“Nobody could ever touch him” Slash on what made Eddie Van Halen a unique guitarist
For all his technical wizardry and reputation as a shred-loving, fret-blazing virtuoso, Eddie Van Halen was, at his core, “a really tasty blues guitar player”, according to Slash.
Speaking to Guitar World about the late legend, Slash says that good guitar playing for him is all about having one’s personal style – a quality Eddie had in spades.
READ MORE: “They pale in comparison to the original guys” Slash on why British guitar icons like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page don’t measure up to American blues innovators
“There were a ton of, you know, tremolo-bar fucking fiends going around [during the 80s],” the Guns N’ Roses axeman recalls with a laugh. “But that never really spoke to me. I was just doing my own thing because that’s what I wanted to do. I wasn’t really interested in all that other stuff.”
Though there were still “some really great guitar players” that he certainly appreciated and looked up to back then: “Like, Paul Gilbert is an amazing fucking guitar player. Jason Becker was insanely good. Joe Satriani and Steve Vai, who’ve been around forever, they have their own unique personality, just the same as Stevie Ray Vaughan or Johnny Ramone.”
“No matter what type of playing it is, the really good ones that stand out are the ones that have their own unique personality,” he says. “That’s what I’ve always been attracted to. It doesn’t matter whatever technique it is that they’re using, as long as it’s theirs.”
“I mean, Yngwie? Yngwie means it. He fucking owns that shit, whether you like it or not.”
As for the godfather of rock guitar, Slash says that Van Halen’s ability to use the blues to create something that’s wholly his own was what made him so great.
“That was the coolest thing about Eddie for me,” he says.
“All the great ideas he had that were uniquely his own, all these left-field kind of things, underneath all that was a really tasty blues guitar player. He just added all these other ways to branch out his expression on top of that. And that’s why nobody could ever touch him.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
