Guitarist Joe Satriani had a recent conversation with Australian Musician, where he talked about how he plans to play Eddie Van Halen’s parts on the upcoming summer 2024 tour with vocalist Sammy Hagar, bassist Michael Anthony, and drummer Jason Bonham that will focus largely on the music of Van Halen.
Satriani was asked how is he planning to approach the concerts from a “tonal” standpoint, in order to replicate Eddie Van Halen’s sound:
“Yeah, there’s a couple of things that you can zero in on. This is one of the guitars I used during ‘The Howard Stern Show. It’s tuned to a D standard, which is really low, and the strings were 11.
”That was my first two big mistakes. ‘Cause I can’t play 11s. And tuned down to D, I just wasn’t used to it. Sammy and the guys, they’ve been doing it for years, but it was foreign to me. So a lot of things don’t happen.
“Eddie played at 440 and then E flat, and he played light strings. He played nines and even sometimes the lower strings were lighter. Every time I talk about Eddie, I finish it by saying ‘besides the fact that he was a genius.’
”You always have to add that in, ’cause he was just amazing, period. ‘Cause every time he picked up a guitar, no matter what it was, it was amazing. He had the hands and the heart, everything. I’m just catching up. […]
“Now I learned that because of those two (EVH) amps right there. I got those back when Alex (Van Halen) and Dave called and asked me to do the Eddie tribute tour, and I thought, ‘Well, I’ve gotta figure this out.’ So the first thing I did was I got a couple of those and I thought, ‘Well, this is great.
”You get all the harmonics, but, man, this is really small sounding. This is like for modern…’ If I was 20 years old and I was playing modern rock, those would be the best amps ever. But I’m not, and I still wanna hear sort of the body of the guitar and I wanna hear a more dynamic mix. So I started to think, ‘Well, what’s my favorite Van Halen section?’ And I did find that period in ’86.
”I talked to Sam quite a bit about it and he said, yeah, that first 5150, he was still using Marshalls. In Sammy’s view, his favorite sound that Eddie ever made. It wasn’t small and then stereoized. So I reached out to Dylana Scott at 3rd Power amplifiers, and she is building me what we believe is going to be the amp that does it…”
1 comment
Just Awesome 🤘