You didn’t have to be a fan of his genre to know who Eddie Van Halen was. I’ve been scouring Twitter to read the reactions following the news of his passing and one of his rock contemporaries summed it up nicely saying “Eddie was the Mozart of rock guitar”.
He was an absolute musical genius who single-handedly changed the way guitar was played and the way music was written. In many of his interviews Eddie reflected on the value of not learning guitar the traditional way which allowed him to break all the rules.
An interesting part to the Eddie Van Halen story is that he never learned to read music. To add another twist, his unique style of guitar-playing included a technique called ‘tapping’ that could not be expressed in normal musical notation so a new written language was created called ‘tablature’ to keep up to date with the way the guitar was being played.
He changed the way music was written…..and he still never learned to read music!!!
RIP Eddie. Every time I feel the need to blindly follow a rule book for the sake of following a rule book, I will play one of your songs as a reminder of the lesson you left us.