by JawBreaker » Mon Mar 13, 2017 4:25 am
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Thank you, Tombu. People never give Eddie enough credit. As you can see by my polka-dotted Gibson Flying V .. you can probably guess who my hero was. But, the fact is, the type of metal we were playing in the early eighties was pioneered by Eddie Van Halen. Now, with both our albums, I was playing lead guitar in a metal band signed to a national deal so .. I had to be TOP NOTCH .. really on my game. So, I started a deep learning of exactly what Eddie was doing. I was the first guitar player in all of the Cleveland bands to be able to play "Eruption" all the way through because I really got in to the tapping technique. For those who are not guitar players, "tapping" was invented by Steve Hackett, lead guitar player in Genesis but was adopted by Eddie Van Halen in Los Angeles. Basically, you play so friggin' loud that when you place your finger on the guitar fretboard, it sounds a note. So, you find your octave (12 frets) of the base note you are on .. go up to a fifth .. and if you have big hands go to a seventh .. and tap the octave next. It creates a crazy "spacey" sound that makes it seem like you are playing a million notes per second. I, personally, used a Jim Dunlap Wah pedal and manually variated the frequencies with my foot to create a sweeping sound so it was less like a series of notes over and over. The real key .. or "Advanced" tapping is when you can get more than five fingers on the neck. Eventually, I was able to get to the full eight fingers so it was much more like piano playing than guitar playing. When you get to eight fingers during a solo .. you can really rip. You're just fucking shredding at that point. And when you do it right in front of a thousand people, there's no feeling like it. Plus, it usually gets you laid. Or at the very least, free cocaine.
But, Eddie was the man, Tombu for my age group. It all came from Hendrix .. and before that Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry. We recognized that and don't dismiss it.
It's just Eddie Van Halen invented what all of us were doing in the eighties in metal.
JB
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