Eddie Van Halen
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Edward Lodewijk "Eddie" Van Halen (born January 26, 1955 in Amsterdam , † October 6, 2020 in Santa Monica , California ) was a Dutch - American rock musician and one of the most influential and influential guitarists in rock and related music styles. In October 2012, Van Halen was voted the best guitarist of all time by the readers of Guitar World . He ranks eighth in a list of Rolling Stone's best guitarists . He was like his brother Alex Van Halen, member of the hard rock band Van Halen since the band was founded .
Life
Edward van Halen was born in 1955 in the Netherlands as the son of Jan van Halen and Eugenia van Halen, who comes from the Dutch East Indies , and came into contact with music at an early age through his father, a professional saxophone player and jazz clarinetist . When the family moved to the USA in 1962 , he was already playing the piano, having been taught classically, and began to learn drums , encouraged by The Beatles . Inspired by Jimi Hendrix and his great role model Eric Clapton from the Cream group , he soon swapped instruments with his brother, who would later become drummer Alex Van Halen, and learned to play the guitar. Together they formed a band. When the later cast crystallized later in high school (in 1974 the Van Halen brothers founded the group Mammoth and Rat Salad with Michael Anthony and David Lee Roth ), they were discovered by producer Ted Templeman . Her self-titled debut album Van Halen (1978) made for a meteoric rise to the best paid live band and made Eddie Van Halen one of the most famous guitarists overnight. After breaking up with singer David Lee Roth , the band developed in a more song-oriented direction. By then, the influential Guitar Player magazine had voted him the best guitarist in the world more than anyone else.
He was married to the American actress Valerie Bertinelli and from this marriage has a son, Wolfgang Van Halen (* 1991). The marriage was divorced in December 2007.
Longtime alcoholic and chain smoker Edward Van Halen wrestled a lot in his later years. a. with tongue cancer . In spring 2007 he visited an alcohol withdrawal clinic with the success that the Reunions tour could take place the following autumn. In 2009 he made a cameo as himself in the first episode of the seventh season of Two and a Half Men .
Van Halen died of throat cancer on October 6, 2020, at the age of 65 at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica .
style
Tapping
Ted Templeman presented a demo of the band Van Halen to the music magazine Guitar Player in 1977 . The second title of the tape, the 1:42 minute long instrumental Eruption , demonstrated an unusual guitar style: vibrato lever effects, extreme modulation effects and a technique that impressed the editors with previous means. The climax of the piece is the end: a fast game that, on the one hand, did not sound like an alternating beat and, on the other, did not seem playable at this speed.
In their article, the editors speculate about keyboard tricks, a faster playing tape or about two mixed guitars. The secret of his playing technique was reinforced by the fact that Van Halen turned away from the audience when performing live when he was playing his solos. Later, however, some guitarists like Randy Rhoads or Steve Vai discovered the secret of this new technique, and in 1982 Van Halen publicly explained his playing style in the Guitar Player . The tapping was hallmark of his style.
The expansion of legato playing with the right hand by not striking, but rather hammering on a fret and then rolling on the fingered note of the left hand, originally goes back to Steve Hackett in rock music and was subsequently popularized by many rock guitarists practiced, including Gary Moore , Brian May , Harvey Mandel , or Jimmy Webster . Eddie van Halen was mainly inspired by Jimmy Page , whose solo song Heartbreaker on the album Led Zeppelin II by the British rock group Led Zeppelin was based on this technique. Van Halen integrated tapping particularly consistently and very virtuously into his playing style. The best known is the so-called Van Halen triplet, which can be heard at the end of Eruption :
Eddie Van Halen's tapping game has many facets and variants to offer, such as the inclusion of open strings or the tapped harmonics that arise when you pick a note and exactly one octave - i.e. twelve frets higher - on it Fret hammers (for example in Spanish Fly , German " Spanische Fliege ", a solo piece played on a guitar with a nylon string). Van Halen sometimes plays whole riffs with "tapped" overtones by grabbing notes with his left hand and by striking the fret in the 4th, 5th, 7th, 9th or 12th fret, creating harmonic overtones ( see Aftershock ). Wide, tapped legato lines over several strings (see Jump ) are also part of his repertoire.
The technique was later expanded by guitarists such as Steve Lynch or Jennifer Batten , who used not just one finger but all four fingers of the right hand for tapping and thus could tap even more notes per string (two hand tapping).
Tremolo insert
Eddie Van Halen was also innovative in the field of guitar technique. One of the main problems with using the tremolo - which Jimi Hendrix also struggled with - was that the strings quickly became out of tune as the mechanics gave in to the fluctuations in load due to the slack and tension of the strings. As a result, no large vibrato actions could be performed - at least not if a regular game was to follow afterwards. Van Halen built a block on his Fender Stratocaster - which he still played in the late 1970s - directly on the saddle, i.e. between the headstock and the fingerboard, so that the voltage fluctuations did not reach the machine heads. This pioneering technology can be found as a basic concept in many locking tremolo systems from various manufacturers. With this technical basis, Van Halen was able to integrate extreme forms of tremolo use into his style. Later, the Hanover-based company Rockinger - via the American guitar maker Kramer - delivered the Tru Tune Tremolo, the world's first fine tuning tremolo, to Eddie Van Halen, among others. Floyd Rose's knife edge systems followed suit.
An example is his guitar work in the solo of the Michael Jackson song Beat it (although the solo was not recorded in one piece): Van Halens' impetuous rhythm, the surprising use of harmonics and the sudden, yet flowing use of the vibrato lever make up Van Halens Style so unpredictable. His repertoire in this technique is complex. At the beginning of this solo, he imitates an opening door; Melody phrasing (see Baluchitherium ) or the use of rhythm work (see Ain't talkin '' bout love ) are typical ways of playing Eddie Van Halen.
Rhythm work
Since he - like Jimi Hendrix in his band Experience - was the only guitarist in the band for a long time (singer Sammy Hagar played a second guitar in between), Van Halen also combined rhythm play with the solo guitar. He also used all of the techniques discussed above in rhythm play and thus created a smooth transition between his rhythmic pentatonic riffs and the solo part, which mostly fills short pauses in singing (cf. Panama ). Van Halen thus put rhythm playing on a technically much more demanding level: he recorded the first two albums with almost no overdubs .
volume
For a long time Eddie Van Halen's tone was always referred to as the "brown sound". In an interview with Billboard Magazine in June 2015, Van Halen made it clear that he was originally not trying to describe his guitar sound with this name, but rather the sound of his brother Alex Van Halen's snare drum. This “... sounds like he's drumming on a tree trunk. Very organic. So it wasn't my brown sound. It was Alex's sound. "
Equipment
Guitars
Eddie Van Halen is known for his self-made and modified guitars, such as the Frankenstrat . These are usually electric guitars of the Stratocaster design, which are equipped with a humbucker in the bridge position . Around 1979 Eddie Van Halen built still a Floyd Rose - tremolo system and was thus one of the first who used this model.
amplifier
In Van Halen's early years, Eddie used a 100 watt Marshall with Celestion speakers. To do this, he used a variac transformer to reduce the volume of the amplifier. This was necessary in order to be able to use the amplifier in smaller clubs as well, because Van Halen had often clashed with club owners because of the enormous volume.
Between 1993 and 2004, Van Halen had an endorsement contract with Peavey , who manufactured the 5150 series of amplifiers, which he was involved in the design and development of.
After termination of the employment relationship, the amplifier was renamed "Peavey 6505", with the appearance being slightly modified. The electronics, however, remained unchanged.
Eddie Van Halen last used fender equipment. Fender built the three-channel 5150 III amplifier for him. A combination version of the 5150 III with an output of 50 watts, two loudspeakers and a 50 watt version of the head are also produced.
Web links
- Eddie Van Halen at Discogs (English)
- Eddie Van Halen in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Official Van Halen website
Individual evidence
- ↑ guitarworld.com: Readers Poll Results: The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time ( Memento of the original from October 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. Rolling Stone , December 18, 2015, accessed August 8, 2017 .
- ↑ Kevin Dodds: Edward Van Halen: A Definitive Biography. 2011, p. 2.
- ^ Wieland Harms: The Unplugged Guitar Book. 20 of the most beautiful songs for acoustic guitar. Gerig Music, ISBN 3-87252-249-3 , p. 108 (on Van Halen ).
- ↑ Eddie Van Halen | Biography | AllMusic
- ^ Wieland Harms: The Unplugged Guitar Book. 20 of the most beautiful songs for acoustic guitar. Gerig Music, ISBN 3-87252-249-3 , p. 108 (on Van Halen ).
- ↑ Eddie Van Halen Makes a Wild Child Out of Valerie Bertinelli - Twisted Tales | Van Halen News Desk
- ↑ He was only 65 years old: Rock legend Eddie Van Halen is dead - cause of death has been determined. In: fnp.de (Frankfurter Neue Presse). October 6, 2020, accessed October 6, 2020 .
- ^ Spencer Kaufman: Eddie Van Halen hospitalized due to complications from cancer drugs: Report. In: consequenceofsound.net. November 18, 2019, accessed October 7, 2020 .
- ^ Van Halen workshop at Bonedo
- ^ Eddie Van Halen Smithsonian Talk 2-12-2015
- ↑ Vintage Kramer: The Rockinger Tremolo
- ↑ Eddie Van Halen deconstructs his collaboration on 'Beat It' - CNN.com
- ^ Eddie Van Halen: The Complete 1978 Interviews | Jas Obrecht Music Archive ( Memento from October 22, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Eddie Van Halen Interview
- ^ Eddie Van Halen Smithsonian Talk 2-12-2015
- ↑ EVH® Gear… This Is What I Use. Retrieved April 8, 2018
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Van Halen, Eddie |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Van Halen, Edward Lodewijk; Halen, Eddie van |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Dutch-American rock musician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 26, 1955 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Amsterdam |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 6, 2020 |
| Place of death | Santa Monica , California |