“After I learned the song, I’d spend an hour or two on YouTube”: How the online guitar community helped Joe Satriani nail Eddie Van Halen’s riffs
After being too intimidated to perform at a Van Halen tribute event in 2021, Joe Satriani finally rose to the challenge of performing Eddie Van Halen’s riffs in 2023 to join Sammy Hagar’s Best Of All Worlds project. But Satriani has been putting in a hard graft every day since, even consulting YouTube tutorials to fine-tune his Van Halen chops.
While Hagar has since praised Satriani for “doing Eddie right”, that wouldn’t have been the case without YouTube’s talented guitarists. “One thing that really helped me was this amazing community, these guitar players of all ages dedicating so many hours to figuring out exactly how Ed played a lot of these songs,” he admits in conversation with Andy Guitar [via Blabbermouth].
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While the guitarist started out by emulating the original recordings, “using [his] ear to get the chords and arrangements”, that was just “the easy part”. The real challenge was capturing Eddie’s personality, adding that extra flare. “The hard part is the quirky fingering string choices,” he says.
That’s where YouTube came in. “After I learned the song, I’d go and I’d spend an hour or two on YouTube just watching how other people address this immense problem of trying to emulate Ed’s playing,” he explains. “You can’t capture the magic, but you can get pretty close to the fingering, and some players are better than others.”
As Satriani consulted countless hours of YouTube content, it was like a way of passing and comparing notes on Eddie’s technique. “It was just great for me to sit across from the screen and just go, ‘Okay, he’s doing that on the first three strings, but this guy’s doing it on the third string, and she’s doing it somewhere else…’” he explains.
“Every guitar player [has their] own pluses and minuses, and it might be speed, timing, touch, tone, intonation… there are areas where we’re kind of deficient, let’s say, than the next player,” Satriani continues. “You have to kind of come up against that and [think] ‘Well, how do I measure up in that particular area, and how do I work around it?’”
Of course, there was also a case of seeing some guitarist’s playing preferences to see how they add their own flavour to Eddie’s tone. He points to Bon Jovi guitarist Phil X in particular. “There are players out there… who will play great Van Halen songs without any vibrato bar,” he says. “It reminds you that the spirit is sometimes more important than just imitating the part that might be.”
While purists might not enjoy a quirky take on Eddie’s riffs, Satriani points to the man himself: “Well, Ed played it differently every single time. He shocked you at how he would just forget about some part or purposely not play it the way it is on the record. He’d just replace it with something you never expected. And you loved it anyway! You have to keep that in mind.”
Since 2024, The Best Of All Worlds’ project has been touring and breathing new life into Van Halen classics. And the tour is still going strong, with plans to hit the UK this summer. The unit recently shared that they would be downscaling their tour from arenas to more intimate mid-sized venues. They’ll be kicking things off in Wolverhampton on 6 July, before closing off in London’s 3,800-cap British Airways ARC for a trio of dates on the 9th, 11th and 12th July.
You can grab tickets to the Best Of All Worlds tour now.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
