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Re: The EVHII Holy Grail
Is somebody saving these pages? This whole thread is extremely informative.
Is somebody saving these pages? This whole thread is extremely informative.
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Re: The EVHII Holy Grail
you may be right, but i was thinking about that as i was posting previously... i'm not really a tapper (unless i'm playin crazy train or flyin high again)nor do i go nuts with a whammy bar... other than that, i can't really think of what else he would be responsible in my playing. although i might be a little short sighted, here.
i guess it's only a question that i can answer, as 99% of the board hasn't heard me play (consider yourselves lucky!)...
granted, he was one of my faves when i was younger, until i heard randy...and then dave left, and they put out that abortion known as 5150.
sullyComment
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Re: The EVHII Holy Grail
I'm about 5 years younger then Ed, and I grew up in Pasadena, and back then everyone I knew played Les Pauls. Not always Gibsons we played a lot of copies. A few guys might of had a SG. But no one would play a Strat, with the exception of 1 or 2 Hendrix freaks. There were tons of Starts in the stores and nobody wanted them. Then came The VH Album. From that day on everybody played some form of Strat if they liked it or not and it was all because of Eddie.
[ January 03, 2003, 05:01 PM: Message edited by: Johno ]Comment
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Re: The EVHII Holy Grail
my .02 on hoss' EVH ideas:
single hum single volume idea
Sounds like a 50s jazz guitar to me...
dive bomb wild wammy effects harmonics
Hendrix.
effects tapping etc.
Hendrix for effects, and there was some jazz dude in the 50s tapping. Also Steve hackett from Genesis, and even Frank Zappa, but I think they both used picks to tap with. Also Billy gibbons from ZZ top - he did it on a record in the early 70s. Not in the same way as EVH, but he did tap a note on the fingerboard. I also have some MP3s of the VH boys doing ZZ covers...
first to introduce the floyd.
Randy Hansen, the Jimi impersonator dude got a floyd much earlier, and was a touring musician.
first to have a strat with explorer headstock.
I dunno about that one. there was some weird sh*t made in the 60s guitarwise.
first to have is own signature graphic ID.
Clapton in the 60s with the Fool guitar, or if you want to know where Eddie got the idea, Rick Neilsen of Cheap Trick with his B&W Checkerboard Hamers.
first to have a super wide flat large fret fast neck.
Sounds like a good Les Paul to me. [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]
first to dip pickups for less feedback.
Dan Armstrong, as someone else noted. Also, I think it was either Duncan or DiMarzio that tried to say they showed EVH how to do that, or was it Wayne Charvel? Who knows. I don't think Eddie was the first in any event.
It's kinda like Vai and the 7 string guitar - there were jazz dudes doing that in the 50s - but he made it more prominent to our generation. Ditto with EVH... guys who aren't in their 30s-40s have no idea how much impact VH I had on us.
I wasn't a guitarist when VH I came out (hell, I was 8) but when I heard eruption, I couldn't believe the sounds I was hearing. Once I got my scabrous paws on my first electric guitar, Eddie and RR were the two first guitar heroes I had.
Really cool thread!
PeteComment
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Re: The EVHII Holy Grail
Great stuff Hoss...thanks for sharing that with usshawnlutz.comComment
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Re: The EVHII Holy Grail
Pete, the jazz tapper was Thumbs Carlisle and he played the guitar flat on his lap like some Dobro players, the 7 string Guy was george Van Epps and he played classical style.Still takes nothing away from EVH's inovations in his own genre. It would be like saying Charlie Parker was nothing because J.S. Bach had all those harmonies down centuries before. Oddly enough the man most responsible for the whole heavy, eruptus, spiritualis, modalis movement in the arts was John Coltrane, who Was The most imortant contribution to 20th. century American music. But thats another story. BTW he played a Selmer Sax [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]Comment
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Re: The EVHII Holy Grail
Bird is one of my all time favorite movies.Comment
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Re: The EVHII Holy Grail
Brian May did some excellent tapping on "It's Late" off of the "News of the World" sessions. (Circa 1976-1977)
He also built his own guitar.....
Used the whammy ala Hendrix (Notably...Death on Two Legs and Get Down Make Love.)
Used his VOX amps on "10". etc etc....
It's not so much what Eddie did, It's HOW he did it.
-ericComment
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Re: The EVHII Holy Grail
_____Edward Van Halen_____
First to make tapping a new style of playing guitar.
First to make natural effects harmonic tapping harmonic shrills and dives famous and do it like no other. Including the volume swells with adding echo to get the triplet effect to sound violinish.
First to make Floyd Rose, Charvel and Jackson well known names in the musical instrument industry.
First to make potting widely known.
First to have such a distinctive sound, Brown sound, nearly a household sound heard round the world.
First to have a single Hum Superstrat which was designed to get the sound of a Les Paul but in a Strat form making it a Hybrid. BTW Les Paul necks are thin compared to the wideness of a real VH Superstrat. He wanted them wide like a classical guitar, Not a Les Paul.
First to build and paint a signature paint to his own superstrat in invention in 1977 pre-dating a ¨cheap trick¨ Graphic. Which spawned the idea to Jackson since he was prohibited to making VHs any longer.
Influenced. As stated before, the return of the Strat and caused many pefect Fender Stratocaster vintage and new to be modded with Hums and Floyds. Cause the cutomized your guitar the way you want it craze and Custom Shop explotion of the 80s which in turn Fender caught on and opened there own customshop taking the Charvel luthiers with them and buying the Jackson company.
Inspired Randy Rhoads and started the fashion of other Superstrat players like Ratt and Lynch Satch and Vai etc etc.
To be Original is to return to the Origin.
What is the differnce in this custom made guitar and the a early Boogie Bodies Warmoth Schecter or Charvel Jackson guitar??
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...item=935073063
All of this is because of EVH!! and the people before him.
Oh yeah and look at this too.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...933976114&rd=1
Why because they are rare people with
extraordinary talent and history.
Hope that helps [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
[ January 04, 2003, 09:44 AM: Message edited by: Hossman ]Comment
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Re: The EVHII Holy Grail
Ya know, Frank Marino did a lot of that OVER-THE-TOP stuff before Van Halen......But he didn't even get his 15 minutes of fame!!! Hahahahahah.
Also, Gary Moore was doing that sort of stuff. Have you seen the video of him with Thin Lizzy? (From Austrailia. Circa 1978)
The BIGGEST difference is Eddie wrote much better songs! Ultimately that's what it comes down to....Songs.
-ericComment
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Re: The EVHII Holy Grail
while we are at it in terms of guitar John McGlaughlin set the standard for shredding many years before metal mania.Comment
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Re: The EVHII Holy Grail
Good points Hoss... it's just that Eddie gets kudos for 'inventing' things that he certainly popularized, but didn't 'invent'.
Hell, one could also say he started the 'modded marshall' craze by saying Jose Arredondo reworked his Plexi...
...and in many ways, the DIY spirit of the late 70s to early 80s. Everyone was hotrodding amps, rewinding pickups, doing wacky things with their musical gear - and it wasn't nearly as prevalent until EVH came along.
I still say Rick Neilsen's checkerboard Hamer predated Eddie's stuff tho. And that tapping as a 'style' doesn't mean a lot - tapping is tapping is tapping.
Ditto for the floyd stuff (Jol Dantzig of Hamer claims that they had em on production guitars before EVH even had one...)
Oh, and my favorite fast playing quote? It's paraphrased a bit, but I have a Frank Zappa book where someone asks him about different guitarists (this is early 70s) and John McLaughlin comes up. Frank basically said anyone who learns how to operate a guitar like a machine gun deserves at least some respect. [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]
PeteComment
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Re: The EVHII Holy Grail
Funny that Frank would make a comment like that when his later 12 tone row compositions were the equivalent of having a keypad with 12 letters on it and the basic compositional rule was you could not press a key once pressed until all the other keys were pressed. Not that I disliked the Mothers of Invention, on the contrary I go back to when they first came out and played in residency at the Garrick Theater in Greenwhich Village and used to go hear them lay on consecutive nights heck I even used to go out with Uncle Meat (remember her?). Truth of the matter is that when John McLaulin came out he had as radical an impact on serious musicians as Eddie did in his day but if you were 8 when EVH came out you must have been maybe one in the Mahavishnu days. Before McLaulin I don't think there was one rock musician capable of playing outside of a pentatonic box let alone a Super Locrian.His influence went way beyond his imitators and Fusion heads but set a bar as to what could be accomplished on the guitar much like Eddie did in his time. I agree that he may not be everybodies cup of tea but to try and trivialize his accomplishments by a quote from Frank Zappa who made a career out of trivializing anything that wasn't Frank Zappa is kinda crass.Seems like Frank in the same breath would have nothing but praise for Steve Vai and he basically took a McLaulin tecnique and applied it to a Rock and Roll formula and added a whammy bar.Comment
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Re: The EVHII Holy Grail
heheh, calm down there Yoga! [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img] Just noticed your reply to my post - I'll have to dig up the entire Zappa quote, but it was laudatory to McLaughlin, I just thought the part about a machine gun was pretty funny. I didn't mean it as a 'dis' to John at all. And the spirit of it in the Zappa interview wasn't that way either - he gave John and Jeff Beck kudos, but I think he dug Jeff a little more.
Regarding the age deal... well, that's a little bit of ageism on your part, isn't it? I wasn't around when Charlie Christian was either, but I've read about him. Does that mean I can't talk about him or drop an amusing anecdote another guitarist said about him?
John M had an interview in an older guitar player magazine ('83? 84?) where he was super cool and very humble about his skills and talents. it made me, even though I was only 13, check out some of his stuff... and this was pre-napster when you had to BUY albums like that!
However, my personal tastes run more towards Larry Carlton for any type of jazz/rock fusion stuff... I spent my formative years tearing apart many a Steely Dan solo... Kid Charlemagne and Don't Take Me Alive (the intro) still affect me more than most metal solos do.
Oops, no HG content... sorry guys.
PeteComment
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