Eddie Van Halen made guitar pyrotechnics his stock in trade when he burst on the scene in 1978. The novelty of what he did — not to mention the excitement it generated and his success with it — spawned a wave of copycats.
But by the early 1990s Eddie had changed his approach. That's not to say he stopped performing two-handed tapping — a technique Harvey Mandel claims he introduced to the guitarist — or whammy-bar dive bombs, but he had started to put the brakes on his love of burning up the frets.
For that matter, he wasn't happy with the need for speed that emerged from his early shred-heavy approach. While Eddie always put melodicism first, other guitarists were all about showing off how fast they could play.
“A lot of people just do all kinds of crazy shit,” he told Guitar Player's then associate editor Jas Obrecht in a recently unearthed 1991 interview. “That’s fine and dandy when you’re young, but playing as fast as you can doesn’t really hold much water for me.
“To me, a solo is to highlight the song, not to show off.”
He admitted that speed was often a side effect of youthfulness. He too played with his foot on the accelerator in his early early days, but by 1991, was was embracing slower, more intentional soloing, perhaps taking a leaf from the book of one of his biggest heroes, Eric Clapton.
“In the guitar polls, I’m not the number-one cat anymore,” he said. “There are faster gunslingers out there…
“What’s important to me now isn’t how fast I can solo; it’s the whole picture. With the whole band thing, the songs are what’s important.
“Big egos are very unhealthy,” he added. “Everybody needs an ego, obviously, but when it starts getting in the way of the overall picture, you know — what a band is and what a band is supposed to be doing — too much ego is bad news.”
His attitude is echoed in recent statements from his son, Wolfgang, who has channeled his efforts into his band Mammoth since his father's death in 2020. Although he's delivered some heartfelt nods to his father, Wolfgang has made it clear that he's his own guitarist.
But, like his dad, he believes a guitar solo should serve the song, and says his upcoming third album, The End, will have far fewer solos than usual as he changes the tack of his songwriting.
“Not everything needs a guitar solo,” he tells SiriusXM. “That might be stupid coming from the son of Eddie Van Halen to say, but, for me, that is where I get my most joy from — crafting the song piece by piece.”
For evidence, one only needs to look at The End’s first two singles. The title track is full of tapping licks, while “The Spell” backs away from incendiary solos.
“I approach guitar playing more as a producer and more as a drummer than a guitar player,” Wolfgang said last year. “Rhythm is always the first thing for me, and melody is the second.”
Echoing his dad's sentiments, he says he's drawn to more purposeful soloing, rather than seeing the 16-bar spot as an opportunity to flex his muscles. He says a one-note solo "can be way more impressive than a solo that's 2,000 notes. It's not really the speed at which you play.”
