Here's how Eddie Van Halen reshaped rock guitar forever, from his finger-tapping wizardry to the way he modded out his axes
in 2019, and one of his guitars was previously featured at the Smithsonian — just two examples of his influence on art and culture. Here are his greatest contributions to the vocabulary of rock & roll.
Although classical guitarists had already pioneered using their picking hands to play notes their fretting hand normally would — in order to give musical phrases a wider range — Eddie confounded rock fans with what became known as “finger tapping,” playing the guitar with two hands, kind of like a piano, on “Eruption” and other songs. The approach was so revolutionary that Alex encouraged him to play gigs with his back to audiences so aspiring ax men wouldn’t steal it before the band had a record deal.], like that, with one hand, in ‘Heartbreaker,'” Eddie toldin 2008 of why he started playing that way. “I thought, ‘I can play like that, and you wouldn’t know if I was using this finger or this one.’ But you just move it around and it’s like, ‘You’ve got one big hand there, buddy. That’s a hell of a spread.'”A constant tinkerer, Eddie always sought ways to modify his instruments for maximum impact; he’d whip out sandpaper and saws to customize them in ways to make the sounds in his head. His most famous guitar was known as the “Frankenstrat” or “Frankenstein” because of the way he built it himself from a $50 Charvel body and an $80 neck. He had the audacity of affixing it with a humbucking pickup, which creates a fatter sound and is typically found on Gibson electrics, like Les Pauls. “I’ve experimented with it a lot,” he toldin ’78. “If you put the pickup really close to the bridge, it sounds trebly; if you put it too far forward, you get a sound that isn’t good for rhythm. I like it towards the back; it gives the sound a little sharper edge and bite.” He put his own frets on it and got rid of all the knobs and switches of popular guitars at the time, using only one volume knob. He then painted it with angular stripes. He also chainsawed a copy of a Gibson Explorer to make it look more like a Flying V. “Nobody taught me how to do guitar work: I learned by trial and error,” he told. “I have messed up a lot of good guitars that way, but now I know what I’m doing, and I can do whatever I want to get them the way I want them. I hate store-bought, off-the-rack guitars.” Although he wasn’t the first prominent guitarist to meddle with his instrument — David Gilmour had his “Black Strat” and Les Paul had the freakin’ Les Paul, for instance — Eddie inspired the custom-guitar craze of the Eighties. Moreover, he brought some of his innovations to the guitar world at large. He worked with guitarist Floyd Rose on a whammy bar system that stayed in tune,
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