Additionally, Eddie mentions another self-taught/DIY trick he employed back in those piano days. He couldn’t really read sheet music, he was eseentially faking and mimicking teachers, playing by memory, ear and feel. He never learned to read music. Now, as someone myself who played piano pretty well at the age of six and then quit later only to teach myself guitar without lessons… I always used to say I guess I just forgot how to read music. I must have been able to do it since I learned at lessons and played in recitals. But now, knowing how I play the guitar (like Eddie by memory, patterns, ear and feel), I wonder if I was employing some hybrid of techniques back then on the keys? One thing is for sure, it does point to the ingenuity that really ended up setting apart EVH from everyone else!

One thing about the uniqueness of EVH’s playing is that it pretty much requires Spinal Tap style knob turns — all the way up to 11 (or 15 if you asked EVH as he says in that interview!). The finger-tapping, palm-crunching and distorted-harmonics of his style REQUIRED that the smallest touches on the fretboard would translate to loud sounds from the amp/PA. This became a big problem because guitar would drown everything out, especially in small gig or club settings where the band wanted to play. Like Marty McFly and The Pinheads in Back to the Future, Van Halen also heard a lot of “You guys are just too darn loud.”

But… if a rock god must rock the volume dials at the godly levels of heaven (i.e. 11 and/or 15 as referenced above), what is a deity to do?

It was EVH’s naivety about guitar gear/electronics, paired with his DIY ethic that led him to a solution. Of course, it was that naivety that also *partly* caused the situation in the first place.

You see, the young EVH was working at a music store when a used Marshall amp came through. He definitely wanted it because it’s what Clapton played. He swooped it up, but didn’t realize it was a British model. This meant (in simple terms) it operated at 220 volts which was the standard for the UK whereas the US electric grid runs at 120 volts (used to be 110v). So, being an old tube amp, it also took time to warm up and even when it did it was not producing the same full volume it would have running at the correct voltage.

With no fear and his DIY hat on, Eddie popped open the amp and tinkered. He realized he could control the volume by controlling the voltage. How? First try was trying to tie into a house lightswitch/dimmer. That zapped him and the electricity in the house. The mad creator/scientist’s first experiment completed, he decided on more “professional” equipment.

EDDIE VAN HALEN: “So finally I went to this place called Dial Radio and asked “do you have any kind of like an industrial variable voltage transformer that I can use like a light dimmer” and he said “yea I got this thing called a Variac”, I said “ok cool”, and I take it home and plug the amp into it and I’d lower the voltage from like 110 slowly down to 100 and … the lowest I ever went was like 60. Depending on the room we were playing I’d set it anywhere between 60 and 100 because the only way the amp sounded good was with everything all the way up, so that became my volume knob. If we were playing little bars I’d set it to like 60 volts; somewhere a little bit bigger I’d crank it to 80 and for recording the sweet spot seemed to be 89-volts.”

If you go farther back in time, EVH was already displaying his DIY/Mad Scientist approach to music and gear when he decided to build his own guitar, the instantly recognizable Frankenstrat, so-named due to the use of a Fender Stratocaster style body and neck implanted with Gibson style humbucking pickups. Again, another thing that led to his unique sound. With some hypothoses, trial and error and elbow grease, he figured out how to slam in a bunch of disparate pieces into the body pieces he bought and wire it up.

Let’s take “potting” the pickups. Again, this came from an artistic need/want (reduce high-pitch feedback squeal) and required a pretty technical/engineering solution. While it’s unsure how it became more wide practice, and others certainly were doing similar things around the same time, EVH certainly figured it out on his own. He was definitely one of the first and many surely were exposed to the technique after he popularized it. He just looked at the pieces and hypothesized “I bet it’s gotta be those coils around the magnets vibrating.” So, he decided to dip them in melted wax to stop the vibration. Not to say he did so without melting a few pickups along the way and later — to his own admission — even ruining many a vintage guitar trying to pluck parts from here or there to tinker with somewhere else.

All this without even mentioning the paint job, which stemmed from the same mix a pragmatic and artistic solutions… you make a lot of holes moving around pickups etc. then you have to make it look nice after, and the just black was boring — right? Well, that also permeated the entire industry with wild graphics taking up residence on axes in music stores across the country.

Later, this same entrepreneurial spirit led to patents on several pieces of guitar/music tech (via CNN: “his first patent in 1987 was for a supporting device that allowed the musician to perform hands-free “thus allowing the player to create new techniques and sounds previously unknown to any player.”In 1997, he got his second patent for a “guitar peghead.” And in 2017, his third patent was for a “stringed instrument with adjustable string tension control.”

The Mad Scientist didn’t hesitate to experiment outside his own work — even if that meant re-writing the King of Pop. The fact that EVH played the solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” is fairly well-known, and it was instantly recognizable as him (or someone copying him very well, see below 😛 ) even though it was uncredited work. Pete Townsend of The Who was actually approached to do some guitar work on the Thriller album, but was unable to do so and recommended Eddie Van Halen as a replacement to producer Quincy Jones. While EVH didn’t play all the guitars on the track (the original lick and rhythm guitar was played by Toto’s Pete Lukather (I dig his new single with Ringo Starr on drums btw), Quincy did call him up to ask him to lay down the solo. The whole story of how it happened is hilarious and amazing in a few ways.