Joe Satriani says he prepared for the Best of All Worlds tour by watching cover versions of Van Halen songs to see how other players wrestled with the knowledge that “their hands are not Eddie's hands”.
Before Sammy Hagar tapped him for the tour, Satriani admitted he’d never wanted to learn how to play Van Halen songs so that his electric guitar hero’s playing style didn’t bleed into his own.
Naturally, that all changed the moment he said yes to the tour, for which he's required to play a huge repertoire of Van Halen songs. But he didn’t just study Eddie Van Halen to nail his parts – he also watched countless cover versions and tribute bands.
That led Satriani to a key discovery that helped him prepare for the tour – the real magic of Van Halen’s guitar tone is in his fingers, not the gear.
“Here's the interesting point about some of the simplest pieces that Eddie would do,” the guitarist said while guesting on SiriusXM's Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk (transcribed by Blabbermouth). “He'd do the album version, and from the stories that I've heard from the bandmembers... Eddie and Alex [Van Halen] would work on these things – let's say, one song for two or three weeks – and then the other guys would come in to add to the track.
“And so the recordings would be this culmination of the brothers jamming. And then once they took it out on the road, I couldn't find one live clip of Eddie playing the same song that was remotely similar. Every show he would just do it a little different.
“And so I thought, 'Okay, I should just embrace every different version. And I really do wanna see how other guitar players work around the fact that their hands are not Eddie's hands.'”
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Watching countless players trying their hand at Eruption and Van Halen’s extended library of acrobatic material ultimately helped Satriani embrace his personality while playing EVH’s parts.
“Eddie held his guitar in a certain place,” Satriani continues. “A lot of guitar players don't hold it like that these days. He would hold his pick in a different way. He would pick in a different way. There were all these things that were part of his physicality that were quite different.
“So when you check out a Van Halen tribute band, you're looking at a different person with a different body and they have to deal with the fact that they're different. They hold their pick differently, they position the guitar and their body at a different height. It all makes a difference. It all adds up to creating that right vibe, the rhythm, the tone.”
There’s also the matter of amps. Satch worked with 3rd Power amps to create a custom tube amp inspired by Eddie Van Halen’s 1986 guitar tone specifically for the tour.
The amp will be made available to guitar players later this year, with a plugin version already available in the meantime. Nailing the amp's creation, though, was only half the battle.
“Maybe this is a bold statement, but I think 50% of what we hear really came from his hands,” he adds. “When you do the deep dive into the amps, you realize he's played all these different amps in the course of a couple of decades, but he never lost that intensity, the snap, just the overall aggressive-yet-beautiful sound that he created. So it was in his hands.
“You can get the amp – the EVH amp, the Soldano, the vintage Marshalls – but you're not gonna be there; you're not gonna be able to really do a great impression of Eddie Van Halen without his hands. He was that special, that unique. It's impossible to copy that element of him.
“So you learn the songs, you try to learn the fingerings and then you go, 'Now, how am I gonna do it, ’cause these are my hands?' And I think Eddie would have wanted anyone who played any of his music to inject a healthy portion of their own personality and not to try to imitate him.
“Maybe that's the thing – don't imitate, but pay homage, be respectful. Try to memorize the stuff, but at the same time celebrate it the way it was intended. Don't be like a parrot.”
That’s exactly what Sammy Hagar believes Satriani has gotten right with the tour.
“Joe has taken the essence of Eddie's guitar solos,” he recently said of his bandmate, “and he puts his heart and soul into it. It's so much better than a guy just mimicking him exactly.”
Over two-thirds of the band's 21-song setlist for the tour is made up of both Hagar and David Lee Roth-era Van Halen songs, with Satch partnering his signature 3rd Power amps with a variety of guitars – including a modded EVH Frankenstein and his signature Ibanez guitars – to nail the tone.
He also revamped his pedalboard to get as close to Eddie’s guitar sound as possible.
