Wolfgang Van Halen plans to use a number of Eddie's "notable guitars" for his solos on the new Mammoth WVH album

The recording sessions for Wolfgang Van Halen's second album as Mammoth WVH are well underway.

In fact, Wolfgang revealed in a newly-published interview with Total Guitar, the follow-up to 2021's Mammoth WVH is just about complete, but for the guitar solos.

Most of the forthcoming album, it turns out, was recorded using Wolfgang's still in-development signature guitar, the semi-hollow EVH SA-126. For the solos, though, Wolfgang intends to dig deep into the electric guitar collection of his late father, Eddie Van Halen.

"The only thing I have left to do is track the guitar solos," Wolfgang said, "so what I want to do is go through some of Pop’s notable guitars and do a solo with each of them. Guitars like the Frankenstein or the Shark, stuff like that."

Wolfgang also used Frankenstein – the most famous of his father's many custom guitars – for solos on two Mammoth WVH cuts, Mammoth and Feel.

In a recent interview with Guitar World, Matt Bruck – who now heads up Eddie Van Halen's guitar brand, EVH, with Wolfgang – emphasized that, though it's gone through extensive road-testing at Mammoth WVH shows in the last year and change, the much-anticipated EVH SA-126 "is still a work in progress."

For his part, in conversation with Total Guitar, Wolfgang revealed that he didn't originally plan on using the SA-126 prototype for the entire album, and was pleasantly surprised – as the recording process went on – by the guitar's tonal versatility. 

"It [the SA-126] is on pretty much the entirety of the album," he said. "We were almost surprised as we kept going through. It was like, ‘Wow, okay this works for this, too’ and ‘Oh my god, this works really well again over here!’ From the cleans to the really heavy stuff, it sounded crazy!" 

To read Total Guitar's full interview with Wolfgang Van Halen – which also covers the young guitar hero's pedalboard, the perks of being a one-man-band in the studio, and why he chose to primarily use semi-hollow guitars for Mammoth WVH – pick up a copy of the latest issue of the mag at Magazines Direct.