Van Halen's bag of tricks

Very interesting video, there’s a major scale pattern cycle in there which isn’t typical Eddie. It’s at 6:23. Someone tabbed it over at the VHLinks forum :

http://www.vhlinks.com/vbforums/threads/62934-Ed-s-Major-Scale-Exercise-from-Steven-Rosen-interview

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Wow. Very cool. I’ve never heard that before.

Cool! Thanks @Squeaks. Eddie is the best.

Hi Troy, this is a. J. You mentioned that gypsy jazz guitar players were known to use tremolo picking, would Django rhinehardt be one of the influential guitarists to have influenced Eddie Van Halen? In his style of guitar techniques?

What’s going on with those toggles? It appears you’re using them help along that wail at the end.

That was my next question, because I’m finding uwps to be a challenge with my 1.14 jazz pick.

What is eddie’s string switching strategy? He does dwps but how does he do all the outside the strings lines then?

Nice spotting Hawkeye! I put a Sustainiac in that JEM and use the toggles to control it. One enables/disables and the other is a three-way switch between different harmonic modes. Most of Steve Vai’s apparent “feedback tricks” are really using the Sustainiac (well, he uses a Fernandes Sustainer, but same idea). It’s a really fun gadget and it’s easy to spend an hour just making “whale song” with it.

Wrist extension. Eddie is a supinated player. You can think of him in the same family as Albert Lee and Steve Morse when it comes to his form.

So he crosspicks? In the same way Albert lee does? If so, is the way to achieve that the same as the crosspicking turorial you just put up, or more like the one in the Albert lee video where you consciously add extension on the downstrokes but then just use upstrokes like normal dwps?

I don’t think any of these wrist-type crosspicking movements involve “consciously extending on the downstrokes”. That’s not how the players that do them perceive it. And I can tell you for sure the one I’m doing in the tutorial doesn’t feel this way. It just feels like side-to-side wrist movement. The Albert movement is probably the same just with more supination.

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I decided to try that forearm rotation picking / Eddie’s tremolo technique. This thread was one of the reasons that pushed me to do that. I’ll allow myself one month of practicing and I’ll see how I feel about it afterwards.

Does anybody (who has tried it) have any more tips or insights? (Naturally, I’ve read the thread few times :wink: )