If there was a Mount Rushmore of guitar players, I’m pretty sure Eddie Van Halen would be carved directly in the middle, with frazzled hair and a cigarette dangling from his grinning lips.
What makes Eddie’s guitar habits so appealing to any guitar player looking to improve or find inspiration is the fact that they’re a personification of his on-stage antics: hypnotizing, flashy, confident, and most of all, fun.
If you’ve never caught one of my Habits of… lessons before, I aim to tease out the approaches and lines of thinking behind of our favorite guitar legends in order to adapt their expertise to our own guitar playing. The endgame is to avoid becoming carbon copies of those guitarists ourselves… because that will never happen.
Retaining and refining your voice on your instrument should be the ultimate goal for any musician, and lessons like these can help you do just that. While Eddie may have never taken a guitar lesson in his life, he can certainly teach us a lot. Who knows? You may experience an eruption of new skills in your playing.
Tyler Larson is the founder of the guitar-centric brand Music is Win. His insightful, uncomplicated guitar lessons and gear demonstrations along with entertaining, satirical content about life as a musician receive tens of millions of video views per month across social media. Tyler is also the creator of the extremely popular online guitar learning platform, Guitar Super System. A graduate of Berklee College of Music, Tyler has been teaching guitar for over a decade and operates a production studio in Nashville, TN.
Marcin’s percussive fingerstyle is dropping jaws with its stunning mix of speed, complexity and explosive dynamics. The warm-ups that fuel his virtuosity are guaranteed to boost your own playing
It’s the flamenco technique that lit the rhythmic fire under Marcin and Paco de Lucía, and treats all four fingers and thumb as separate plectrums – why learning rasgueado will give your picking hand a huge turbo boost
