was a person walking into Eddie's recording studio. Another story has claimed that the sound was simply the musician knocking on his own guitar.[25] The sound, however, is that of Jackson knocking on a drum case, as he is credited in the album's liner notes.
So I suppose if you've actually got a source from Van Halen's mouth, that's probably more authoritative.
I also enjoyed this tidbit:
>The engineers were shocked during the recording of Van Halen's solo to discover that the sound of his guitar had caused the monitor speaker in the control room to catch fire, causing one to exclaim, "This must be really good!"[26]
So I suppose if you've actually got a source from Van Halen's mouth, that's probably more authoritative.
Yes, that's exactly why I was searching for that transcript. Maybe Howard Stern will re-air it or re-publish the interview in his app (I don't live in the US, so I don't have proper access to the show's content sadly). Thats why I added the IIRC. But whatever VH said in that interview clarified were that knocking came from.
Because musicians never lie or self-aggrandise, of course ;) i bet it’s one of those things where half the people in the recording studio have a different story to tell.
I agree, but there were conflating stories about the knocking for decades. That MJ is listed as "drum case beater" in the credits is surely not helping.
However this HS interview was done at least 15 years after, a time after which I assume any secret joke they conspired must have worn off.
Steve Lukather from Toto actually played the whole album and he's alive. Please do check him out as well, brilliant player that played at least a riff in every single important album produced in LA during the late 70s and 80s ;).
There's David Lee Roth interview (maybe on joe rogan) where he explains some tricks they used to write solos.
They'd record multiple different solos, then switch between the tracks to come up with unexpected progressions. Clever idea.
I heard that Eddy was asked to to play on Beat It and thought to himself "Nobody will notice". His Bandmates were pissed because VH were on No 1 before Beat It came out. The MJ bought it and the VH fans too.
(Trying to think of something new to add to this discussion, not already mentioned.)
Well, one of the requirements of being a popular hard rock band of the day was to have a triumphant logo, and VH had one of the best. I even drew it once or twice in drafting class. :-)
This deeply saddens me, the pool of people I admire is draining faster than it’s replenished. It also reminds me that Death just dragged another bead on his abacus and before long my bead will be up.
Also, while I respect and admire what Eddie has done to further the art of playing electric guitar, I must confess I much more enjoy Eddie The Songwriter rather than Eddie The Guitarist.
> This deeply saddens me, the pool of people I admire is draining faster than it’s replenished
Then you need to stop wading in the shallows of the people you admire and get out in the insane expanse that is the rest of the creative world.
In terms of just music alone, there's more talent out there now than there ever was before. Two generations or more of musical education where none really existed before, plus an entire generation that saw making a living as a musician as a possibility (whether or not that was true) has led to a situation where almost every town of 50k people or more has musicians in it who are as almost as good or better than any who ever lived.
I am fairly confident that the same thing is true of writing, painting, photography, dance: the pool of talent is out there. If you're as old as you semi-suggest, it gets harder and harder to encounter it. I'm 57 and I have to work quite hard to ensure that I keep exposing myself to new artists and creatives - the natural tendency is to just look back on all the people I discovered between 17 and 27 and then lament them dying. Don't do it! YouTube is a miracle in this respect. There's so much incredible talent and invention out there. Every generation has people in it for you to respect, and they too will die and become the "legends of old".
[* edited "wallowing" => "wading"; did not mean to sound so harsh ]
I didn't see your exact wording before but just the same to me what you said is ok.
HN (or really any forum) shouldn't be a place where people have to fear saying what they really think. I want to know what someone really thinks not what they think they have to say so that others don't jump on top of them and get them into line with what you are supposed to say.
Maybe someone should draw a line if a close relative of friend died but not a public figure celebrity etc. I read your comment more like 'get a life if this is what upsets you in some way'.
What I think? Didn't like his music (not a fan) but even if it was someone who I liked it wouldn't matter to me. For one thing (not the only thing one thing) none of these artists are typically making any good music anymore and even if they did the entertainment they provided can be easily replaced by another of thousands of artists.
By the way I would feel the same way about the worship by people about some tech figure dying or getting sick. It's not because it's music.
Harsh? Point is I don't think people should assume that everyone cares about this nor should people be afraid that they won't say the right or sensitive thing.
I got the same feeling as brtkdotse when Chris Cornell of Soundgarden died. "They aren't making them like that anymore". And if they are, I haven't found any.
Can you give us an example (like a YouTube link) of a modern guitarist (from the past 15 or so years) that approaches Eddie Van Halen's level of talent or innovation? An uplifting thought is that, like Cornell, although we have lost him, we still have his music.
Another "hacker's guitarist" is Tom Sholz of Boston. If the younger generation has never heard of him, his story is amazing too (an MIT trained engineer; rock star; built his own gear; wrote, played, recorded and produced his own work):
My immediate go-to answer for that question would be Guthrie Govan. He can shred with anyone, but also can do incredibly delicate picking work, and can play in the context of almost any genre you could name - blues, folk, jazz. His blending of techniques goes way beyond EVH (but undoubtedly bears some debt too). This is probably Govan's most famous single-take solo, but he has oodles of other work at this level (though not necessarily in this style);
Before him, Shawn Lane (RIP) was technically far beyond EVH, but ditched the southern speed metal he came up playing and got interested in indian classical music. Lane died young in 2003, but leaves behind an interesting legacy of work for those us interested in something far outside of "rock", but ultimately strongly indebted to it.
You can find old videos of him shredding in the late 1990s when he was often said to be the fastest ever. This is from his work with Jonas Hellborg and two indian percussionists. The first link is to one of his more melodic sections, the second is more virtuosic and microtonal:
he's definitely more directly indebted to EVH, but more modern and arguably more technique, technology and maybe just a shade more jazz.
Further, or maybe differently, outside the of "rock" scope, and on acoustic guitar, people like Kaki King have taken the "extended technique" approach of Michael Hedges and run with it. She is off-the scale talented, although to be fair a lot of her music doesn't connect with me.
One of the most innovative guitarrists of the current era is (for me at least) Tim Henson of Polyphia. Modern, innovative guitar playing has changed a lot in the last few decades. You probably won't find the most innovative players in classic Hard Rock or Metal Bands. You can find them instead in different sub-genres which have a deep focus on the "newer" style of playing.
My impression is that rock and roll is...well, dead. Genres wax and wane in popularity, and so does the talent in that genre, as talent becomes attracted to other genres (you ask who the modern day Van Halen is: who is the modern day B.B. King? Or Frank Sinatra? Or Mozart? On some level, it's a silly question, because those genres have become somewhat passé).
A few years ago, garage band rock n' roll was topping the charts: The Black Keys, The White Stripes, The Arctic Monkeys, etc. Now, not so much - or at all. But as much as my soul is warmed by a tasty guitar lick, I'm okay with that, because the seasons change and all we can do is watch as they do.
finding new (to me) bands that sound like the old bands I like is much easier given tools like everynoise.com, which I highly recommend (though it works best if you also have a Spotify account because of the playlists).
my current heavy rotation playlist of EVH-style guitar shredding is here, if anyone is interested:
This is absolutely insane. Modern metal has been pushing so many boundaries since its such a hard genre to get into. Some obscenely amazing guitarists have emerged in the last decade.
And 15 years? Dream Theater has been around for 20 years (with modern lineup), and nobody in their right minds would not put John Petrucci at the top of any guitarist list
So your response to the guitarists who are known for being obscenely technical, and for DT currently owns the world record for most time signature changes in a song is "inanity". A person who has been lead guitarist, main producer, writer and singer for multiple bands and current/longest lasting member of G3?
Modern metal has become insanely competitive with young bands competing against each other to be sky high technical, since that's the main differentiation these days.
What does a modern guitarist need to do? Be the literal re-incarnation?
That fellow from Animals as Leaders is pretty insane and cutting edge. I’m not really a fan of the music but he is undeniably a beast. And thoughtful. See his interview on Rick Beato
There is a lot more talent out there today but I think it's the combination of the talent combined with the fame and recognition that makes the hero. Eddie was very good, as are many other folks, but he was also a guitar hero and most really good players are not. The world of "guitar heroes" got one smaller and I don't know who is filling it up going forward. It was the CEO of Fender that not long ago lamented that John Mayer (maybe one of the best contemporary guitar players around, he is very talented) doesn't sell guitars the same way as youth aren't trying to emulate him like they did some of those other guys like Van Halen. That and someone had to sort of do that stuff "first." It's going to be hard to reinvent tapping or impress the world by touching a drill to the strings again, I don't see it happening any time soon.
Maybe I'm wrong and a whole new world of of guitar techniques will be discovered running it though a DJ turntable and scratching and cutting or something. I don't know. Maybe it's also just a quality of our time, hardcore blues fans have sort of lamented the dying off of the greats for a long time.
> hardcore blues fans have sort of lamented the dying off of the greats for a long time.
i'd wager that's because hardcore blues fans are mostly of a certain age too, like the GP here, and can only focus clearly on the death of people they discovered in their late teens and early 20s.
you're right about the "guitar hero" thing, but for me personally, i just can't care about that. i'm into the music, not the personality. i don't sell guitars, so i don't have to care if the undoubtedly talented mayer isn't causing sales to rise.
"there's more talent out there now than there ever was before. "
No there isn't really - totally the opposite.
The number of professional musicians has dropped dramatically over the decades.
In the 1920s-1950s 'musician' was a 'job'. Then the phonograph became big, the number dropped by 90% then over a few more decades another 90%.
It's no longer an occupation, it's just a hobby.
There are tons of people who take 'fine arts' at Uni etc. but they're not necessarily that good, and very few of them will be able to work in the field and develop careers.
'Orchestral' even on big albums is all fake, it's just to easy to do and too expensive otherwise.
'Creative' yes, a lot of that, but have a look at the Billboard 100. It's 'audible creativity' but all made by algorithms, it's more 'art' than it is 'music' in some sense.
The other issue is that the bar to entry is lower as well, so for every 'extra genius' we get out of that 'open process' there are also 1000x more posers, fakers, people just making arbitrary sounds and it's harder to wade the the noise. 'The system' used to do that for us i.e. the musical community would 'find' the talent generally. There is no 'system' now, just YouTube.
> The number of professional musicians has dropped dramatically over the decades.
This is completely orthogonal to the question how much talent there is. The fact that less people can make a living doing something that doesn't require any capital investment, just time and skill, doesn't have any real direct impact on how many people get really good at it.
"It's just a hobby" is a weak put-down, and really doesn't apply to thousands of people who play instruments at incredibly high levels of skill, even though they do not do so for a living. Certainly, it's going to help development if you play more (for whatever reason). But I don't think that you can claim that only way to get to be "that good" is to be a paid professional. There are many musicians whose early work as a "professional musician" was just a side gig anyway, and they didn't play significantly more than dedicated "hobbyists".
The spread of music education (public and private) and the dramatic drop in the real cost of musical instruments has exposed way more people to the possibility of playing music. Sure, most of them will be in the middle of the bell curve, but this process has (1) lifted the absolute height of the bell curve (more people) which (2) means more people over at the right-hand end of the curve.
Not orthogonal. Being a pro means you can practice all day, you get to work with other working musicians, you grind away doing gig stuff which really expands your chops.
I agree music is accessible in a different way today, but kids used to grow up in musical families, and there were a lot of them.
My entire, large, family plays music. And played together. Tons of people used to play piano, guitar, fiddle, it was not inaccessible or elite. Instruments have been cheaply available for decades.
Also - time. People are constantly busy these days and hugely distracted. Eddie Van Halen literally got good by spending years and years alone, isolated in his room practising. So while that has nothing to do with pro/not-pro, it's definitely a cultural artifact.
You and everybody replying to you are making the same baffling mistake, i.e., assuming that technical/song writing ability/education = star. If you want technical ability, there are 8 year olds on YouTube with better chops than EVH. Possibly every 8 year old has better chops than Kurt Cobain. But technical ability does NOT make you a rock star. Same applies to the other fields you mention, painting etc.
I'm sure young rock stars (in the same vein as EVH, Axl, Hendrix, Cobain, Morrison) would still exist as the personalities and talent are still there, but rock is not mainstream anymore, so they can't exist. The closest thing to real rock stars now are the likes of Justin Bieber.
You should re-listen to the Beato/Satriani clip you told someone else to listen to, because he essentially says this. The artists you suggest are irrelevant and can not be compared to EVH in any way whatsoever. Guthrie Govan?! Van Halen drove mainstream culture. Nobody outside of guitar forums know Guthrie Govan. The other suggestions in this thread of comparators to EVH and Chris Cornell (Tosin Abasi, Petrucci, Belamy) are just embarrassing.
and as I said separately, I'm not interested in the "rock star-y-ness" of any of the people you've mentioned (or all the other ones you could name). I'm interested in the music. EVH did, in fact, push this along with his technique and compositional ideas. I don't give a damn about his personality, or who becomes a "star". Almost none of my favorite musicians are stars, despite levels of creativity and technical ability that are hard to measure or even imagine for most of us.
I wasn't suggesting that technique is everything. Great musicians have imagination and strong connections to existing cultures (even when they ignore them). But so many people talked about EVH in terms of his technique ("OMFG, did you see that Eruption solo?" etc. etc).
And for reference, the "mainstream culture" I grew up in (London, 70s-early 80s) was unimpressed by EVH and american rock in general.
But yes, rock is not mainstream anymore, and thus "rock stars" are not a thing. Bieber is not even close to being a "rock star" - we had "pop stars" all through the 60s and 70s and they were entirely distinct from the "rock stars" of those same eras.
> I must confess I much more enjoy Eddie The Songwriter rather than Eddie The Guitarist
I enjoy his guitar playing as well, but I agree with you here! I have the unpopular opinion that the stuff he was doing with the synth in the late Roth and throughout the Hagar era is better than some of the more traditional hard rock stuff. "Right Now" is one of my favorite songs ever, and it's relatively light on the guitar for a Van Halen song.
I agree with that, too. I know it's, ah, controversial to say that Van Halen's songs in the Sammy Hagar era were by and large their best, but -- even though I think David Lee Roth was the better singer (Hagar sounds oddly like he's straining all the time) -- I'm just more likely to go back to the "Van Hagar" songs. I know Hagar's suggested they were writing as a group during that period more than the band was previously, but I know he's not exactly an unbiased source there.
So sad to hear! For what it's worth, the Van Halen cassette scene in "Back to Future" was my first introduction to this legend: https://youtu.be/BaYADHcpdng?t=17 RIP
iconic scene... this piece was never popular it seems it was used for another score at the time[1]. I guess for me was also my introduction to Eddie Van Halen excellent guitar playing and style.
I wondered what was up a few months ago when I heard he was selling off his car collection. That and the news he had been flying back and forth between the US and Germany for treatment had me concerned.
After I heard the first Van Halen album my Kiss records went in the closet, and I got more serious about music. Never did anything with it, but it was a fun journey, listening to him along the way, wondering what he would do next. A true rock guitar hacker.
His music wasn't really my style, but I remember the Heavy Metal effect pedal from Boss that my cousin owned had a booklet in it with the setups of various professional musicians - to show off how they used Boss pedals in different combinations. Everybody had complicated setups with multiple pedals. Van Hallen's "setup" went something like this:
I think that was just a way of the manual showing you how to have a sound "inspired by" Van Halen, since he famously got his distortion sound not from a pedal, but from a Marshall amp that he ran at a low voltage using a variac (as an aside, the boss heavy metal was famously used by Swedish death metal bands turning all the dials up, not really a Van Halen sound).
He also used multiple pedals, such as the Echoplex, MXR phase 90 (Eruption), flanger (Unchained) and wah pedal. He later started his own signature EVH range of pedals in a partnership with MXR.
Well, you seem to know this better than I do. I was always more into the kind of music you got out of turning all the dials up, like you say. My (older) cousin fancied himself a more sophisticated rocker.
The booklet stuck in my mind because Van Halen was the only musician in there that was anywhere near a Metal musician. The others were all people I had never heard from bands I didn't know that probably played jazz or pop or stuff. Van Halen's simple setup, inaccurate as it may have been, somehow served to justify and enforce my preference for the simple, uncomplicated, no-fuss kind of pleasures I always looked for -and found- in Metal.
Only 65. I grew up listening to Van Halen and spent a crazy amount of time trying to play guitar like Eddie. I think their first album was released when he was only 22. What a legend. What a life. Taken too soon. :(
Huge talent and very innovative guitar player. Known for his guitar playing style, dive bombs, tapping, usage of Floyd Rose, custom guitars (Frankenstrat), brown sound, solos, instrumentals, heavy sound and huge music hits.
I cannot think of many influential Rock guitar players as Eddie.
Eddie Van Halen's famous rider(contract) has a useful lesson for tech companies.[0][1]
"It's one of those rock 'n' roll legends that turns out to be true: In the 1980s, the party-rock superstars in Van Halen demanded, via a clause embedded in their tour rider, that no brown-colored M&Ms be allowed backstage at their concerts."[0]
The reason was that if they included brown M&Ms, it was a strong indication they hadn't read the contract, which included intricate but important technical details.
i was never much of a fan of EVH, but i am a huge fan of a bunch of guitarists who would either not have existed (as guitarists) or who would have sounded very different if EVH had not done his thing. so thanks for that, EVH.
Don’t waste your time, Leuconoé, living in fear and hope
of the imprevisable future; forget the horoscope.
Accept whatever happens. Whether the gods allow
us fifty winters more or drop us at this one now
which flings the high Tyrrhenian waves on the stone piers,
decant your wine: the days are more fun than the years
which pass us by while we discuss them. Act with zest
one day at a time, and never mind the rest.
Ask not ('tis forbidden knowledge), what our destined term of years,
Mine and yours; nor scan the tables of your Babylonish seers.
Better far to bear the future, my Leuconoe, like the past,
Whether Jove has many winters yet to give, or this our last;
This, that makes the Tyrrhene billows spend their strength against the shore.
Strain your wine and prove your wisdom; life is short; should hope be more?
In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebb'd away.
Seize the present; trust tomorrow e'en as little as you may.
I never really got into Van Halen until I was an adult. As a teen in the early 90s a lot of the kids in my circle would make fun of anyone who listened to them because it wasn’t “cool” any more, especially when grunge became popular. Later in my adult years I began to really appreciate EVH’s technique and spent endless hours trying to replicate his style (and mostly failing, as I could never get my stubby fingers to move that fast). A few things I did learn and absolutely loved was his use of pinch harmonics and other right-hand techniques like palm muting and tapping — he of course didn’t invent those things but he elevated to a new level. I also don’t hear this often from fellow fans, but he had a unique “swing” that so many guitarists just didn’t have.
Cool story: I read somewhere that when EVH first started performing in public, he would often play with his back to the audience, as he didn’t want to people to see his techniques and possibly steal them!
RIP Eddie - may you enjoy your time in heaven among the guitar gods. Or is it supposed to be hell? After all you did run with the devil.
Fun tidbit for fans of music theory: EVH tuned the B string on his guitar slightly flat, to form a just-intoned interval with the G string. This allowed him to play distorted major chords without the associated discordant beating. [1]
VH1 was the first rock album I ever bought, back in 1979, and I’ve spend 41 years loving it. I know the band has had their ups and downs but I think that Eddie’s playing on their last album was just as fresh, vibrant and exciting as it ever was. Impossible to overstate the impact this man had on my life, as well as the entire music genre. RIP.
I have no real knowledge or affinity towards him or his band but I do realize he is a member of a dying breed of rock stars. People who could pack a whole stadium and control the crowd with one gesture. Am I just out of touch or one of the side effects of balkanization of entertainment into small fandoms is death of the rock start?
Beyonce filled a stadium with capacity for 100k people a couple of years ago. Not sure if you'll count that or you refer specifically to rock as a genre; if it's the second I'd say it's natural for the mainstream popularity of particular genres to rise and fall, but there still a mainstream for sure.
One aspect of Eddie's playing that rarely gets mentioned was his rhythm and chord playing. His chordal phrasings and how he could make a song sound huge for just a single guitarist was amazing. AND The first few early albums were mixed with the main guitar track panned hard left.
Never a huge fan of 'Stadium Rock' I saw him live with Van Halen on free tickets and it was just immense. Only then did I understand what 'Stadium Rock' even meant. All talent, zero gimmicks, just raw genius filling up an entire stadium.
I used to go to sleep when I was 12 listening to Eruption, Mean Streets, Take Your Whiskey Home, etc. fantasizing about being the guy playing those riffs and solos.
They should re-issue those "Who the f*ck is Eddive Van Halen?" shirts right about now.
His style was so far ahead of its time. He was playing this way over 45 years ago! Zep was just hitting their peak. The Beatles had only released Sgt Pepper 7 years before.
The original shredder (who played a nice rhythm too).
We were cross-town rivals, then. David Lee Roth attended my high school (John Muir, also in Pasadena) three years ahead of me.
Here's my Van Halen story. In my last year of high school, one of my friends was a budding rock guitarist. He often talked about the local band Van Halen and what a great guitarist Eddie was. Van Halen was scheduled to play a show in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium on January 25, 1975—thank you for the date, Wikipedia [0]—and my friend and I went together to the Berry & Grassmueck music store on Colorado Boulevard to buy tickets. At the counter, my friend said something like "I’m really psyched! We're going to get to see Van Halen! He’s great!,” and a fellow standing nearby perked up. After we left the store, my friend told me, “That was Eddie Van Halen!” Just hanging out in the local music store, apparently.
My main recollection of the show is that it was extremely loud: several stacks of Marshall amps in a concrete-lined exhibition hall and only a couple hundred people scattered around the floor to absorb the sound. I wore earplugs, but my ears still rang afterwards.
I see now that the next day was Eddie's twentieth birthday [1].
I know this has nothing to do with eddie dying. rip. but i just wanted to say. i think Hagar was the better singer. I just prefer the 80s synth rock sound. Not to say roth wasn't good. he was great. i just prefer hagar.
Few things are more horrible than angry internet arguments about whose life was worth more. Please don't go there here, even if you think a past story should have had more attention on Hacker News.
The answer to a lot of these questions, btw, is randomness. Even when it's not the whole answer, it's usually part of the answer, and another part of the answer is judgment calls which may not look so different from randomness. If you're expecting consistency in moderation, that's your problem right there!
the flagging of the dozens of posts about kobe's death over many hours certainly wasn't simply random. randomness would posit the likeliness of at least one of those stories escaping flag-death, as happened with this particular story (a number of van halen stories didn't make it to discussion, only this one).
Nerds don't like sportball, but programming nerds like abstract creators. Eddie was a mind bending genere pushing creative force. His impact was bigger than sportball. Often other obituaries are noted here. Sportsball not so much, unless it's statistical sportsball. Van Halen is probably a stretch tbh, so I don't want to defend it too much either. This site is still better than twitter.
I often do a "Van Halen day" where I put on my headphones, crank it to 11, and play all the important Van Halen albums for about 5 or 6 hours (basically all of them up to 1984) - and I get shit done. It's amazing what switching from electronic "beats" to Van Halen for a day does for my programming.
so no value judgment there, huh? nerds who like sports are just not the right kind, right? certain creativity like plucking strings in various patterns is just inherently better than others? and how was his impact greater? how is one kind of entertainer better than another?
startup founders could learn a lot from kobe, from focus and discipline to creativity and tenacity. he also invested in startups.
> jimi hendrix was a pioneer. van halen was another rock-n-roller.
Millions of guitarists around the world say otherwise -- including many well respected professional guitarists. That includes a guy you might have heard of: Les Paul.
Sure, he wasn't everyone's cup of tea. But he was very much an artist who spent thousands of hours crafting his own sound and his own technique.
I think saying he was "another rock-n-roller" is inaccurate and extremely unfair.
Eddie had a world-wide following and a patent. He inspired many geeks including this one. Kobe worked hard as well but was mostly an LA phenomenon with limited nerd-overlap.
Yes the rules are rather arbitrary, but this particular outcome isn't too hard to understand.
that's your biases talking. basketball has roughly a billion fans worldwide (china is #2 after the US in b-ball fans) and every one of those fans knows who kobe is. van halen probably has in the few millions, mostly americans. and basketball is probably the most popular major sport among nerds (and many other demographics).
yes, the outcome isn't too hard to understand--hypocrisy. if you don't care about basketball you just ignore the posts about it. it takes willful malice to actively flag dozens of posts about the death of a singular athletic talent like kobe. he also has an oscar, a much rarer achievement than a patent.
The Lakers don't have all those fans, that's more than a stretch. The NBA has been declining in popularity for years as well. Finally, knowing who a person is, is rather unimportant in the scheme of things.
Face it, running back and forth throwing a ball, even with excessive style simply doesn't move people the way art does. I do have additional respect for Kareem for that reason, he's shown himself to be a deep thinker outside the court.
forget the lakers, every basketball fan, a billion people around the globe, appreciated and respected kobe. and if you can't recognize the sheer intelligence involved in actively, relentlessly achieving your objectives in a fast-paced, highly dynamic environment at the limits of your physical abilities, while hundreds of others at their physical limits and billions of dollars try to prevent you from doing so, then you may want to reevaluate your perceptive facilities.
face it, flickin' strings in rhythm is entertainment, not art. art engages the brain not just the heart. that's why i have great respect for 2pac, a ghetto poet with deft lyricism that gripped your soul using just his brain-inflected voice.
Agreed. Sadly, there's no defense or explanation of this, other than that moderators are arbitrarily (and in a very exclusionary way) defining what constitutes "hacker culture".
It isn't the moderators, it's the users. More people here care about Eddie Van Halen than did Kobe Bryant. I won't theorize about the rationale behind that but the decision about which celebrity obituaries stay up and which don't seems to be entirely up to the zeitgeist. If people have nostalgia for the work of someone who died, they won't flag the thread. If they don't care about the person, or other biases are at work, they will. No greater explanation is necessary than the dice roll as they do.
Not at all. Posts are removed when they're flagged by users and the mods don't seem to intervene. I wonder if they even have the power to intervene. I remember one post where dang (moderator) was basically trying to negotiate with one or two users who had flagged the thread to unflag it, after the title was changed (or maybe it was something discussed in the thread, this is a bit vague in my memorey, sorry). The post stayed flagged.
Bottom line: it's not the mods, it's the users. That's HN.
Users are the ones who flag threads, not moderators. Mods will unflag threads if they don't feel they should have been flagged or otherwise manipulate rankings but as far as I know flagging is entirely from users.
it's hypocritical and worth calling out for discussion, not justifying with a shrug. if a particular user doesn't care about kobe, why then care enough to flag? just let it go and move on to items of greater interest. it's not a political issue rife for flamebait, certainly no moreso than van halen.
I agree with you. But there's nothing you can do to change it.
I'm not saying you should stop calling it out either, but the only result will be that eventually you will annoy the mods - not because of what you're saying but because you're being repetitive and "repetition is the enemy of curiosity" - and they'll either ask you to stop and you will, or you won't and they'll ban you.
I don't fully understand hacker news I think, I am curious as to why this is still on the front page but the Nobel prize that was announced today has been on page 2 all day (unless I missed its original front page landing)
EVH was a classically trained, incredibly talented and highly creative musician. He was also a founding member of an amazingly successful band that was very popular right around the time many of your average HN readers were growing up. His death is impactful to a lot of these people -- events like this just seem to have resonance. Sorry, that's the best explanation I can come up with.
Thank you, I have only recently been on HN and I love it. Its amazing, I have been on reddit forever and was just curious as to how it was on the front page for awhile. This is a pretty good explanation, I don't know why I got down voted, honestly curious about the Hacker news process of what makes it to the front page vs other things. I was stoked to hear about Penrose winning the Nobel and shocked it was on the second page vs this story. And now an article Penrose has co-authored is on the top spot! Thanks for the solid response! And RIP to EVH too, I saw VH with my pops years ago, he saw VH open for Black Sabbath back in the day and said they destroyed Black Sabbath! Madness!
