When Eddie Van Halen burst onto the scene in the late-’70s, aspiring players and professional virtuosos alike were all lining up to watch him up-close.

Like Hendrix before him, the Eruption mastermind was changing the very fabric of guitar playing in real time. He needed to be seen to be believed.

But not everyone was swept up in the hysteria. The late Jeff Beck, for instance, was full of admiration for the virtuoso’s ability, but kept a level head about it – this not being his first brush with a generational guitar talent.

“I love it, I think it’s the greatest,” Beck said of Van Halen’s music in the January 1985 issue of Guitar World. “I've been there, y'know, but he lives and dies for that whereas I don't – I'm not really a heavy metal boy, through and through.

“I’d love to go and see him but I probably wouldn't stay for the whole concert: I’d just get a flash of brilliance and then I’d go, saying to myself, ‘That guy is really great.’”

At the time, Beck appeared to believe Van Halen – as has often become a criticism of the shred scene, though rarely EVH himself – was prioritizing technicality and showmanship. Beck was all about expression and storytelling. He didn’t get that from Van Halen.

“I wouldn’t want to get bored with it, which I could easily do with that style of music,” Beck continued. “I like rock concerts, concerts in general, to go through different moods, but there aren’t too many concerts like that now.

“I mean, those guys like Van Halen are so great, but they seem to be stuck in that kind of stuff. Still, he’s got the most amazing technique, you’ve got to take your hat off to him for that – the speed and the frantic element. I could do well to learn from him some of those tricks he pulls.”

It wasn’t the only time Beck praised Van Halen, even if he couldn’t see himself sitting through a whole show.

“He brought tapping to the forefront, and I still think he was one of the tastiest players doing it,” he gushed in Van Halen: A Visual History (via Van Halen News Desk) “It wasn’t his fault that all these other horrendous people tried to emulate him.

“I actually saw Eddie play some blues once and it was really beautiful. It would be great to hear him play more in that style.”

The two heroes certainly met in later years and were photographed together in 1987, albeit not in a show setting – and the respect was mutual.

Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2011, Van Halen noted, “I didn’t get into him until [1975’s jazz-fusion album] Blow By Blow. Just the instrumentalness of it. And [1976’s] Wired. Interesting stuff in there.

“I guess it was just the experimentation in there that I liked. Jeff Beck is definitely a standalone. You never know what the hell he’s gonna do.”

A collection of Eddie Van Halen's gear will go under the hammer later this year as part of what's been billed as "the ultimate Van Halen guitar auction".

The auction includes offerings from the virtuoso’s long-time guitar tech, Zeke Clark, and a Van Halen superfan named Nick D’Andrea. The lots are dominated by some choice electric guitars, as well as some weirder picks. In total, they are expected to sell for over one million dollars.

Two Clark-customized 5150 Kramers from 1986 and 1987 headline the auction. The earlier model is described as “a holy grail artifact from the peak of Van Halen’s stadium-rock dominance”.

As per EVH’s preferred shred-ready recipe, they both feature a Floyd Rose trem with a D-Tuna, a sole bridge humbucker, and the famous stripes design. They also feature some of Eddie’s guitar picks from the 5150 tour, and even have a stage-used cigarette lodged beneath the low E string on the headstock.

They were reportedly present throughout the band’s first three albums with Sammy Hagar: 5150, OU812, and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.

From Eddie’s Ernie Ball era is a Translucent Gold-finished EVH model that was used between 1993 and 2002. It is signed by the Van Halen brothers, former bassist Michael Anthony, and their three vocalists: David Lee Roth, Sammy Hagar, and Gary Cherone.

The guitar sports zebra-style twin ‘buckers, a maple fretboard, and another dive-bomb-friendly Floyd Rose. It's said to be in used condition, given how much Eddie Van Halen relied on it during tour.

Elsewhere, there's also an EVH-branded Wolfgang from 2012, which was presented to D’Andrea to commemorate his 400th time watching the band live. It was signed by the band after Eddie used it on stage.

As for amps, three Marshall JMP Mk 2 tube amps from 1977, ’87, and ’80-’86, feature, as does the 1960s Sears Silvertone 1465 head and cab, used to record Finish What Ya Started. There’s also a stripes-laden drill that Eddie used to play Poundcake with in the mid-’90s.

Stompbox offerings include a 2004 Jim Dunlop signature Phase 90, a 2006 EVH Flanger, while stage-used picks from 1991-’92 and 1995 tour dates represent another more understated option.

There’s even a pair of Eddie’s sneakers (signed) currently selling for $2,000.

Away from Eddie’s gear is a Michael Anthony-owned 1988 Aria Pro II Integra bass that made it out on the road with the group, a used Ludwig drum kit, and a mic used by DLR between 2007 and 2008.

The auction is being handled by Backstage Auctions, and runs until August 8.

See Backstage Auctions for more.

Elsewhere, Sammy Hagar has reached out to David Lee Roth in a surprise showing of support following the recent cancellation of his tour, and Steve Vai has championed the quality of Eddie’s library of unreleased music.

Ned Steinberger did not invent the minimalist guitar – the ’60s La Baye 2x4 and the skeletal Gittler introduced during the ’70s both precede his design.

Nor was Steinberger the first to make a headless instrument – Les Paul invented a headless guitar with an aluminum body in the ’40s, Dave Bunker patented his headless “touch guitar” in the mid-’60s, and numerous Northern California luthiers built custom headless instruments during the late ’60s and ’70s. This writer vividly recalls seeing a few headless guitars and basses at Stars Guitars in San Francisco during the mid-’70s.

However, Steinberger was the first company to successfully mass produce minimalist, headless instruments.

Built from non-traditional composite materials – a graphite/carbon fiber blend neck and body and phenolic fretboard – the original Steinberger guitar design is noteworthy for its appealing combination of radical elements, familiar features, brilliantly engineered innovations, and comfortable ergonomics.

The first Steinberger GL Series guitars appeared on the market in May 1984, starting with the GL2 model featuring EMG 81 and 60 active humbuckers and a stop tailpiece. At 29 ¾ inches long, it was only a few inches longer than its 25 ½-inch scale length.

Standard features included 24 frets and master volume and tone controls. By 1985, the lineup expanded considerably, consisting of the dual humbucker GL2 and GL3 with three single-coil EMG SA pickups, both offered with either the standard S-Trem (GL2S/GL3S) or revolutionary TransTrem (GL2T/GL3T) vibrato systems. The popular GL4 model with an HSS pickup configuration then followed in 1986.

An instrument unto itself, the TransTrem is an engineering marvel that allows users to lower or raise pitch while keeping chords in tune. A metal stop piece can lock the strings in six positions that transpose the key to B, C, D, E, F#, and G. Both the TransTrem and standard floating S-Trem provide a lever that locks the tremolo arm for non-tremolo performance, which also maintains tuning when a string is broken.

One rarely mentioned feature of Steinberger GL guitars is the Co-x connector system that allows users to quickly swap EMG pickups using snap on-off connectors. The body's removable rear-mounted faceplate also made it easy to access the electronics and install other non-EMG pickups with minimal hassle.

Initially, the GL guitars came with a plug-in leg rest for comfortable playing in a sitting position, but later a simpler, improved fold-out leg rest was adopted. The double ball end string design radically simplified the process of changing strings, although the non-standard strings were not always easy to find.

Although Steinberger stopped offering composite versions of their GL models by the late ’90s, the timeless minimal design has become a classic that still lives on today via Steinberger's budget Spirit line.

Thanks to its prominent use by a wide variety of guitarists like Elliot Easton, Reeves Gabrels, Jerry Garcia, David Gilmour, Steve Hillage, Allan Holdsworth, Steve Howe, Mark Knopfler, Mike Score of A Flock of Seagulls, Andy Summers, David Torn, and Eddie Van Halen – the latter two being among the few who truly mastered the TransTrem – the Steinberger GL model has become a desirable icon of both ’80s/’90s nostalgia and futuristic innovation.

Wayne Charvel, the visionary guitar maker whose namesake brand changed the guitar industry, has died at the age of 85.

The news was announced in a statement posted to Dignity Memorial, which confirmed he passed away earlier this month on July 12.

Charvel leaves behind a legacy as one of the guitar world’s most influential change-makers.

“Beyond his remarkable craftsmanship, he was a devoted father, grandfather, family member, and friend,” the post on Dignity Memorial notes. “He will be remembered for his kindness, integrity, wisdom, and his great sense of humor.

“His greatest legacy is not only the beautiful guitars he built, but also the love, values, and inspiration he shared with everyone around him. He will be deeply missed and forever remembered by all who knew and loved him. His impact in the music world, and his loving spirit will live on for generations.”

Few luthiers have had the same impact on the guitar scene as Charvel. When he opened Charvel’s Guitar Repair in 1974 in Azusa, California, he unwittingly sparked a guitar custom shop revolution.

Charvel originally performed aftermarket customizations and sold parts that allowed players to build their own instruments. He became a go-to partner for the likes of Gibson and Fender, who didn’t provide in-house custom work of their own, and quickly attracted some notable early clientele, Eddie Van Halen included.

“Eddie came by the shop a lot and sometimes would sit on the floor and play the guitar while we repaired some of his other guitars,” Charvel once said.

“One day, Eddie came over to the shop and asked if I had an extra body and neck. I told him that I had an extra Boogie Body neck and an old body in my shop. I gave Ed the parts, and the next time I saw the guitar he had used a spray can to paint it white with black stripes. He used nails to hold the pickup in the body.”

That guitar went on to be known as Frankenstein and changed the face of rock guitar as we know it.

By the dawn of the 1980s and the shred era, Charvel had already begun building its own guitars. They ended up in the hands of the biggest players of the age, including Steve Vai, Jake E. Lee, Warren DeMartini and George Lynch.

Outside the metal world, Jeff Beck and Allan Holdsworth were fans. At Van Halen's own request, Wayne Charvel also built the original Bumblebee guitar.

In 1978, Charvel’s interest in the company was bought out by Grover Jackson, who helped the company level up and delivered Charvels to the masses. But though he was part of his eponymous brand for only four years, Wayne had already left a huge impact on the scene.

A hot-rod enthusiast who inspired players to experiment with their instruments while emboldening them with superior mods and setups, Charvel prioritized speed, sound and quality, pioneering what would later be known as the "Superstrat".

The company’s own instruments continued to follow the precedent set by Wayne, and the resulting instruments virtually became synonymous with the shred scene.

“There was a vibe and a team spirit at Charvel that I never experienced anywhere else,” Grover Jackson once observed. “Sometimes the good intention of the creator gets into the product, against all odds, and this was certainly true of every Charvel that went out the door.”

In 2002, Charvel was acquired by Fender, which helped return the brand to its former glory after decades in the wilderness triggered by the rise in grunge and declining quality.

As such, Charvel’s name continues to be associated with some of guitar’s most iconic instruments and players. More recently, its legacy has been carried by a range of modern virtuosos, from Sean Long and Rick Graham, to Angel Vivaldi, Guthrie Govan and Jim Root.

Charvel is survived by his wife, Susan; his sons, Michael, Richard, and Robert; his daughter, Jennifer; and his grandchildren, Gavin, Glory and Giana.

If Joe Satriani asks you to build an amp to make him sound like Eddie Van Halen – specifically the Eddie we hear and see in Van Halen’s Live Without a Net (1986) – it’s a request you’d better take seriously.

This is exactly what happened to Dylana Nova Scott, founder/owner of Minnesota-based 3rd Power, who was entrusted with handling Satch’s tones on this year’s Sammy Hagar-fronted Best of All Worlds tour. Together they created the DRGN 100 Custom Shop head, packed with a whole range of new features to bring the legendary tones of Van Halen’s 1968 Marshall Super Lead (serial number 12301, to be precise) into the modern age.

The results were so impressive, Satriani continued using the amp in the Satch/Vai band, which then led to Steve Vai switching over to 3rd Power cabinets. For Scott, who rose to fame in the late ’80s as the lead guitarist in San Francisco hard rockers Vain, it’s been a true labor of love – helping one of the world’s most respected living guitarists pay tribute to one of the world’s most sorely missed.

Then there are other 3rd Power designs like the Dumble-inspired Aurora 35 and the Fender-golden-era-rivaling Lyra, housing the sounds of a 1962 brown-panel and a 1965 black-panel in one box.

Here’s the story of how a glam-metal guitarist ended up becoming a specialist builder for the likes of Satriani, Lenny Kravitz, Joe Walsh and many more.

What made you want to start an amp company?

I’m a player myself. That’s what drives the amp company. You can design a tone in isolation to sound good, but there can be a moment when that isolation blows up. That’s where 3rd Power comes in. We live in between the artist and the audience, sitting in a very sacred place.

It’s the moment the lights come on and the audience is screaming. I also know what it’s like when the lights come on and everyone is silent because you have to prove yourself. My job is emotional translation. Whatever comes out of that quarter-inch jack needs to hit the audience.

Where did you learn how to build amps?

I’m self-taught, but I guess I’ve always been a tone-chaser tinkering with gear. I took electronics and computer programming in high school. As a recording artist, I started paying attention to the engineers working around me.

In between tours, I was working at a music store where DigiDesign specialists would train us. I also spent time with legendary sound guy Chip Davis, watching how he would analyze rooms.

He would clap and listen to the reflections, asking me if I could hear the flange coming out of the corner. Then I got into wireless systems, which led to me working at Sennheiser and eventually Line 6. But I started to become more interested in tube amps at a time when everyone else was converting to digital. I was the person listening to records while reading The History of Marshall: The First Fifty Years.

It clearly paid off. Joe Satriani is a big fan.

Joe has said a lot of wonderful things. Yes, I’m a nice person, but he’s not using my stuff because I’m nice. On our first call, he said he’d been talking to Edward’s techs, Zeke Clark and Tom Weber, describing the sound he was looking for.

The 5150 tour was actually Ed’s last tour with the famous Marshall. He had all the candy, but it hadn’t moved into the more modern Van Halen tone. On that tour, they played the old catalog next to the new catalog, and it all translated because the energy was right.

After that, the rig changed and maybe the old songs didn’t sound right – this is according to Sammy – so Joe had to be very specific. Ed’s own techs said the only person that could help was this girl outta Nashville called Dylana Scott. Joe called me and said, “Apparently I should be talking to you.”

What were the main considerations when designing the DRGN 100?

I said, “Let me build the perfect racecar for you to drive.” Did he want more horsepower at this turn or better traction over here or extra acceleration back there?

I’m a big fan of his work, so I also explained that I didn’t want to watch him play a covers set. He asked what I meant and I answered, “Joe, none of us need to see you play note for note; we need you to interpret the essence of the moment while honoring the king.”

Obviously I had to make sure he had all the tones he needed – the intro to Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love is like taking a flint and stone to make a spark.

It’s a two-hour set with moments that also sound creamier. This amp was designed to lift Joe up the whole way through, so that even someone in the last seat of the arena would feel the buzz and stand up.

Some of your other designs, like the Aurora 35 and the Lyra, are completely different.

The Lyra has two classic Fender circuits from the ’60s, alongside tube-driven spring reverb and attenuation. It’s a beautifully authentic amp that sounds great. The Aurora 35 starts out in the hi-fi Fender spectrum, like a Dumble, and then opens up.

The signal path is complicated because of the stacking and gain staging, but you don’t need a Ph.D. to get it right; it’s super-simple. But you still get the mid-switch, just in case you need to voice it differently.

Your amps also have modern functions like the HF Damp and HybridMaster.

The High Frequency Damp is geared toward working professionals. Imagine being a hired gun and the singer says you’re too bright. If you walk back to your amp and turn the treble down, you’ve just made sure you have a bad night. Leave it where it is and you might not get that gig again.

The HF Damp will keep all of your articulation but shave a little bit of treble from the power amp. Your gain structure hangs on your tone stacking, and with this all of your sonic decisions remain intact. It’s a gig-saver. The HybridMaster is a patented micro volume control that I refined over years. I looked at all the soaks out there.

Some were good for a 15-percent reduction, others maybe 10 percent, and some weren’t good at all. I decided to create a hybrid while only showing the customer one knob. Inside the amp, that knob is controlling a myriad of things.

When you turn amps down, you lose the weight of the moment. Everything gets smaller. I found a way to reduce the volume without sacrificing tone. When you attenuate the signal, I increase the volume strategically in different circuits so what remains feels more alive.

You don’t just design amps. You also have your own MagFRAG pickup line.

It’s my spin on what a pickup could be in this day and age. I jumped on forums and read the arguments, but I didn’t think like a regular winder, obsessing over wires, magnets, insulators and turns.

Instead, I learned about the variables and tried to imagine the sound of Alnico II on the treble strings, the sound of Alnico IV on the middle strings, which is where chords and chimes open up, and then Alnico V for the bass strings.

I wanted one magnet to address each pair of strings. Tracii Guns is a big fan; they’re now on his main guitars. The pickups sound beautiful, making your instrument come to life. It’s like throwing glitter on what you hear.

• For more info, head to 3rd Power.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

George Orwell’s novel 1984 envisioned a dystopian future where totalitarian governments ruled the world, and the average person’s attempts to enjoy even the slightest personal pleasure were patrolled and punished by the Thought Police in service of Big Brother.

However, when mankind finally reached that symbolic year, the prevailing atmosphere was more of a hedonistic non-stop party than a period of peril. We have the power of the mighty Van Halen to thank for much of that.

Considered by many – including Eddie Van Halen himself – as the band’s masterpiece, 1984 was one of Van Halen’s best-selling albums and one of the best-selling rock albums of the entire ’80s.

It has earned RIAA Diamond certification for surpassing 10 million units sold – a feat the band only matched with their 1978 debut album, with the two perfectly bookending the beginning and end of Van Halen’s classic era with David Lee Roth fronting the band.

Clocking in at a lean 33 minutes and 22 seconds, 1984 was, as the saying goes, all killer and no filler. Even the best-selling album of all-time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, can’t make that boast (does anyone even remember Baby Be Mine and The Lady in My Life?). 1984 produced an impressive string of four hit singles, with Jump delivering Van Halen’s only Number 1 charting hit single in the band’s entire career.

Panama and I’ll Wait both peaked at Number 13, and Hot for Teacher came in at a not-too-shabby Number 56. Even the album’s “deep” tracks – Top Jimmy, Drop Dead Legs, Girl Gone Bad and House of Pain – were scorchers too hot for the Top 40, but found a welcoming home on more adventurous FM station playlists.

The only outlier is the album’s title track, but Ed’s solo synth performance perfectly set the mood as a brief overture that boldly introduced Van Halen’s brave new world.

Future Control

With 40 years of hindsight, it’s tempting to look back and conclude that the phenomenal popularity of 1984 was primarily due to it being the perfect album released at the perfect time.

However, its success also benefited significantly from several years of extremely hard work leading up to its release, along with a series of high-profile events that brought Van Halen prominently into the public’s awareness.

During the early ’80s, Van Halen had become one of the world’s biggest touring acts. The band sold out every single one of its 83 shows in the United States and Canada on its 1982 Hide Your Sheep tour, and in early 1983 they made their first ever appearances in South America during a month-long leg that introduced the band to thousands of rabid fans.

A few months later, Van Halen staked a claim as the biggest band in the world when they headlined “Heavy Metal Day” on May 29, 1983, at the US Festival, performing in front of an estimated audience of 375,000 – Van Halen’s largest audience ever. Their fee for the US Festival gig was $1.5 million, setting a new world record at the time.

Van Halen was also experiencing a significant upward trajectory in record sales. 1984’s predecessor, Diver Down, was a commercial success thanks in large part to the hit status of the 1982 single (Oh) Pretty Woman, which peaked at Number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

The only previous time that Van Halen cracked the Top 20 was when Dance the Night Away reached Number 15, and that was all the way back in 1979. From their debut effort onward, each album that Van Halen released charted higher than its predecessor, with Diver Down peaking at Number 3 compared to Fair Warning’s top position at Number 5.

Van Halen’s tour, album and single statistics were notable, but what truly catapulted the band into the public limelight was Ed’s increasing celebrity status, even though the guitarist never sought the spotlight and was never comfortable with being called a rock star.

His marriage to popular television actress Valerie Bertinelli led to appearances on mainstream prime time shows like Entertainment Tonight, making the Van Halen name a household word. Ed’s charming, down-to-earth demeanor won over many new fans who would have been shocked by the raucous atmosphere at a typical Van Halen concert, let alone the band’s backstage antics.

But perhaps the biggest turning point that made Ed a bona fide celebrity was his guest appearance on Michael Jackson’s 1982 album Thriller, on Beat It. Jackson wanted to record a rock song, and he knew that getting the world’s most popular guitarist to play a solo would introduce and endear the singer to an entirely new audience.

What Ed didn’t realize at the time was that his performance on Thriller would similarly cause Jackson’s fans to notice Van Halen. Beat It went on to top the charts worldwide, and those 33 seconds of shredding guitar bliss became an immortal symbol of the most enduring cultural crossover of pop, R&B and rock.

Eddie didn’t want his name to appear on Thriller’s credits, mainly to keep the session a secret from his bandmates, but there was no mistaking who performed that solo.

Despite his request to remain incognito, record company and musician’s union agreements led to his name appearing four times in the liner notes, and his wife Valerie and engineer Donn Landee, who had recorded every Van Halen to date, also were thanked for good measure.

It didn’t matter anyways as David Lee Roth immediately knew it was Ed the first time he heard Beat It blaring from a car stereo in a 7-Eleven parking lot.

Brave New World

Edward Van Halen’s creative inspiration increasingly grew during the early ’80s as he broadened his horizons into new musical styles and techniques and explored instruments beyond the guitar.

While he was initially pleased with Van Halen’s fifth album, Diver Down, he wasn’t happy with the rapid-fire approach to the sessions, which were completed in a mad rush over a period of 12 days.

On the band’s previous album, Fair Warning, Ed had finally become comfortable with spending considerably more time recording and crafting multiple guitar tracks in the studio while also experimenting with a broader palette of guitar tones. He felt that the slam-bang live performance blueprint used on Diver Down was a regression to the band’s first three albums, and the outcome left him creatively unsatisfied.

“I was always butting heads with (producer) Ted Templeman about what makes a good record,” Van Halen said in 2014. “Diver Down was a turning point for me because half of it was cover tunes. When we made Fair Warning I spent a lot more time with [engineer] Donn Landee working on my sound. I became much more involved in the recording process.

“To me, Fair Warning was more true to what I am and what I believe Van Halen is. We’re a hard rock band, and we were an album band. I like odd things. I was not a pop guy, even though I have a good sense of how to write a pop song. When we started work on 1984 I wanted to ram it up Ted’s poop chute and show him that we could make a great record without any cover tunes and do it our way.”

In order to be able to do things his way, Ed took dominant control of the creative reins by building a professional multitrack studio at home in 1982. Initially, the plan was to build a studio for recording demos, but as work progressed the guitarist realized that, with Landee working by his side, he could record Van Halen’s next album there.

“I did not set out to build a full-blown studio,” Ed admitted. “I just wanted a better place to put my music together so I could show it to the guys. I never imagined that it would turn into what it did until we started building it. Slowly it turned into a lot more than I originally envisioned.

“Everybody else was even more surprised than I was, especially Ted. They thought I was just building a little demo room. Then Donn said, ‘No man! We’re going to make records up here!’ Donn and I had grown really close and had a common vision. Everybody was afraid that Donn and I were taking control. Well… yes! That’s exactly what we did, and the results proved that we weren’t idiots.”

Ed’s new home studio, named “5150” after the California law code for taking a mentally disordered person into custody when that person is considered a danger to others, was completed by the end of 1982.

In a recent interview with Greg Renoff for Tape Op magazine, Landee recalls that the first recording session took place on January 2, 1983, with Ed on synthesizer and his brother Alex Van Halen on drums.

Although Ed said in his 2014 Guitar World interview that he didn’t want to record cover tunes, ironically the very first song ever recorded at 5150 was a cover of Wilson Pickett’s In the Midnight Hour.

It’s very likely that this was a calculated move on Ed’s part to appease David Lee Roth and Templeman, perhaps hoping to convince them that the studio was indeed up to the task after they worked there and heard the results. The fact that the song was never released and is still locked up in 5150’s vaults suggests that Ed may have never actually wanted to record it in the first place.

However, Ed boldly revealed his hand with his next move. Over the previous few years, the guitarist had worked on a synth-dominated song that would later be named Jump after Roth wrote the lyrics, and with the studio up and running he recorded an instrumental demo of the tune, performed on an Oberheim OB-Xa synthesizer with accompaniment from Al on drums and Michael Anthony on bass.

“When I first played Jump for the guys nobody wanted to have anything to do with it,” Ed said. “Dave said that I was a guitar hero and I shouldn’t be playing keyboards. But when Ted heard the demo and said it was a stone-cold hit, everyone started to like it more. Ted only cared about Jump. He really didn’t care much about the rest of the record and just wanted that one hit.”

The band worked diligently recording new material for most of 1983, with the exception of the month of May, which they spent preparing for their appearance at the US Festival. Ed particularly reveled in having “unchained” freedom to experiment whenever and for as long as he pleased.

This included some explorations he wouldn’t have tried at a regular studio, like when he backed up his 1970 Lamborghini Miura S near 5150’s doors and miked its mighty roar. Initially intended for use during the chorus of Jump, the Lamborghini’s forceful growl eventually found its immortal home on the bridge of Panama.

Necessary tools for the party

In addition to equipping 5150 with a solid selection of classic studio gear that included a Universal Audio console purchased from United Western Studios, 3M M56 16-track tape machine and various items of high-end outboard gear such as Eventide Harmonizers, Teletronix LA-2A and UREI 1176 limiters, Lexicon Prime Time digital delay and EMT140ST plate reverb, Ed also added a wide variety of new instruments to his creative arsenal.

Ed had become enamored with the Oberheim OB-Xa polyphonic synthesizer and its updated version the OB-8, and they played a major role in three of the album’s songs.

Keyboards had actually prominently appeared on all three of Van Halen’s previous albums – a Wurlitzer electric piano on And the Cradle Will Rock… (Women and Children First), an Electro-Harmonix Mini-Synthesizer on Saturday Afternoon in the Park and One Foot Out the Door (Fair Warning) and a Mini Moog on Dancing in the Street (Diver Down) – but they were distorted and usually employed as ersatz guitars. With 1984, Jump and I’ll Wait, there was no mistaking that Ed was playing synths.

However, Ed was still a guitarist at heart and to his core, and he made many new additions to his guitar collection. The most notable newcomer was a rare vintage 1958 Gibson Flying V that Ed bought from Dan Martin of Missouri’s St. Charles Guitar Exchange – the first of many vintage guitars Ed would buy from the dealer over the years.

The V was Van Halen’s primary guitar on the album, used to record Hot For Teacher, Girl Gone Bad, the main riff of Drop Dead Legs and, as recently discovered, quite possibly for Jump [researcher Allan Garber has uncovered a behind-the-bridge pick scrape in the isolated guitar track, corresponding sonically with the V’s tailpiece configuration].

The guitarist had also acquired a few of Steve Ripley’s stereo guitars, featuring hexaphonic pickups (essentially each string had its own individual pickup) and panning controls for each string.

Ed put the Ripley to good use on Top Jimmy, using an open D7 tuning (DADACD, low to high) and playing harmonics that bounced across the stereo soundscape. This is probably the song called Ripley on a Warner Bros. memo that Ted Templeman wrote on August 23, 1983.

Ed later recycled the title for another song he wrote for The Wild Life soundtrack since it also used the Ripley guitar. That song later became Blood and Fire on Van Halen’s 2012 A Different Kind of Truth album.

Photos taken at 5150 during this period show a Veilette-Citron Shark baritone guitar, but apparently any songs where he might have used it didn’t make the final cut on the album. That Warner Bros. memo lists a song called Baritone Slide – very likely an unreleased or unfinished track featuring this instrument.

Ed had given conflicting reports over the years about the use of his original Frankenstein guitar or his Kramer 5150 to record the album. He had officially publicly retired the Frankenstein starting with the tour in support of 1984, but it’s plausible that he used it for one last hurrah.

However, Ed also had a habit of immediately putting new guitars to use once they orbited into his universe. As the 5150 became his favorite main guitar on albums recorded for the remainder of the ’80s, he may have played it on 1984. But one confirmed constant throughout all of Van Halen’s first six albums was the use of his 1968 Marshall Super Lead 100-watt head with its voltage reduced via a Variac.

“I had my old faithful Marshall head and bare wooden 4x12 cabinet facing off into a corner,” he recalled. “Al was in the other corner, and we set up some baffles to have isolation between my guitar and the drums. Because the space was so limited, Alex had to use a Simmons kit except for the snare.”

Ed employed effects much more sparingly than he had on previous Van Halen albums. Most notably, he used a pair of Eventide H910 or H949 Harmonizers that were slightly detuned and individually panned left and right to provide a stereo spread and subtle chorus effect on many guitar tracks.

Panama made good use of rhythmic delay, and the studio’s EMT plate reverb was employed tastefully on that song as well as Girl Gone Bad and House of Pain. However Ed’s usual MXR flanger and phaser pedals are absent.

Ministry of Truth

The finished product exceeded all expectations and then some. 1984 was a document of a band at its prime, where years of relentless touring had made their sound tight and their improvisational communication almost psychic.

Ed’s songwriting talents had expanded and grown, with his knack for pop hooks balanced by ambitious excursions inspired by progressive rock and fusion jazz.

Perhaps the most surprising element of 1984 is the fact that the first note of guitar is heard after more than two minutes have passed. This was partly the result of Templeman’s late comment that he wished the album had a song called 1984.

Landee realized that he had about 45 minutes of Ed improvising solo on the Oberheim that could be edited down to an instrumental intro, and voila! He had his wish. The 1984 synth instrumental made the perfect dramatic statement and lead in to Jump.

Jump was pure pop perfection that fit right in with the synth-crazy mid-’80s, but Ed’s dynamic guitar solo was the secret weapon behind its success, giving Van Halen a competitive crossover advantage with a hard rock audience that would never be caught dead listening to groups like the Human League, Depeche Mode or Soft Cell.

Panama may be the ultimate classic Van Halen tune, with Roth’s raunchy “fast car and faster girl” lyrics perfectly capturing the So Cal party vibe that made the band so irresistible from day one. It’s also one of two songs on 1984 that were inspired by AC/DC, which was not a bad move considering how Back in Black had already become the best-selling hard rock album of all-time.

The infectious, bouncy energy of Top Jimmy made it a strong contender for a fifth single or at least a hell of a B-side. However, it was probably held back by the difficulty of switching from open D7 tuning to standard for the solo’s delirious whammy bar workout, which prevented Van Halen from ever performing the song live.

Drop Dead Legs similarly should have been a hit, partly thanks to its relentless pile-driving Michael Anthony/Alex Van Halen rhythm section groove.

“That was inspired by Black in Black,” Ed admitted. “I was grooving to that beat, although Drop Dead Legs is slower. Whatever I listen to somehow is filtered through me and comes out differently. It’s almost a jazz version of Back in Black – I put a lot more notes in there.” It was never played live until the final 2015 tour.

Jump and its supporting music video may have made Van Halen seem harmless and cuddly, but Hot for Teacher was the opposite, exposing the band as the bad boy party animals they really were.

Alex Van Halen’s galloping Simmons drum intro sounds like a nitro-fueled dragster revving up before he switches to a Billy Cobham-meets-Buddy Rich swing that pushes Ed’s hot-rodded tapping into overdrive.

Roth’s schoolboy-in-heat lyrics are given extra punch and verve by Anthony’s high-pitched harmonies, while Ed keeps things loose and raunchy with ZZ Top-inspired bluesy finger-plucked riffs.

I’ll Wait was the album’s other synth-driven hit, with the yin of Ed’s sophisticated keyboard chords and a chorus with smooth yacht-rock lyrics penned by the Doobie Brothers’ Michael McDonald counterbalanced by the yang of Roth’s semi-goofball rants about “heartbreak in overdrive” and “such good photography!”

The guitar solo similarly provides a contrast between Ed’s melodic phrasing and fusion-esque flourishes with explosive vibrato bar noise.

When the album’s final sequence was being prepared in late 1983, no-one had any inkling that the band’s classic era with David Lee Roth would soon come to a close, yet the final two songs on 1984 delivered about as perfect a send-off as any fan could ask for.

Girl Gone Bad is simply epic and the closest thing to a progressive rock song that the band ever recorded. Ed delivered a tour-de-force performance with dynamic shifts in emotion from elegiac tapped harmonics to dark, drama-filled riffs. This was Van Halen’s equivalent to Led Zeppelin’s Achilles Last Stand with the added bonus of a truly blazing Van Halen solo heavily inspired by Allan Holdsworth.

Dating back to Van Halen’s early club days (demos were recorded in 1976 with Gene Simmons and in early 1977 for Warner Bros.), House of Pain was the only song not completely written fresh for the album, although the only element that remained from the early versions was the song’s main riff.

“I guess nobody really liked it the way that it originally was,” Ed said. “The intro and verses are completely different, and the fast part in the middle for the solo and the groove at the end are almost like entirely new songs.”

House of Pain showed that Van Halen had grown and evolved considerably over the preceding seven to eight years without losing any of their hunger, intensity and power.

Gin-scented tears

All good things must come to an end. They were too good to last. Always leave the people wanting more. These may be overused clichés, but it’s difficult to think of better ways to describe the aftermath of the 1984 album, its ambitious supporting tour and the eventual breakup of Van Halen’s classic David Lee Roth lineup.

Did success spoil Van Halen? Yes, and no. Eddie Van Halen’s ever-growing musical ambitions and desire to pursue different sonic paths collided with David Lee Roth’s incessant adoration of the spotlight and aspirations to pursue a career as a movie star.

With two diametrically opposed forces in conflict, the tensions inevitably sucked all the air out of the room until no one could comfortably breathe. Trying to outdo 1984’s success would have been an unfathomable challenge for any band, so it sadly made sense for Van Halen to end that chapter at the top of their game.

Van Halen fans both new and old maybe didn’t get exactly what they wanted, but instead they got what they needed. The Van Halen brothers and Anthony joined forces with Sammy Hagar and his growing legion of fans to take the band in a different and arguably more progressive direction it couldn’t have tried with Roth.

5150 didn’t reach the staggering commercial sales heights of 1984, but it became Van Halen’s third all-time best-selling album with 6x Platinum certification. It was also the first Van Halen album to finally reach the #1 spot on the charts. [1984 likely also would have achieved that feat, but it had the disadvantage of going head-to-head with the best-selling album of all-time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which was in the beginning of several extended periods where it completely dominated the charts for several months.]

Meanwhile, Roth put together one of rock’s greatest supergroups, recruiting the extraordinary talents of guitarist Steve Vai, bassist Billy Sheehan and drummer Gregg Bissonette to keep the rip-roaring party going full blast.

Roth’s first full-length album Eat ‘Em and Smile was nowhere near as commercially successful as the albums he recorded with Van Halen, but with Vai and Sheehan’s instrumental pyrotechnics and Roth’s inimitable character it kept the white-hot flame burning very brightly for classic Van Halen fans.

The split resulted in a Dave vs. Sammy argument as incessant as it is meaningless. For some fans, the change truly was the best of both worlds, but it didn’t last. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. Van Halen had won the victory over itself.

While Eddie Van Halen was Van Halen's linchpin and chief songwriter, the Sammy Hagar era saw the Red Rocker prove himself as a songwriter in his own right.

Coming into the band, Hagar had something of an upper hand: the Van Halen brothers were already fans of the material he had recorded with Montrose in the mid-’70s, while his solo career was already on the rise.

Therefore, it was no surprise that Hagar brought his own ideas to the fore – even if Alex Van Halen wasn’t so keen at times. Eagles Fly, which ended up on Hagar’s 1987 solo record, I Never Said Goodbye, was one such track.

“When I sing Eagles Fly, it's about being born,” Hagar tells Total Rock when asked to pick the song he enjoys singing the most from his vast repertoire.

“And once again, I had a vision. It wasn't a dream. I was wide awake, and I had a feeling in a special place. I was in a special place.”

He continues, “I showed him [Alex Van Halen] that song, and Eddie's going, ‘Wow, wow, wow.’ And Alex goes, ‘Yeah, yeah. It sounds like John Denver; it's cool.’”

Hagar explains that, at the time, Alex “wasn’t about me writing songs for Van Halen,” preferring that Eddie handle the musical composition while assigning Hagar “the lyrics and the vocals.”

However, the drummer soon did a 180 when he heard it as a fully-fledged track on Hagar’s ninth solo album – and his first solo effort since becoming Van Halen’s front man. Eddie not only stepped in as the album’s co-producer – alongside Hagar himself and David Thoener – but also laid down the low end and a quintessentially Eddie guitar solo.

“When it came out, and we finished my solo record, Alex heard it, and he goes, ‘Hey, why the fuck didn't we put that on a Van Halen record!’” Hagar says.

“I went, ‘Well, Al, if you don't remember, I can remember you said it sounded like John Denver,’ because I was playing it on acoustic guitar!”

In more recent Van Halen-related news, Joe Satriani recently recalled being approached by David Lee Roth for a Van Halen cover band – when Eddie was still alive.

A genuinely unique character, whose taste for Jack Daniel’s is only equalled by his love for classic rock ’n’ roll, Michael Anthony has earned a reputation as one of the most hard-rocking bassists of his generation.

He’s played in several now-legendary bands, with Van Halen alone selling upwards of 80 million albums worldwide, snagging a Grammy and entering the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.

But long before the arena tours and platinum-selling albums, Anthony was just another Southern California kid hauling gear into backyards, playing fraternity parties and dreaming of making a living through music.

“Snake was the first power trio I ever played in,” said Anthony in the November ’95 issue of Bass Player. “I played bass guitar and sang lead; we did a lot of ZZ Top, Cream, Allman Brothers, and Doobie Brothers covers. We were playing backyard parties when I first became aware of the Van Halen brothers.

“I was going to Arcadia High School California, and we had a carnival on our field, and they played. Back then they were called Mammoth – it was Ed on guitar, Al on drums, and some bass player. Ed was singing lead.”

Anthony later attended Pasadena City College, where the Van Halen brothers and David Lee Roth were also enrolled.

“My father wouldn't let me major in music, so I was majoring in psychology – but I took a couple of music classes, like jazz improvisation, theory, and piano to learn how to read bass clef. After about a year, my father finally let me major in music, so I switched all my classes.

“Around that time, Snake opened up for Van Halen – Roth had just joined the band, and they asked me if they could borrow our PA. Theirs had blown up.

“I'd see Alex coming from his Jazz Improv class, and I remember Roth coming over to me; he was wearing this little vest, had a cane, and his hair was dyed like a skunk. He said, ‘How do you like my boys?’ I stepped back and thought, ‘Get the fuck away from me!’ Little did I know what it would lead up to!

"A while later, Ed told a friend of mine that the band was going to be getting rid of their bass player. My friend told Ed, ‘Hey, Mike might be interested in joining.’

“I had never played with musicians like Eddie and Al before, because Snake was straightforward 4/4 rock. I mean, these guys had played Gazzarri's in Hollywood, and the biggest thing I had done was a backyard party. They ran me through beat changes and different time signatures, and we just jammed.

“Afterwards, Ed and Al asked me if I wanted to join. I thought about it for half a second and said, ‘I'm in!’ I learned five cover tunes a day so we could play parties. We eventually started playing clubs, and we also did weddings.

“We played everything from the Ohio Players to K.C. & the Sunshine Band. You would love the sight of Van Halen doing Get Down Tonight! But by the third set, when everybody was good and tanked up – boy, we'd be blazin’!

“I soon realized that my two Acoustic 150 amps weren't cutting it, because by this time, Ed had found his 100-watt Marshall. So I bought my first SVT stack and retaliated. I remember thinking, ‘I'm in the big leagues now!’”

Anthony and the boys weren't in the big leagues yet, but they were close. In 1976, Kiss bassist Gene Simmons took the foursome under his wing and produced a five-song demo, but all it yielded, said Anthony, was “a good tape.”

One year later, at a Monday-night gig at Hollywood's Starwood Club, Warner Bros. chairman Mo Ostin and producer Ted Templeman saw the band and offered them a deal. In February 1978, Van Halen hit the stores; globe-circling tours, platinum records, and the usual rock ’n’ roll excesses followed, until the negative effects of stardom started taking their toll in 1984.

“During our '84 tour, there was a lot of tension – Ed had written Jump, and it turned out to be the biggest single Van Halen ever did. Dave never liked Ed playing keyboards, but Ed finally said, ‘Fuck you!’ Then he met Valerie Bertinelli, and I think that pissed Dave off more.

“At the end of that tour, we fired our tour manager because of some skeletons we found in his closet. So Ed, Al, and I were in the studio starting to work up some music, and Dave decided he wanted to record a solo EP with California Girls. We knew he was testing the water to see how he'd do on his own. All of a sudden, the dream was over and Dave had left.

“At that point, we didn't know if the band would continue, but we eventually realized that the music was coming from us, not Dave. A lot of people thought he was Van Halen – even our record company wanted us to change our name. When Dave left the rest of us hanging, we thought, ‘What do we do now?’”

What they did was hook up with ex-Montrose singer Sammy Hagar via a recommendation from Eddie Van Halen's car mechanic (as fate would have it, he was Hager’s mechanic, too).

Their first collaboration, 5150, became Van Halen's first #1 album, and it has since sold over six million copies.

Kramer is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a golden new line of S-types, treating its most popular models to a glow-up.

The guitar brand was at the height of its powers during the 1980s shred scene, with Eddie Van Halen, Mick Mars, and Richie Sambora among the advocates of the shred-friendly axes. Its fortunes nosedived the following decade, with Gibson buying it out of bankruptcy in 1997 as it bid to restore the Kramer brand.

Half a century, then, is a major milestone, and all the big hitters are here to celebrate, and caked in a 2026 exclusive Anniversary Gold finish for good measure. Each model – taking in the 84, SM-1 HH, NightSwan, Baretta, Pacer Carrera, and Volante – features a Floyd Rose 1000 Series vibrato and black hardware.

The 84 is an alder body, bestowed with forearm and belly contours and deep double cutaways for oodles of upper-fret access. It's paired with a satin-finished bolt-on K-Speed SlimTaper maple neck with a walnut skunk stripe. That, in turn, is capped with a maple fretboard and 22 jumbo frets.

A single Kramer Eruption PRO humbucker benefits from a push/pull series/parallel switch via the Volume knob. It is priced at $999.

The SM-1HH, meanwhile, doubles its money with two Eruption PRO Humbuckers wired in with premium CTS pots and boasting Volume and Tone controls. In contrast, the series/parallel control is moved to a dedicated mini toggle.

Also featuring a full-length mahogany neck with mahogany body wings, the gilded shredder has the same fast-playing profile as the 84, but swaps in a 12” radius ebony fretboard. It’s well-specced, but also refreshingly no-nonsense for $1,199.

As for the NightSwan, the revival of a late-’80s gem packs its two Eruption Pro humbuckers closely together and benefits from a lightweight alder body with comfy contours. Its Slim-Taper maple neck, complete with a black Kramer four-bolt plate, features a 22-fret ebony fingerboard and the model’s iconic offset “Ping-Pong” inlays.

See, too, its reverse Explorer headstock and a retro-styled Volume knob that, again, has a push/pull series/parallel control, all for $999.

The headline with Baretta, which was EVH’s Kramer of choice, is its offset and uncovered single Eruption Pro humbucker, which nods to its lineage with zebra bobbins and more streamlined controls.

It sports a double-cutaway maple body, satin-finished, three-piece maple neck with ebony fretboard, and a Kramer Thin profile. There’s absolutely no fat on this 25.5” scale six-string, and it sits at the lower end of the price scale at $999.

The Pacer Carrera, meanwhile, is a more traditional Super Strat, with twin Eruption PRO buckers, expanded Master and Volume controls, and a sleek, inlay-free ebony fingerboard. Its contour-strewn body is made of maple and has a bolt-on Kramer Slim-profile maple neck, all for $1,199.

It’s no surprise that the Volante HHFR, which roughly translates to “flying” in Italian, features a lightweight alder body and is designed for lightning-fast play.

It’s a three-piece, thermally aged maple neck with a satin finish that bolts on using five ferrules for enhanced stability and should help nicely with arpeggio practice. And, more still, its KeyLock system, engineered by Senior Product Development Engineer Richard Akers, is said to eliminate neck-pocket movement and improve tone transfer.

Its ebony fingerboard is built with a 10-14” compound radius and has 24 frets and small diamond inlays. It also steps away from the rest, bucker-wise, with a Kramer USA Neptune humbucker for a wide palette, especially when paired with its five-way switch. Each position is said to be hum-canceling and uniquely voiced, hence the slightly larger $1,299 pirce tag.

“Performance has always been at the core of what Kramer stands for, and that spirit is deeply personal to me,” says Aljon Go, Product Manager at Kramer. “Every detail of this series reflects the uncompromising quality, precision craftsmanship, and player-first design that define Kramer at its best.”

Gibson has taken the Kramer essence and dialed it up to 11 here.

See Kramer for more.

And in more recent news, Gibson President and CEO Cesar Gueikian has announced that he intends to step down from those executive roles.

Joe Satriani may be filling Eddie Van Halen’s shoes during the Best Of All Worlds tour with Michael Anthony, Sammy Hagar, and Jason Bonham; however, he’s recently revealed that David Lee Roth tried to recruit him for a Van Halen cover band when the sorely missed guitarist was still very much alive and active.

“I remember in the mid-’90s, around ’95 or ’96, David Lee Roth called me and he wanted to put together a band to do Van Halen songs,” Satriani tells Thinking About Guitar in a new interview. “He went on and on about how we were the only guys who could really do it right.

“He had all these crazy plans, and I said, ‘But Dave, Ed’s still alive. He’s still making amazing records. He’s still on tour. What guitar player would ever try to imitate him while he’s still working?’ I said, ‘It makes no sense.’ And of course, I said, ‘Look, I’m not the guy.’”

Ultimately, Roth’s project didn’t transpire, and Satriani could breathe a sigh of relief. Following Van Halen’s death in 2020, though, the Surfing with the Alien virtuoso was once again approached for an Eddie Van Halen tribute.

“When he and Alex [Van Halen] called me after Ed had passed away, it made a little bit more sense, even though I tried to convince them I was not the person who could do it justice. I told them I had tried to avoid playing like Ed for so long that now I really couldn’t.”

He even tried to pitch a couple of other names for the job. “I called and said, ‘Really, are you sure you don’t want to call Nuno [Bettencourt] or Steve [Vai] , or someone obviously more well-suited to sound like Ed? Someone who has demonstrated playing this stuff live?’ But they were adamant that I was the only guy who was going to do it justice.”

Fast forward to 2024, and Satriani found himself joining Hagar on his Best Of All Worlds tour, which heavily celebrated his era with the legendary band.

When asked by Guitarist what it takes to tackle EVH’s parts live, he replied, “It’s all in the fingers; that really is true. We’ve heard Eddie play acoustic guitar, and it’s freakishly just as good as electric. I don’t know how he did that. I’ve seen players online get close, but there’s that magic thing that Eddie had, which was his personality and his heart. No one comes close to that.”

Elsewhere in the Guitarist interview, Satriani revealed the gear he uses to play Van Halen’s parts – and the level of dedication and practice required to nail them.

Wolfgang Van Halen has said his appearance at the Taylor Hawkins tribute show was “like closing a book” as he honored his late father before marching down his own path in the industry. But he knew that, had he failed that day, his career might have gone down in flames.

The son of Eddie Van Halen was flanked by Dave Grohl on bass, frontman Justin Hawkins, and session drummer Josh Freese at Wembley Stadium in 2022. Armed with his semi-hollow EVH signature guitar, Wolfgang led the band through three Van Halen classics, On Fire, Hot For Teacher and Panama, and though his tapping work and music videos with Mammoth have since nodded to his father’s glittering legacy, he’s steered clear of most things Van Halen since.

The consensus was that he nailed the set, but he knew he might not have recovered had he not brought his A-game.

“It was my way of being able to not only honor Taylor, but honor my dad by playing some of his material, and keep out of the mess,” he tells Andy Guitar (via Blabbermouth). “So it was definitely a do-or-die thing for me.”

“I was losing it that day,” he adds. “’Cause to me, it was, ‘If I don’t do this right, if I don’t serve this justice, then my life will be over.’”

As Andy Guitar says, the performance did little to expose those fears, but it was a big moment in his life and career, as he had only debuted Mammoth the previous summer, having played bass in Van Halen’s final chapter before that. The band has allowed him to move away from the shadow of his ultra-successful family and into his own light, but only because he “ended up playing it pretty all right.”

“I still made mistakes,” he confesses, “but it was all live and in the heat of the moment. Having Dave, Justin, and Josh there to support me, and being able to play with three idols of mine while doing such an emotional and difficult thing for me, was really special. I don’t think I could’ve done it without them. That was a day of catharsis, for sure.”

Wolfgang has previously admitted he harbored doubts about whether he could actually pull off playing Van Halen in front of such a staggeringly big audience – and one multiplied manyfold by the show’s livestream. Truth is, he made it look easy.

Mammoth released their third album, The End, last year as the band continues to rise through the ranks.

What is it?

For any rock guitar player, Eddie Van Halen and the 5150 moniker are nothing less than Iconic. As the title of the Van Halen album that ushered in the Sammy Hagar era, the name of Eddie Van Halen’s home studio, and his signature series of amplifiers, 5150 is synonymous with the influential, high-gain, high-octane rock that Van Halen propagated.

The original 5150 tube amp started life in 1992 as a signature amplifier built by Peavey for Eddie. After moving on from Peavey in the early 2000’s, he took the 5150 trademark with him into his own brand - EVH (Peavey continues to produce its take under the 6505 name).

Fast forward a few decades, and the 5150 III 6L6 amplifier has been brought into the modern era with the release of the EVH 5150 III Hypersonic 6L6 combos. The EVH Hypersonic series follows in the footsteps of parent company Fender’s Tone Master range, turning to digital modeling technology for the amplifier but marrying it with a real guitar cabinet to create a digitally modeled combo amp.

These digital versions of the 5150 III 6L6 should, on paper, be about as accurate as it is possible for digital modeling to be for two reasons. Firstly, all of the digital processing power is dedicated to recreating one amp well, rather than a collection of iconic amps and effects and fancy (but useful) routing in floorboards such as the Quad Cortex.

Secondly, utilizing a real cabinet bypasses digital cabinet emulation and puts the player directly in front of two 12” Celestion G12H speakers, reducing the number of digital steps between the modeled tone and your ears. We should note here that there is cabinet emulation for a direct-to-desk sound on the amp, should you need it.

So far, the Hypersonic range consists of the 5150 III FRFR speaker, the 5150 III 6L6 1x12 combo, and what I have here, the 5150 III 6L6 2x12 combo. Looking forward to getting stuck into some high-gain tones, let’s see if it delivers what it should.

Specs

• Launch price: $1,699 | £1,399 | €1,625
• Type: Three-channel digital combo amp
• Origin: China
• Output: 50 watts
• Speaker: 2x12, Celestion G12H 30W anniversary series
• Channels: Three
• Controls: Independent three-band EQ, Gain and Volume for each channel, Presence, Resonance and Reverb, Power Mode switch, IR selector
• Connectivity: 1/4" input, IR-loaded XLR output
• Footswitch: Included
• Weight: 56lbs/25.5kg
• Dimensions: 27.5”x11.8”x24.4”
• Contact: EVH

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★½

Generally speaking, one of the biggest upsides of digital technology is increased portability, but this does not apply in quite the same way when you start making digital combos big enough to house two 12” speakers. Even considering this, the EVH 5150 III Hypersonic is pretty big at 27.5”x11.8”x24.4”.

At 56lbs/25.5kg, it is also relatively heavy in the context of digital equipment (for example, the 2x12 Boss Katana Gen 3 is 43lbs), but, when compared to the 85lbs of the tube equivalent, it is a significant, back-saving reduction.

So, best avoid if you need to work with a relatively small space on stage, but thankfully, there is a 1x12 version for those who need a smaller footprint.

I say on stage, because unless you're playing live, there would be little point in buying the oomph of the 2x12 over the smaller 1x12. And, EVH has built the chassis with live use in mind, as evidenced by the thick plywood sides and reassuring metal bracings on the corners.

Big clunky switches for the power and mute functions also offer an impression of industrial strength, as do the sliders, rotary selectors, and knobs that control the I/O on the back of the unit.

The only place where I feel there is a little room for improvement is the chicken head controls that form the top half of the dual concentric setup on the top panel. They feel a little loose in use relative to the other controls, so they don't quite have the same premium feel as the rest of the amp.

The lower of the dual controls for the Green channel (channel one) and the standalone chicken head knobs for the Red channel (channel 3) happily don’t have this issue and meet the high bar that the amp sets.

Usability and features

Usability and features rating: ★★★★☆

Another benefit of digital technology is the ability to include some extra features. The Hypersonic EVH 5150 III makes use of this, but builds it around a faithful recreation of the real thing, which includes three footswitchable channels, each with its own Gain and Volume control, plus a master Presence and Resonance control, an effects loop, a sturdy footswitch, and MIDI connectivity.

A little note, as we go forward, the three channels are canonically called the Green, Blue, and Red channels. Green for clean, Blue for rhythm, and Red for lead.

The extras on this digital version include a three-band EQ for each channel (on the tube version, channels one and two share an EQ), a noise gate for each channel, and a speaker-emulated XLR out with two built-in Impulse Responses.

For running a silent stage and utilizing just the XLR output, there is a mute switch around the back.

These IRs can be swapped and changed with the EVH IR manager app. Using the app requires a firmware update for the amp, which is easy enough to do, but finding out how requires some browsing around on the EVH website's support page. I would rather have this outlined in the included manual, as it is an operation everyone who buys this amp will need to carry out.

Additionally, instead of the Power Level control featured on the tube amp, the Hypersonic version has selectable 1, 5, 25, and 50-watt outputs.

In short, there are plenty of features for almost everyone. The only omission in my eyes is a Master volume control, as with three channels that have their own independent volume, a master volume would be handy in changing the overall output of the amp without having to worry about accidentally changing the balance you have set between each of the channels.

Adding a Master to a tube amp can bring some compromises depending on its placement in the circuit, but this is a digital amp, so I can’t help but feel this is a missed opportunity.

However, the benefit of the amp being styled after something more traditional is that there are no menus to scroll through or screens to look at. It’s the upside of digital modeling with the plug-and-go sensibilities of old school tube amps.

For the most part, it’s plug your guitar in, tweak the EQ, gain, and volume to your liking, and go. A breath of fresh air in the context of digital floor boards that are getting increasingly complicated.

But that’s not to say there aren’t a few awkward quirks.

The biggest issue being the chicken head knobs positioned on top of the dual concentric controls for EQ, Gain, and Volume on the first two channels (the Green and Blue channels). The Green channel is tweaked by the lower control, and the Blue channel by the chicken head control on top (the Red channel gets its own dedicated knobs).

The top and bottom of the chicken head knobs are bigger than the control below it, and therefore, get in the way when trying to turn the lower control.

This is more than a little annoying. These controls can be done effectively, as demonstrated by Boss in pedals such as the JHS Angry Driver. So on the EVH, I find this to be a good idea that falls short in its execution.

Switching channels with the footswitch is easy, with the channel you are on properly indicated by the LED alongside the switches. Without the footswitch, the LED that indicates what channel you are on is built into the mini rotary knob that is each channel's noise gate control.

I found this confusing, initially believing, as most would, that an LED lighting up a noise gate control would indicate the noise gate being on. Nope, the noise gate is always active (turn the dial to zero to effectively have it off) and the LED indicates which channel is currently being used.

Getting back to the positive, the noise gates themselves are straightforward to utilize and a godsend on an amp with this much gain on tap. EVH has elected to avoid in-depth parameters like attack and release, and has just included one mini knob to control how severe the gate effect is.

Assuming the more in-depth parameters have been set well (we’ll cover this later - spoiler alert - they have), the result is we only need to turn the relevant gate up until the hiss goes away. Easy. And I particularly appreciate having three of them that are independent for each channel.

Having three channels with independent EQ and volume controls makes the amp a versatile beast when it comes to live use, by providing clean, rhythm, and lead sounds without the need for pedals.

Having said that, I’m sure that most of us would prefer to have a pedalboard with perhaps a nice phaser and delay to spice things up a bit, and for this, you will find an effects loop around the back, should you prefer to run things that way.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★½

Making some noise, when it’s run squeaky clean, the Green channel is a little lacking in those harmonic overtones that make a clean tone feel lively.

However, turn the Gain control up until it growls a bit, and there is a healthy, but not unpleasant, amount of high-end that is complemented by a tight low end, making for a very rewarding pushed clean tone.

Testing with both my Gibson SG and Music Man Silhouette Special, things get a little bit muddy in the low mids when that gain is pushed beyond halfway, so be careful here.

For tone shaping, the channels three band EQ sports powerful High and Mid controls, but is more subtle on the Low control. And then we have the master Resonance and Presence controls, which are both quite conservative in their effect, but help control the low-end thump and airy high end of the amp's character, without giving you enough to ruin a tone with.

Let’s face it - most of us will be looking at this amp for its driven sounds. And it does not disappoint. The Blue channel immediately adds a ton more gain, with the control ranging from a heavier crunch to all-out distortion in the first half of its travel, and then adding more than you would ever need as you push it further.

What makes it so much fun to play is that it stays tight throughout. No flubby low end here, so use that neck pickup to your heart's content. On a bridge humbucker, it’s perfect for the chuggy, high-gain, eighties rock thing, with palm mutes benefiting from that tightness.

The Red channel is similar to the Green but gets into distortion territory even earlier and has a slightly more pronounced mid-range, whilst staying super tight in the low end. In short, the perfect high-gain lead.

We also have a little space, courtesy of some digital reverb. Again, this is kept simple with just one control to adjust the amount, and is voiced with a controlled low end that keeps things mud-free even at higher settings. Being picky, I’d say it feels a little bit separate from the dry signal at lower settings, but not problematically so.

As previously mentioned, the XLR out on the back comes with two stock IRs. These are based on the EVH 5150 III cab and speaker, one with an off-axis SM57 and the second an on-axis SM7B.

Testing both, they are impressive IRs. I find myself preferring the on-axis SM7B as it is just a little rounder and has less of that digital fizz. In both cases, utilising the high cut built into the IR Loader app is a good option for mitigating that.

When compared to the real cabinet, there is a little less beefy mid-range in both, which is the sort of thing I would expect when hearing a cabinet through a microphone rather than standing in front of the real thing.

The IR loader app allows for the user to load in their own IR’s, too, so if these don’t do it for you, you are covered. Personally, with a little bit of that high cut, I would happily use the built-in IRs as a direct-to-desk solution.

Verdict

The provenance of the 5150 moniker means that there is a certain expectation on gear that bears that title, as we immediately think Van Halen and great high-gain tones. Thankfully, that is exactly what the EVH Hypersonic 5150 III 6L6 provides.

While I’m not a massive fan of the Green (clean) channel, the super tight, high-gain sounds of the Blue and Red channels are what we are all really here for.

Having three channels, each with its own individual noise gate and EQ, plus the benefits of a direct-to-desk XLR output equipped with decent pre-loaded IRs, makes the amp all any high-gain shredder will need to get through any gig. And that is in both high-volume and silent stage contexts.

The real win here is in taking cabinet emulation out of the digital equation and running a modeling amp into a real guitar cabinet and speaker. A lot of that amp in the room thing comes from the experience of being in front of a real cab, so it makes sense that this would result in a digital combo that feels real.

In short, when playing through the cab, I forgot it was digital.

The uncomfortable truth is that tubes are not going to be around forever. But if this is the future of guitar amplification, I’m okay with it.

Guitar World verdict: The EVH 5150 III Hypersonic 6L6 blends the benefits of a modeling amp with the feel of a real speaker cabinet. It plays like a real amp in a room, but with some of the upsides of digital technology, such as an IR-loaded XLR out and lower power modes. In short, despite a few usability-related shortcomings, it’s an ideal gigging solution for any high-gain player.

Also try

Hands-on videos

Dagan Wilkin

EVH

John Nathan Cordy

Joe Satriani has never been someone to do things by halves, so when he was tasked with honoring Eddie Van Halen in Sammy Hagar’s Best of All Worlds tour, he knew he needed a custom amp to nail his tone.

Naturally, he went straight to the source for help, and the late virtuoso’s electric guitar techs all pointed to one person: 3rd Power’s Dylana Scott.

“Ed’s own techs said the only person that could help was this girl outta Nashville called Dylana Scott,” the amp builder tells Guitar World. “Joe called me and said, ‘Apparently I should be talking to you.’”

Satriani is a huge Van Halen fan, and he had a specific era of Eddie’s tone in mind, since he was to be playing both David Lee Roth- and Sammy Hagar-era material.

“On our first call, he said he’d been talking to Edward’s techs, Zeke Clark and Tom Weber, describing the sound he was looking for,” Scott details. “The 5150 [in 1986] tour was Ed’s last tour with the famous Marshall. He had all the candy, but it hadn’t moved into the more modern Van Halen tone.”

After conversations with Hagar, Satriani had homed in on the band’s Live Without a Net live album from that tour, because it captured such an important tonal transition and was, err, the best of both worlds of the band’s two most distinct eras.

The resulting amp – and the one that Satch has been pushing air with on the road – is the DRGN 100. To bring it to life, Scott had one request: “Let me build the perfect racecar for you to drive.”

“Did he want more horsepower at this turn, or better traction over here, or extra acceleration back there?” she posits. “I’m a big fan of his work, so I explained that I didn’t want to watch him play a covers set. I said, ‘None of us need to see you play note for note; we need you to interpret the essence of the moment while honoring the king.’

“Obviously, I had to make sure he had all the tones he needed – the intro to Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love is like taking a flint and stone to make a spark,” she adds. “It’s a two-hour set with moments that also sound creamier.

“This amp was designed to lift Joe up the whole way through, so that even someone in the last seat of the arena would feel the buzz and stand up.”

With the DRGN 100, Scott more than lived up to her reputation, with Satriani later purring that the “harmonically rich and touch-sensitive” tube amp is “my favorite new amp.”

After a raft of choice guitar mods, it was the final ingredient needed to Van Halen-ify his rig.

Elsewhere, Satriani has opened up on the failed Van Halen tribute tour that would have seen him take EVH’s place in a Roth-fronted Van Halen, and named the two guitarists he felt would have nailed the gig better than him.

Scott’s full interview can be found in the latest issue of Guitar World. Print and digital copies can be ordered from Magazines Direct.

The Jesus and Mary Chain have claimed that Eddie Van Halen is one of the “worst guitar players in the world” and that he “ruined rock guitar” for two decades.

Speaking to Stereogum over the weekend, the Scottish alt-rock band's two guitarists, Jim and William Reid, unleashed a verbal volley against one of guitar’s most beloved virtuosos. If 2026 cooks up a hotter take than this, it might just melt the entire planet.

While stating his claim that having less gear can make players more creative, Jim Reid says, “I can play guitar, but only just. It’s kinda deliberate. I play guitar to the level I need to. Sometimes knowing too much about making music gets in the way, and it ends up back to Eddie Van Halen again.”

It’s William who then gets the heaviest blows in, dubbing Eddie one of the “worst guitar players in the world.”

“I can’t stand Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing,” he offers. “I think he ruined rock guitar all through the ‘80s and ‘90s ‘cause so many people copied him. And I just couldn’t get any of that playing as fast as you fucking can and cramming as many notes in one second as you could.

“I listen to [Joy Division/New Order bassist] Peter Hook’s riffs, and I think that’s a thousand times better than anything Eddie Van Halen could ever conjure up.”

The influence that Van Halen had on the guitar scene at the time has been widely discussed. For example, Wolfgang Van Halen once said that his dad had “kind of ruined” the guitar scene in the 1980s because it gave rise to a sea of copyist players.

That said, such sentiments have never been voiced quite so, er, enthusiastically.

Eruption alone permanently changed the electric guitar landscape, but Wolfgang argued these copyists ignored EVH’s other qualities – qualities that apparently the Jesus and Mary Chain aren't too fussed with.

In related news, Steve Lukather recently issued an update on the forthcoming Van Halen record, which will bring to light never-before-heard Eddie material.

Steve Lukather has spoken out about the new Van Halen album he’s working on with Alex Van Halen, and he can’t believe how good the songs are.

The Toto man, and a dear friend to the late Eddie Van Halen, was handpicked by Alex to help bring a posthumous EVH record to life, and while he remains coy on a lot of details during his new interview with Guitar Player, what he can say certainly whets the appetite.

As previously confirmed, Lukather won’t play a note on the album, since it was virtually complete before Eddie passed in 2020. Luke does reveal, though, that the music is one hell of a swan song for the beloved virtuoso.

“I’m telling you, this is not throwaway shit,” he attests. “When I heard them, I said to Al, ‘How fucking come you didn’t use these?’ And the answer was because nobody could write to it. So if you think this is a bunch of throwaway crap that we’re trying to Mickey Mouse together to suck the dollar out of poor, unsuspecting Van Halen fans, it’s not.”

While he admits he doesn’t know what the project will be called – he’s just Alex’s “sidekick,” he says – he sees it as a passion project that will give Eddie the send-off he deserves.

“This is not about money,” he confirms. “This is about love of the guys and trying to help. I’m not gonna be involved in an obvious way.”

Recently, Steve Vai revealed he was made privy to EVH’s vast library of unused material before EVH died and was stunned by its quality. It seems that Lukather reacted similarly when the Van Halen vault opened to him.

Lukather, onboard as the album’s co-producer, has laughed off the “ridiculous” rumors that he was essentially replacing Eddie in Van Halen, saying “there’s no need for another guitar player”. He did, however, reveal who plays bass on some of the tracks.

“It’s not pieces on the floor that have to be snapped back together and try to Mickey Mouse something together that might be sellable,” Lukather notes. “These are finished tracks with Ed and Al, and Ed’s playing bass on a lot of it. That’s all I can say right now because it’s a much bigger picture, and it’s Alex’s story to tell.”

That confirms that Michael Anthony, who played bass on all Van Halen’s albums – save 2012’s A Different Kind of Truth, which featured Wolfgang VH – is not in the picture. Nor are David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar, with the band reportedly on the hunt for a vocalist after a high-profile rejection.

So, expect one more album from the guitarist who changed the world, which will follow the release of Unfinished – a previously unheard Eddie Van Halen track that was shared by Alex back in 2024.

David Lee Roth had to fight back tears at a recent show as he reflected on his friendship and songwriting partnership with Eddie Van Halen.

The pair achieved rock superstardom together in Van Halen, and though Alex Van Halen has since blamed the failed Van Halen tribute tour on DLR’s refusal to play tribute to the late guitar hero, at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday (May 19) Roth did just that.

“Most of these songs that I wrote with Ed, we wrote in a very, very tiny little space,” Roth told his audience with a classical guitar in his lap (via Blabbermouth). Roth's current tour finds him playing Van Halen material exclusively.

“When I first walked into Ed’s room, it wasn’t even a room. It was identical to the way I grew up,” he remembers. “You had to go from the backyard to the kitchen, and you moved through what they called his room, but it was just a little alcove for a washer and a dryer – and then, ultimately, me.”

He pauses as he starts to well up, with cries of “we love you” coming from the crowd.

“He had an electric guitar, and his mom wouldn’t let him plug into the amp,” he then says. “So I would have to listen to the electric guitar without an amp, and it’d be so close that our knees would touch.

“I’d sit there with a tape recorder, go home, write the lyrics, take it back, and go, ‘I think it’s a song about running with the devil. What have you got next?’”

Roth admits that there was “friction” in their relationship, but notes that “we loved it.”

Some 30 years, world domination, and an era with Sammy Hagar at the helm later, Roth and Eddie Van Halen were reunited. Despite now being couped up in Eddie’s “multi-million dollar recording studio,” it was just like old times.

“I was sitting in the middle of the room, and I was on a chair, and I was reading a paperback, waiting on him,” the singer remembers. “When he came in, he put a cigarette in his mouth, brought a chair right in front of me, and sat down in it and scooted forward till our knees touched. That’s how I wrote the last two songs. Full circle.”

Van Halen released A Different Kind of Truth, their first album with Roth since 1984, in 2012. But for Roth, the closeness of their songwriting partnership never changed.

In related news, Alex Van Halen has teamed up with Steve Lukather to bring one final Van Halen record to life. Steve Vai has heard archival tapes of Eddie’s unreleased work, and he believes fans are in for a treat when the album is finally released. But they need a singer first.

Alex Van Halen has bid to “put the record straight” regarding Michael Anthony’s absence from Van Halen’s final reunion with David Lee Roth, claiming he was offered the gig.

After a brief second era with Sammy Hagar from 2003 to 2005, Van Halen’s third era, with Diamond Dave once again fronting the band, began in 2006, with Eddie’s son, Wolfgang, unveiled as their new bassist. But he only got the gig after Anthony ghosted them, Alex claims.

“We did call,” he tells Brazlian outlet KazaGastão. “To put the record straight, we did call Mike because we owed him that, and he just didn't answer.

“We had the same manager,” he adds. “Come on! He was important for the band.”

So, when “nobody showed up” at the studio to accompany the Van Halen brothers, the job eventually went Wolfgang, who ended up impressing Eddie and Alex during a jam.

Alex adds: “People think there were family influences in how he [Wolfgang] became part of the band, which is simply not true.” He insists the then-teenager got the job on merit

Wolfgang has said that the reunion hinged on his involvement, and with Alex’s claims, it’s easy to see why. And he even had to keep his dad in check at times. Alex, meanwhile, is glad Wolfgang has gone on to be “his own man.”

“He’s very careful that he doesn’t want to be Ed Jr,” he continues. “He was in a very tough spot. He could have just continued with the Van Halen stuff, but he decided he was his own man.”

Indeed, Wolfgang said it would have “ruined” his life had he messed up covering Van Halen at Taylor Hawkins’ tribute show as he bid to carve out his own path. He’s kept his late dad close by, occasionally recording with Eddie’s beloved Frankenstein guitar, and carrying the torch of his tapping legacy, but his band, Mammoth, operates in a whole other sphere.

And as EVH the brand updates Wolfgang’s namesake guitar, Alex is busy working on a new Van Halen album with Steve Lukather.

Steve Vai, who has praised the quality of the unreleased Van Halen he's heard, believes Lukather is “the best guy” to complete material. It was recorded during Eddie Van Halen’s lifetime and intended as a successor to the 2012 album, A Different Kind of Truth.

Steve Vai has revealed he’s heard a raft of unreleased Van Halen material and is in high hopes for the band’s highly anticipated forthcoming release, which will revive some of Eddie Van Halen's older demos.

Alex Van Halen recently caused a stir when he revealed that he and Steve Lukather were working on a posthumous Van Halen album using material the band recorded before Eddie's passing, intended as a successor to 2012’s A Different Kind of Truth.

The two rock heavyweights have a wealth of ideas to work with. And it turns out Vai has heard some of it.

“I was up at Edward’s house once, in his studio,” Vai tells Guitar Player in a new interview. “He had a room filled with tapes, and he was pulling them out, and we were listening. He would just sit, record, and play.

“I’ll tell you, nobody plays like they do when they’re sitting in their room alone,” he continues. “It was a whole library of tapes, and it was such great stuff.”

He adds that he asked Eddie about the prospect of turning his swathe of riffs and ideas into a solo album. The late virtuoso said that “he always felt that Van Halen was his solo records”.

In turn, Vai has given his blessing to the Lukather-guided project. Lukather is, he says, “the best guy to help with this” given how close Eddie and Lukather were.

However, after early rumors got out of hand, Lukather was quick to clarify his role in the album shortly after its announcement, explaining that he won’t play a single note on it after fans reacted to the news.

While details of the record remain scarce, we do know that Bad Company vocalist and recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Paul Rodgers turned down the opportunity to front it.

Former bassist Michael Anthony, meanwhile, who was replaced by Wolfgang Van Halen in the band’s latter years, has his own thoughts on how the record should be released, and such a move would render the need for a vocalist redundant.

Vai, of course, has his own chapter in the band's history, having been chosen by Diamond Dave for his solo band. He says he got the gig with a little help from Billy Sheehan.

EVH Guitars has given its famed Wolfgang model a choice makeover with new fingerboards and some glorious finishes to boot.

The Wolfgang Special Baked Maple and Wolfgang Special Baked Maple TOM, which offer new tweaks to Eddie Van Halen's signature guitar, bring baked maple fretboards to its refreshed lineup, with a choice of Eddie-approved and whammy dive-ready Floyd Rose bridges, as well as stoptail bridge and tailpiece designs.

They’re being described as “purebred music-making machines,” so saddle up. Let’s ride out.

Both models feature quarter-sawn, baked maple necks with matching 22-jumbo fret fingerboards. They're bolted onto their quirky bodies and reinforced with graphite, and the new standard, heel-mounted truss rod adjustment wheels.

As expected, they stay true to Eddie's preferred Wolfgang Backshape neck profile, delivering a 12"-16" compound radius with a hand-rubbed satin urethane neck finish.

Their basswood bodies get one-ply cream bindings, regardless of their color, and atop them sit twin EVH Wolfgang humbuckers, with many getting a Zebra colorway, nodding to their creator's DIY modding days (which never really ended, in truth).

Those pups are wired with 500K EVH Bourns Low Friction Volume Pots, a Treble Bleed Circuit, and 250K Tone Pots, as well as a three-way toggle switch which takes the Les Paul-like upper-horn position.

Although the lack of glow-in-the-dark inlays is a minor oversight, it's a well-spec'd, mid-price axe that gives players the choice of a Floyd Rose R2 vibrato, or an adjustable hardtail bridge with tailpiece and a Graph Tech TUSQ XL nut.

The Floyd also comes equipped with Eddie’s D-Tuna invention to switch between standard and drop D tunings without needing an Allen key, an engineering degree, or the patience of a saint.

But let's talk about the color options, because you'll need sunglasses for some of them. The Floyd model gets Smoked Mesquite, Caution Yellow, Ivory, Stealth Black, and Gloss black. All are gloss finishes, save the Stealth Black option, which gets a satin urethane finish instead.

There are some dazzling options here that throw it back to the SuperStrat era of the 1980s, while hardware colors are either chrome or black, depending on the body color. They're priced at $1,499 apiece.

Conversely, the TOM model delivers Gloss Black and Husk White colorways with black hardware, Oxblood with gold hardware, and this writer's favorite, Kandy Green with Chrome Hardware. These guitars are a little cheaper at $1,399.99 each, which isn't too shabby.

See EVH Gear for more.

Meanwhile, a luthier has recalled the moment when Eddie visited the EVH workshop while his Wolfgang guitar was being crafted, taking the guitar builder by surprise.

Back in April 2024, Jerry Cantrell thought that his beloved 1984 “Blue Dress” G&L Rampage – which has been used on almost everything he has ever recorded and defined the sound of grunge – had gone missing.

“I was freaking out for three or four days,” he shares in a new interview with Guitar World. “We couldn’t track it down. It was a pre-album thing, and we were doing a video and a photo shoot and then going back for rehearsal, and shit was moving around, and I lost track of it.”

Thankfully, the “Blue Dress” G&L was just misplaced, but Cantrell had previously experienced his fair share of missing guitar trauma after one of his prized possessions went missing for nearly 20 years.

“I’ve had a guitar that meant a lot to me go missing, where I was lucky to get it back, and that was a goldtop Music Man that Ed [Van Halen] gave me. Alice In Chains were on tour with Van Halen, and I got two from him,” he relates.

“One was a goldtop and was a trans blue where you could see the wood flame through the finish. The goldtop went missing when I was making Degradation Trip [Jerry’s 2002 solo album] I didn’t see it for 18 or 19 years. It disappeared, and it broke my heart because my fucking dude gave me that guitar.

As he had previously specified in another Guitar World interview, “Somebody lifted it out of the A&M studio,” but two decades later, a couple of dedicated Alice in Chains fans managed to track it down.

“[They] tried to do a sting on this kid who had it and was trying to sell it,” he continued. “He went dark on the first guy, who was from Florida. The second guy was a separate collector from San Diego. Between the two of them, it took about two weeks for me to get that guitar back… after 19 years!”

Therefore, losing the G&L, even for a mere few days, was, understandably, devastating. “When I thought that was what happened to the G&L, I was crushed for a couple of days,” he now admits.

Fortunately, the Rampage hadn't been stolen – it had just been misplaced.

For more from Jerry Cantrell, plus new interviews with Randy Bachman and Don Henley, pick up issue 604 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.

In more recent news, the Alice in Chains guitarist recently looked back on the “walk-off home run” of Ozzy Osbourne’s final show.

Van Halen was the world’s biggest rock band at the beginning of 1985. Their 1984 album had sold more than five million copies in the U.S., reaching Number 2 on the Billboard 200 albums chart (their highest position to that date, held back only by the juggernaut that was Michael Jackson’s Thriller album) and delivering their only Number 1 single, Jump. The supporting tour was a massive success, selling out all 101 shows.

Eddie Van Halen hoped to propel the band to even greater success, starting work in early 1985 on new musical ideas at his 5150 studio with Donn Landee, who engineered all six of Van Halen’s previous albums and had become the guitarist’s studio sidekick.

Meanwhile, singer David Lee Roth released the four-song Crazy from the Heat EP, recorded with Van Halen’s producer Ted Templeman and released in late January 1985.

Eddie didn’t mind the singer’s extracurricular activity at first and spoke positively about Dave’s solo record in interviews. The EP’s music bore no resemblance to Van Halen material, and the general consensus among the band members was that Roth deserved the opportunity to release some creative steam as long as it didn’t interfere with the band.

However, when Roth showed up at a handful of sessions to write lyrics and work on melodies for the next Van Halen album, he seemed detached and disinterested. Eventually, he stopped showing up altogether, choosing to conduct interviews and promote his EP instead.

One evening in late March, Eddie invited Dave to his home to discuss Van Halen’s future plans. The guitarist was shocked but not surprised to find out that Roth had received an offer from CBS Studios to star in a film with a $20 million budget.

While Ed wanted to release the next Van Halen album before the end of 1985, Dave wanted to take a full year off to make his movie. The singer suggested a short summer stadium tour as a compromise, but the guitarist refused to go out without any new material. Roth also invited the band to record music for the film’s soundtrack, but Van Halen shot that offer down as well. A stalemate was reached, with both parties refusing to budge.

Many sources cite that meeting as the end of Van Halen’s classic era with David Lee Roth, but the singer’s departure actually became official and final almost four months later.

Dave assumed that his bandmates would wait for him to return to Van Halen after the film was finished, while Eddie was convinced that the singer would eventually come to his senses and join the band in the studio.

The situation became more complicated when the band fired its manager, Noel Monk, after he demanded a new contract that would have paid him more than any individual band member. Without an authoritative mediator to guide and advise them, the friction grew.

Initially, Ed pitched the idea of making an album with several of his favorite singers.

“We bounced around the idea of doing a record with me writing all the music and having everyone from Joe Cocker to Phil Collins to Mike Rutherford sing a different vocal on each track,” Van Halen told Steven Rosen in May 1986. “But Alex talked me out of it. He said that would be just a one-shot project, and it made me realize that I wanted a family.”

Ed also reached out to Pete Townshend around this time to pitch ideas for a collaboration, but that effort never went further than the exchange of a few telegrams.

When the guitarist found out that Roth was putting together a band to record music for his movie and had reached out to Billy Sheehan (who accepted) and Yngwie Malmsteen (who declined), he realized Van Halen should probably start looking for a new singer as well. He made a genuine offer to Scandal vocalist Patti Smyth, but she turned it down because she was pregnant and concerned about the band’s reputation as hardcore partiers.

News of Roth’s and the Van Halen camp’s extracurricular activities appeared in music publications like Rolling Stone, convincing many fans that the band was finished.

Privately, Eddie Van Halen clung onto hope that Roth would return, but his attitude soon changed thanks to some matchmaking assistance from his friend, exotic car dealer Claudio Zampolli. One day in late June 1985, Sammy Hagar dropped by Zampolli’s L.A. shop on Wilshire Boulevard to check out Ferraris.

Ed had purchased several Lamborghinis from Zampolli, and during a recent friendly chat he mentioned that he was looking for someone to replace Roth. Zampolli told Hagar about Van Halen’s predicament; Hagar gave Zampolli permission to pass along his phone number to Ed; Ed called to set up a meeting and audition.

Hagar was an enticing prospect to replace Roth. His solo career was on an upward trajectory at the time, with his three most recent albums (Standing Hampton, Three Lock Box and VOA) achieving Gold certification and VOA ascending toward Platinum, thanks to the ongoing popularity of his need-for-speed anthem I Can’t Drive 55. In between he joined the supergroup Hagar Schon Aaronson Shrieve (HSAS), which showed that he could be a team player as well as a solo frontman.

The Van Halen brothers were also big fans of the albums Hagar recorded as lead vocalist for Montrose in the mid-’70s. An added bonus was that Hagar had recorded the Montrose and Paper Money Montrose albums as well as VOA with Van Halen’s producer Ted Templeman.

Ed remained unwilling to give up on Roth until July 15, 1985, when Hagar dropped by 5150 to play and record a few new songs with the band. As Van Halen played the first song, Summer Nights, Hagar came up with lyrics and a vocal melody on the spot. “In 20 minutes we had a complete song,” Edward told Rosen. “We all freaked out.”

“Believe it or not, I just started singing summer nights for the chorus,” Hagar told John Stix in 1986. “They all looked at each other and said, ‘Wait a minute, the guy can sing!’”

Although the Van Halen brothers and Michael Anthony decided to hire Hagar on the spot that day in July, the public announcement followed a few months later, even though the news leaked almost immediately.

In August, the band issued a statement confirming that David Lee Roth was no longer a member of Van Halen. However, Hagar’s official induction waited until September 22, 1985, in the middle of Hagar’s final concert performance with his former backing band at the Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois.

Actually, co-host Gary Beaty of The Nashville Network prematurely spilled the beans during the live broadcast a few seconds before Eddie Van Halen joined Hagar on stage, confirming the rumors once and for all.

Before the duo played their first notes, Sammy fumbled with a banner and joked that it read, “My dick’s too small.” From that point onwards it became obvious that the Red Rocker was not going to be David Lee Roth 2.0, as the former Van Halen frontman would never speak of “Little Dave” in such self-deprecating terms.

Hagar and Roth both were high-energy, dynamic performers who let expletives fly like a sailor with his dinghy caught in a zipper, but Hagar was more down-to-earth and less intimidating, with more working-class appeal.

Hagar’s lyrics may not have been as clever as Roth’s – Sammy’s sexual innuendos were more single than double entendre – but they were direct, to the point and arguably more relatable, if perhaps also too obvious.

While Roth was prone to unapologetic braggadocio, Hagar offered a less threatening approach and more modest personality – consider Roth’s Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love compared to Hagar’s Why Can’t This Be Love, or “guaranteed to satisfy” in Ice Cream Man to “you’re never satisfied” in 5150.

After the Farm Aid appearance, the new line-up of Van Halen spent most of October 1985 writing and completing material for their first album. Recording started in November at Ed’s 5150 studio with engineer Donn Landee behind the mixing console.

The band wanted Ted Templeman to produce the album since he had already produced nine albums in total with Hagar and Van Halen, but much to their dismay they discovered that Templeman was unavailable due to his commitment to produce David Lee Roth’s Eat ’Em and Smile.

Instead, Ed and Donn presumed the producer roles until December, when they hired Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones, who previously co-produced all of his own band’s albums.

“Sammy and [us] were all thinking we didn’t want to do the whole thing on our own because we need an outside opinion,” Van Halen said. “Mick was playing in town with Foreigner and called Sammy to invite him to the show. Sammy asked if Mick wanted to co-produce our album and he said yes.

“Actually we were almost done with it, but Mick helped us organize everything and polish it up. He changed a few things, especially on Dreams, which is like a different song than it originally was. He got a hell of a vocal performance out of Sammy on that song, too.”

Eddie Van Halen’s guitar tone on 5150 went through a dramatic sonic shift compared to the albums he recorded with Roth. Although he previously used an Eventide H949 Harmonizer on various earlier Van Halen tracks, here he used it almost nonstop to create a stereo chorus-style effect by using one H949 panned right with a slight pitch detune, another H949 panned left with a different micropitch detune setting and his dry signal panned to the center.

Landee occasionally patched in delay from a Roland SDE3000 or Lexicon PCM70 to add space and reverb-like resonance. The guitar’s midrange was also more focused, providing more breathing room for Anthony’s bass.

5150 was also the first album that Ed recorded without using his faithful original Frankenstein guitar, now replaced in the pecking order by the Kramer 5150 guitar he built himself, featuring a single Seymour Duncan JB humbucker and Floyd Rose vibrato.

Previously he tuned his guitar down ¼ to ½ step to accommodate Roth’s vocals, but here he generally used standard pitch. For 5150, Ed used his 1958 Gibson Flying V tuned down a half step (to D#) with the low E string tuned further down a whole step drop D tuning-style (to C#) to record the main rhythm track and overdubbed the solos using the Kramer 5150.

Good Enough features Ed’s Kramer 1984 guitar with the low E string replaced by a low A string from a bass (tuning low to high is AADGBE) to provide the vibe of a baritone guitar on the rhythm parts while allowing Ed to still play his regular lead parts.

Ned Steinberger gave Ed a Steinberger GL2T headless guitar with a TransTrem system at the 1985 Summer NAMM convention in New Orleans. Ed immediately put this new toy to good use, writing the songs Summer Nights and Get Up only a few days after first receiving it and expertly employing the TransTrem system.

“You can use the vibrato bar to take whole chords up or down and they’ll stay in tune,” he said. “You can also lock the bar in different positions to instantly transpose keys. It’s kinda like a capo, but you can go up or down in pitch.”

Other guitars featured on 5150 include a Fender Stratocaster with the bridge/middle pickup setting on Best of Both Worlds and a Kramer Ferrington acoustic-electric for the acoustic guitar tracks on Dreams. Ed’s number one 1968 Marshall model 1959 Super Lead plexi remained his amp of choice, plugged into a single 4x12 Marshall cabinet miked with either Shure SM57 or SM58 mics.

Ed’s keyboard excursions continued to evolve on 5150, with several songs prominently featuring synths. An Oberheim OB-8 preset with a sweeping sawtooth oscillator patch provided the ersatz distorted “guitar” riff on Why Can’t This Be Love. Organic-sounding OB-8 string patches layered with an acoustic Steinway piano with MIDI controller capabilities provided lush textures on Dreams and Love Walks In.

Ed played Fairlight CMI and E-mu Emulator II sampling keyboards for the horn section hits and slappy bass on Inside, which unfortunately instantly made it the most dated-sounding track Van Halen ever recorded.

When the newly revamped Van Halen released 5150 on March 24, 1986, the album proved that lightning can indeed strike twice. The album benefitted from the momentum of 1984’s phenomenal success, and Sammy Hagar brought along a new group of followers to compensate for many of the David Lee Roth die-hards who broke ranks.

It was also the first Van Halen album to reach Number 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, reaching that milestone only one month after its release date, although it took about eight years to reach the stunning 5x Platinum sales figure that 1984 achieved in just one year.

Of course, 5150 also ignited a David Lee Roth vs. Sammy Hagar debate that still rages today, even as it becomes more meaningless and trivial with the passage of time. Although Roth didn’t match his previous band’s success when he teamed up with the incredible line-up of Steve Vai, Billy Sheehan and Gregg Bissonette to record Eat ‘Em and Smile, he delivered one hell of an album to satisfy the old-school fans.

Meanwhile Van Halen 2.0 (a.k.a. Van Hagar) maintained a large dedicated following and found new fans as they provided a perfect soundtrack for the remainder of the dayglo/just say no Eighties.

As Hagar sang on perhaps his most eloquent performance with Van Halen, it was the best of both worlds.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Backstage Auctions has launched a new collection of historical musical items, which includes gear used by Eddie Van Halen, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and more – and it's expected to fetch a cumulative figure of up to $1.5 million.

The auction is already live and taking bids, with storied and oddball pieces – many from the collection of the late Small Faces founder, Ian McLagan – making up the lots.

It includes the Don Musser acoustic guitar that Eddie Van Halen reportedly used on two 1990s Van Halen albums, Balance and Van Halen III. It can be heard on the likes of Take Me Back, Without You, and Neworld.

According to a 1995 Guitar World interview, EVH had bought the acoustic from Norman's Rare Guitars, and it was regularly put to work at 5150 Studios.

Also featured is Eric Clapton's stage-played 1974 Fender Strat, which Ronnie Lane also played after it was gifted to the Small Faces/Faces guitarist circa 1977.

See also Keith Richards' 2005 semi-hollow Duesenberg Starplayer Outlaw electric guitar, which sports a unique mosaic-mimicking finish described as a “custom pearl finish.” It was a birthday gift from Richards to McLagan, and it features chrome skull knobs to really tap into the Outlaw vibe.

There's also a movie star up for grabs... sort of. When Elvis Presley was filming Viva Las Vegas, he fell into a pool with a guitar, and when it was discovered to be water-damaged, a Gibson acoustic was drafted in for the remainder of the scenes. Yes, that back-up guitar is up for auction.

McLagan's 1965 Telecaster, customized with a Strat neck and featuring a “custom-painted psychedelic pickguard,” is also of note. Bought for his first show with the Small Faces, it was later used by Steve Marriott to record Tin Soldier and All or Nothing.

It was originally Cream, but that finish was stripped off to reveal a natural look in 1969. That same year, Peter Frampton hand-carved its neck pickup hole to accommodate a Gibson humbucker salvaged from the SG that Townshend had been brutally smashed to pieces during a show at the Marquee Club.

Consequently, Backstage Auctions has dubbed it “a singular piece of rock and roll history.”

Bidding is now open. See Backstage Auctions for more.

Donn Landee, a key figure behind the shaping of Van Halen’s sound, has died from natural causes aged 79, Van Halen News Desk reports.

The recording engineer was a longtime collaborator with Ted Templeman, Van Halen’s original go-to producer, and was a pivotal figure in the building of the band’s 5150 Studios in the early ‘80s.

Landee was involved in recording the band's 1978 self-titled debut album as they carved out a reputation as one of rock’s brightest new stars, and remained part of the band's inner circle for their next seven studio albums.

When Templeman jumped ship to produce David Lee Roth's debut solo album, Eat 'Em and Smile, Landee assumed his place at the helm, co-producing 1986's 5150 and OU812 two years later.

The first Van Halen record he was not part of was 1991's For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, after he abruptly left the music industry. He would, however, go on to remaster a slew of VH records later down the line.

Landee was also the one who came up with the name 5150, which he’d overheard on police radio. It referenced the California Welfare and Institutions Code for involuntary confinement of a mentally unstable person deemed to be a danger to themselves and/or others, which was ideal, given that Eddie had dubbed the studio an “asylum.”

“It was all Donn’s magic,” Eddie Van Halen told Guitar World of the mammoth task of building 5150 Studios. “When we needed to find a console, Donn said that United Western Studios had a Bill Putnam–designed Universal Audio console that we could buy that he was familiar with.

“We went to take a look at it, and it was this old, dilapidated piece of shit that looked like it was ready to go into the trash. Donn said, ‘Let’s buy it,’ and I was going, ‘What the hell are you thinking?’ Donn used to work for the phone company, so he was an expert at wiring things.”

Vitally, this desk was almost identical to the desk that Templeman had used to record their first five albums, and Landee’s know-how helped turn Eddie’s home-studio dreams – originally intended for demo recording – into a stunning reality.

“Donn was involved with the design. I certainly didn’t know how to build a studio. It was all Donn’s magic,” Eddie told GW.

“We had grown really close and had a common vision. Everybody was afraid that Donn and I were taking control. Well…yes! That’s exactly what we did, and the results proved that we weren’t idiots. His approach to everything was genius.”

Donn Landee might not be a household name, but he had his finger on every single guitar riff that turned the band into megastars, and the band recognized his talents ten times over.

Recently, Alter Bridge became a rare group outside of the Van Halen family to record at 5150 Studios, with Tremonti left to reflect on the “emotional” honor of tracking at the fabled home of EVH, which took a white lie to build.

Joe Satriani has been a key figure in honoring the music of Eddie Van Halen over the past few years, but if he’d had it his way, there may have been another virtuoso carrying the torch in his place.

Back in 2022, rumors of a potential Van Halen reunion tribute tour began to circulate after Jason Newsted said he’d been approached by Alex Van Halen for a project that ultimately “fizzled” out.

Eventually, Satch would link up with Sammy Hagar for The Best of All Worlds – widely seen as the next best alternative to a Van Halen tribute tour – but before that, he was heavily involved in the ill-fated project that also featured David Lee Roth.

However, when Alex and Roth sounded out his availability for the band, Satch tried to distance himself – suggesting they instead hire Nuno Bettencourt.

As Satch explains in an interview with David J. Maloney, “It started really when Dave and Alex had called and they wanted to put together a band, and they were insisting that I was the guy to do it, and I kept saying, ‘I’m not the guy. Like, call Nuno.’

“He can really do it, and there’s thousands of kids around the world who dedicated their life to sounding exactly like Ed.”

For Satriani, stepping into a role that would focus solely on the music of Eddie Van Halen didn’t sit quite right with his own ambitions, especially since it was a sound he’d consciously worked hard to distance himself from.

“I said, ‘I’ve always tried not to sound like Ed.’ I’m a huge fan, but like I’ve tried to respect that.’ But they were insistent,” he adds of his approach. “And we rehearsed, we came really close to doing our first show, but it all kind of started to fall apart.”

That the project failed to get off the ground is well-documented. In 2024, Alex Van Halen revealed that David Lee Roth's refusal to pay tribute to Eddie Van Halen during the proposed shows meant they couldn’t go ahead.

But when it failed, Satch fielded another call from another former Van Halen member – but the outline was different.

“When it seemed like what was going on in the family and the band members was getting really out of hand, Sam called,” Satriani continues.

“And he surprised me by saying, ‘Look, I know this: you've been going through this thing with those guys, and it’s insane and everything. How about if we did a retrospective tour – not an Eddie Van Halen tribute thing, but where we get to do Montrose, Hagar, Chickenfoot, my stuff… even some David Lee Roth-era Van Halen?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that could [work].’”

It’s not the first time Satch recommended a player for a high-profile guitar gig. Earlier this month, he revealed he’d put Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal’s name forward for the Guns N’ Roses gig after hearing Axl Rose was on the hunt for Buckethead’s replacement.

Elsewhere in his chat with Maloney, Satriani opened up on the hand injury that forced him to find new ways to play his songs.

Fender Master Builder Andy Hicks has looked back on his early days as a guitar builder – and recalled the moment he received a surprise visit from Eddie Van Halen, who came to oversee the making of his signature guitar.

After various partnerships with the likes of Kramer, Peavey, and Music Man, Van Halen began working with the Fender corporation to build his Wolfgang signature guitar under the newly formed EVH brand.

Around that time, Hicks had started cutting his teeth on the Fender production line, and after a stint shaping necks at the Jackson Custom Shop, he soon found himself making necks for the Wolfgang. Little did he know Van Halen himself was popping in to inspect how things were getting on.

“It’s Fender – we have tours all the time,” Hicks tells Premier Guitar of the day he met Eddie Van Halen. “This guy comes over, leaning on me, and he looks like some dad wearing a baseball hat. Then I’m like, ‘Oh, Eddie Van Halen is just standing here watching us work.’

“The guy I was working with was in the middle of complaining: ‘Man, these stainless steel frets. With just these Wolfgangs, we’ve gotta do 12 stainless steel necks today.’ Eddie [playfully] said something along the lines of, ‘I’m sorry my guitar is such a pain in the butt.’ It was incredible.”

The pair survived the embarrassment of putting their foot in their mouths in front of the late legend, and Hicks’ stock would continue to rise. Soon, he was moved away from the production line to build bespoke electric guitars for the stars, including Iron Maiden’s Adrian Smith.

But his EVH story arc didn’t end there. Before he moved over to the Gretsch Custom Shop – which is still part of the Big F family – Van Halen played a friends-and-family show at the L.A. Forum. Everyone who had helped build Eddie’s Wolfgang guitars was invited with a +1, and Hicks invited his dad, who encouraged his passion for the guitar from a young age.

“My dad was sitting next to Tom Morello, telling him that his son made Eddie Van Halen’s guitar,” Hicks laughs. “I had to say, ‘Dad, please stop talking to Tom Morello. And also, I didn’t make his guitar. Chip [Ellis] made his guitar. I make Wolfgang guitars.’ He was so excited to talk to somebody, and he just happened to be talking to Tom Morello.”

In related news, Hicks was part of a Master Builder roundtable last year, where he offered his theory as to why some of the most famous Fender guitars are so heavily worn. Meanwhile, speaking to Guitar World last year, Hicks' colleague, Paul Waller, detailed what he believes is the heart and soul of a guitar.

Coca-Cola has enlisted Steve Vai to reimagine the Van Halen classic, Jump, as an anthem for the 2026 FIFA World Cup – and yes, it's got shredding galore.

One of the world’s biggest sporting competitions, the 48-team soccer tournament is being hosted by the USA, Canada, and Mexico this summer. To celebrate, Vai has lent his virtuosic hands for a lead-laden version of the track.

Vai’s licks pepper the song like confetti, with whammy bar wails, luscious harmonies, and a flash of tapping – in a nod to the song’s co-writer, Eddie Van Halen – characterizing its tasteful but impressive guitar solo.

“I never know what might come across my desk as an inquiry, but this was a taker,” he says of the wild reworking of the track, which also features Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, Colombian vocalist J Balvin, and American singer-songwriter Amber Mark.

It also continues Coca-Cola’s tradition of reworking a classic track in honor of the World Cup, having been an official sponsor of the competition since 1978.

Van Halen released Jump in December 1983, and it became the band’s first and only song to top the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. It was also nominated at the 27th Annual Grammy Awards, losing out on Best Rock Performance to Prince’s Purple Rain.

Despite its success, Eddie initially had to work hard in order to convince the band to put it on the record.

“When I first played Jump for the band, nobody wanted to have anything to do with it,” EVH told Guitar World in 2014. “Dave said that I was a guitar hero and I shouldn’t be playing keyboards. My response was that if I want to play a tuba or Bavarian cheese whistle, I will do it.”

The track has been covered countless times, including a percussive acoustic version by Mike Dawes and an all-star live performance by Billy Idol, Steve Stevens, and Derek Sherinian.

Meanwhile, Alex Van Halen says a new Van Halen record was virtually finished before Eddie passed away. The project, which includes Steve Lukather, is now looking for a vocalist after Paul Rodgers turned them down.

Wolfgang Van Halen has proved himself a phenomenal guitar talent – but he didn’t learn it from his dad, who he has previously called a “great guitarist but a terrible guitar teacher”.

So much so, in fact, that Eddie once phoned fellow virtuoso Paul Gilbert to ask if he could give Wolfgang lessons – but they never took place.

In a new interview with Guitar World, Gilbert has revealed what caused him to pass on teaching the young Van Halen.

“I would have loved to get together with Wolfgang, but we were just getting ready to go on a really long tour,” he says.

“[I said,] ‘Ed, that would be great. But you know, the flight’s tomorrow and I won’t be back for three months.’ By that time, I think whatever Wolfgang needed to know he had figured out.”

Ultimately, the lessons never came to pass. But were Gilbert to approach them today, he would likely take a different tack, as his teaching style has changed over the years.

“I realized not everybody should play like me,” he reflects. “So I try to listen to them. My goal is, I want to make things easier, see what they're doing and go, ‘There's an easier way to get that done.’

“I always have a plan B, like, ‘Well, if it doesn't work for you, that's OK.’ If I took a lesson from a Nashville guy on hybrid picking, I'd be like, ‘That's impossible for me.’ I'm never going to do that technique ever, for whatever reason. It just doesn't match my physiology.”

Gilbert isn’t going to force anyone to learn a technique that won’t help with what they want to play. But he isn’t adverse to showing them abilities they may never be able attain, either.

He admits he has developed a certain nostalgia for his early VHS instructionals – and is thinking of reviving the kind of woodshedding that changed the game for many aspiring shredders.

“The original way I taught was I wanted to show off a lot… and everybody loved it! I was very popular. Then I was also like, ‘Well, you shouldn’t do that, because you're just showing people stuff that is out of reach.’

“Lately, I've been thinking I should probably get back to that. I think it's inspiring, and [students] will still get something from it.”

In fact, Gilbert has found the urge to burn up the fretboard hard to resist of late, as evidenced on new album WROC (Washington’s Rules of Civility).

“There’s this athletic element where you want to prove that you can still swim – like you’re [23x Olympic medalist] Michael Phelps, ‘I can still swim just as fast as I did when I was 22!’” he said.

“That’s a hard thing to resist. And obviously, there are a lot of places where I didn’t resist and went crazy.”

Michael Anthony has weighed in on the developments surrounding a prospective new Van Halen record by suggesting the direction he thinks it should go in.

In March last year, Alex Van Halen announced out of nowhere that he was working with Steve Lukather on a new Van Halen record. Later, Luke asserted he’d never “play a guitar note on a VH song”, but it was confirmed the two were indeed working on Van Halen material together.

That material, it was recently revealed, was old demos that had been tracked before Eddie Van Halen passed away. In fact, Alex says the band had practically finished an album before the electric guitar legend died.

Lukather had been brought onboard to help piece the project together and, in another twist to the tale, Bad Company’s Paul Rodgers had been approached to sing on the record.

Rodgers, it’s since been revealed, turned down the approach, saying he was in his “acoustic, zen phase of life”.

For Anthony, though, that’s just as well. In his mind, the new Van Halen project should be kept instrumental – and leave the spotlight firmly on Eddie’s playing.

Speaking to WNCX (via Ultimate Classic Rock), the former Van Halen bassist offers, “The way I personally feel about it is, if they wanted to do it justice, [the best idea would be] to just finish it up as a great instrumental nod to Eddie [Van Halen].

“You know, because getting a new singer in there, we're not forming a new band, and then you've got to work on lyrics and all that stuff. And who knows when anything would be put out at that point.”

In Anthony’s mind, whatever unheard material that Eddie recorded before he passed away should be front and center on the new record. Having a new vocalist to go with it – and, by extension, another artistic vision in the mix – would simply detract the project from what it should be: a tribute to Van Halen’s guitar greatness.

It's unclear when this Van Halen record will be released, but by the sounds of it, Lukather and Van Halen are still busy working on it. In 2024, Alex releasedUnfinished – the last song he worked on with his brother.

Recording at Eddie Van Halen's legendary 5150 Studios is an experience most mere mortals can only dream of. Holding some of his gear, including the iconic Frankenstein, and examining it up close, is another beast altogether.

Alter Bridge's Myles Kennedy and Mark Tremonti got to do both – and it got their creative juices flowing.

The band was given the opportunity to record their self-titled eighth album at Van Halen’s studio with the blessing of longtime friend and former Tremonti bassist – and Eddie’s son – Wolfgang Van Halen.

“Wolf was incredibly kind enough to bring that offer up with our manager,” Myles Kennedy reveals in the latest issue of Guitar World when asked how this enviable opportunity came about.

“We were like, ‘Really?’ We knew the history of all the incredible music that had been made there. Just the fact that he trusted us enough to come in and not totally ruin the legacy really meant a lot.”

“It made us want to be better musicians and take advantage of the moment we had,” adds guitarist Mark Tremonti.

“When you have your guitar in your hand, and you're playing in that studio in the same spot those guys played in, there's no slop coming out. It's got to be on point. You’ve got to man up, you know?” Or, perhaps more aptly, “You’ve got to band up when you're in that situation.”

“If you know you're going into this sacred ground where all these incredible riffs have been constructed and recorded, the last thing you want to do is show up empty-handed,” continues Kennedy. “It was definitely fuel for the creative fire.”

As for whether the band encountered any of Van Halen's iconic gear during recording, Kennedy replies, “There were pieces of gear there they had set out, but nothing super iconic. We weren’t tracking with Frankenstein.

“Have I held Frankenstein? Yes,” he teases. “Was it a total, Excalibur-level experience? I don't even know how to articulate that, but I got emotional – that was a pretty special moment.”

And it seems like Eddie himself would have approved of the band recording at 5150, as the Van Halen legend once attended an Alter Bridge show when Wolfgang was filling in on drums.

For more from Alter Bridge’s Mark Tremonti and Myles Kennedy, plus exclusive interviews with Joe Perry and Danielle Haim, pick up issue 602 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.

As Alex Van Halen and Steve Lukather continue to work through archival material for a new Van Halen album, iconic British rock vocalist Paul Rodgers has explained why he declined the chance to front the band.

There’s been much talk – and mystery – about Alex Van Halen’s forthcoming Van Halen project. The drummer temporarily broke the internet last year when it was revealed that the late Eddie Van Halen’s longtime friend Steve Lukather, of Toto fame, had been tapped up to get the project moving. Soon after, Lukather made moves to clarify his role in the album’s creation, and that he wouldn’t be playing a single note on it.

Last week, in an interview with Brazilian outlet KazaGastão, Alex Van Halen shed more light on the album, explaining that it had been written and mostly recorded during EVH’s lifetime, and intended as a follow-up to 2012’s David Lee Roth-fronted LP, A Different Kind of Truth.

The project’s efforts, he said, were now going into finding a frontman, with Diamond Dave and Sammy Hagar, who’s been pedalling his Best of All Worlds tribute tour in recent years, reportedly not under consideration. Rodgers, however, was, but turned the gig down.

Consequently, Rogers – who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Bad Company in November – became a fixture in the rumor mill. As such, he’s taken to social media to burst that bubble and state that his health, which led him to miss the Rock Hall ceremony, was cause for concern.

“To squash the rumours, my health is good. I feel fit and strong, and I am rehearsing to perform on March 2nd at the Adopt the Arts Sound and Vision Awards in Palm Springs,” he writes. “Thanks to Van Halen for inviting me to work on a track with them, but I am in my acoustic, zen phase of life.”

Indeed, there’s certainly pressure and baggage that comes with fronting the band, given the heights they reached with both DLR and Hagar behind the mic. That was something that the one-time vocalist, Gary Cherone, felt when he joined the band in 1996. Speaking to KNAC in 2009 (via Van Halen News Desk), he admitted it was an “intimidating” gig.

And so the search goes on. Alex Van Halen previously hoped that Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant would get involved in the project. One could assume that, having asked Rogers, Plant has already distanced himself from the project.

The other caveat here is that Rodgers was invited to work on just one track. So was it intended as an audition, or could the pair be planning an all-star cast of singers? Only time will tell.

So far, there has only been one posthumous Eddie Van Halen recording, with Alex releasing the last song they wrote together, Unfinished, to promote his book, Brothers.

Alex Van Halen has shed yet more light on the elusive Van Halen album that he’s seemingly been working on with Steve Lukather – and it’s closer to being finished than any of us previously thought.

In fact, according to Alex himself, the record effectively is finished – and it sounds like it was finished before Eddie passed away in 2020. The only thing the band was missing was a vocalist to sing on the new tunes.

Last year, Alex Van Halen caused quite a stir when he revealed that a new Van Halen album was in the works. At the time, he said Lukather was onboard to help finish it, and while Lukather initially confirmed this, he later said, “I will not ever play a guitar note on a VH song ever!”

As Lukather explained, he was simply brought on to help go through a “ton” of unfinished recordings that Alex and Eddie had put together that “never saw the light of day”.

Now, Alex has set the record straight, revealing that an entire Van Halen album had practically been completed prior to Eddie’s death, complete with drums, bass, and – most notably of all – Van Halen’s guitar parts.

When asked if Eddie’s old recordings were going to be used for this next album, Alex explained to KazaGastão (via Blabbermouth). “Well, these are recordings that were going to be the next [Van Halen] record, and that were stopped because [Ed] didn't live that long.

“The drums are already recorded. The drums, the guitar and the bass are already in there,” he continues. “What we didn't have is a vocalist, and obviously the subtleties and the glue – we call it the glue or the spackle.”

Van Halen confirms these recordings also feature Wolfgang Van Halen on bass, and that he and Lukather had attempted to recruit Paul Rodgers to sing on them: “It was very difficult for him to bring himself to say, 'No, I can't. Count me out.' I respect that.”

As for Lukather’s involvement, Alex says he was brought in to help smooth over the missing “glue” and “spackle”. He was on hand to help sort through the recordings and provide some "connective tissue”.

“Luke can play anything,” Alex notes. “I went to Steve's house several times and we played a piece of music and he goes, 'Yeah, I got it. That's it. That's all we need.' Then he can do all the connective tissues. He knows where to put the solo, as far as structure and organization.

“I've been fortunate enough to have Steve Lukather, who was a good friend of Ed's, and we're working on putting a record together, but it has to be of the quality and the level of where we left it. Not just to say, 'Hey, here's some music that we made. If you like it, that's great.' No. It has to be the quality that we expect.”

When the album will see the light of day remains to be seen. There’s been no official word about the project as of yet, and all that’s known has been pieced together from Alex’s various interviews. But, whatever the case, the new Van Halen record is very real, and it will be coming.

Back in 2024, Alex Van Halen shared Unfinished – the last song he ever wrote with his brother.

To mark what would have been Eddie Van Halen's 71st birthday on January 26, his brother and Van Halen drummer, Alex Van Halen, shared a snippet of their childhood – and Eddie's precocious talent – on social media.

The muted clip shows a young Eddie joyously strumming an acoustic guitar, shortly before the camera pans to a grinning Alex. The heartfelt video is accompanied by a short quote from Wolfie – “‘Al, you and dad changed the world of music’ - Wolfgang Van Halen. January 26th, 1955- October 6th, 2020.”

In related Alex Van Halen news, it was recently confirmed by the drummer on the Metal Sticks podcast that he was working on a new record, with Toto guitarist and session legend Steve Lukather allegedly involved in the project.

“I’m getting ready to do this record with Lukather and a couple other people,” said Van Halen. “It should be exciting.”

In an interview with De Telegraf from March 2025, Van Halen commented, “Ed and Steve Lukather were very good friends and they often worked together. There is no one who can do this process with me as well as he can.”

Lukather later clarified his apparent involvement in what many speculated to be a new Van Halen record, stating, “I will not ever play a note on a Van Halen song!”

In more recent Van Halen news, a new compilation album of old Van Halen rehearsals with Eddie, Alex and Wolfgang has reportedly been released – and it doesn’t feature a singer.

Whether igniting Billy Idol’s biggest anthems or unleashing fiery flamenco on his own, Steve Stevens has never played it safe and never stood still.

More than 40 years into his career, he remains sharp as ever. As Idol’s long-time right-hand man and collaborator, Stevens helped define the sound of the ’80s but refuses to be just a relic of that era.

With a recent Billy Idol album, an ambitious tour and new signature gear, he continues to set stages ablaze with the same passion and precision that made him a guitar hero. Here, Stevens joins us to reveal how he’s been able to stay relevant in an ever-changing musical landscape.

The latest Billy Idol album, Dream Into It, dropped earlier this year. Has your songwriting process evolved over the years?

As far as Billy and I go, nothing’s really changed: it’s still two guys in a room with acoustic guitars. We’ve always felt that if a song works acoustically, you’ve got something. If it only works once you layer technology on top, maybe it’s not strong enough. That’s always been our litmus test.

But we also had other collaborators this time like our producer Tommy English, plus Joe Janiak, who we’ve worked with before, and Nick Long, who we had worked with a little bit in the past.

These guys are younger, but they grew up with Billy Idol’s catalogue. They’re excited about the legacy and they know how to bring in elements from the past without just recycling it. That kept things fresh.

What unexpected influences found their way onto the record?

One of the bands that influenced me and Billy early on was Suicide, the New York duo of Alan Vega and Marty Rev. When Billy first moved to New York, we must have seen them three or four times. They had this primitive, lo-fi electronic thing going.

So when we used synths or drum machines on this album, we wanted them to feel stripped-down, raw and almost primitive. These days, plugins can sound massive, so we went the opposite direction and kept it small. Those raw textures worked really well with my guitars.

Lyrically, Billy wanted the songs to reflect his life story. We knew he had a biopic film coming out this year [Billy Idol Should Be Dead], so it made sense to tie the record to his journey. Even though I wasn’t with him back in England where he started, I’ve certainly been there since he arrived in New York. Here we are 42 years later, still working together, so there’s a lot of shared life experiences to draw on.

How did you approach your guitar tones for this record?

I’m old-school, so I like to just plug straight into an amp. I’ve got my Friedman Steve Stevens signature head and my Knaggs guitars. Where I did experiment was in creating soundscapes. Since we didn’t want keyboards dominating the record, I used plug-ins and effects to get textures with the guitar.

That was kind of the concept even back on Rebel Yell. We started recording it back in ’83 when all these records were out with tons of keyboards and we didn’t want to sound like everyone else. I remember telling our producer, Keith Forsey, ‘Let me try it on guitar first. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll add keys.’ And most of the time, guitars carried the weight.

Live, how do you approach material from albums such as Charmed Life and Cyberpunk that you didn’t play on originally?

Funny enough, I’m usually the one saying I want to do tunes off those albums because I love interpreting them; it’s almost like doing a cover song. I mean, I’m a Billy Idol fan as well as his guitar player.

I remember when we did Prodigal Blues from Charmed Life, we played an acoustic version and I approached it almost like a Ry Cooder tune.

Billy said, ‘Wow, where did you get that idea?’ and I just told him, ‘I listened to the song and that’s the way I heard it.’ We do that a lot. I get to reinterpret the songs, sometimes even using a guitar synth, and it’s such a great challenge.

Tell us about your new Ciari Steve Stevens Signature travel guitar.

I came across a video of this folding guitar that fit into a backpack. I understand mechanical design a little bit so I thought, ‘Wow, this looks cool.’ As a touring musician, I always have my laptop and a guitar with me for writing, laying down tracks and even recording stuff for other artists, but I’ve always been nervous about travelling with a guitar and checking it at the airport as baggage. The Ciari guitar looked like a great solution.

I contacted [Ciari Guitars founder] Jonathan Spangler whose background was in [medical device technology], and I thought, ‘How do you go from that to designing guitars?’ [Laughs] But the mechanics were incredible.

I started travelling with one, and eventually Jonathan asked if I’d be interested in doing a signature model. We put in custom Bare Knuckle [Ray Gun] pickups made exclusively for this guitar along with an ebony fingerboard, coil-taps and even a tuner built into the pickup ring. It’s invaluable on the road and I use it on stage for our encore every night.

You’ve been in the spotlight for decades now. What’s been the key to staying relevant without chasing trends?

I think it’s always been cool to like Billy Idol, and our records were never something you could pigeonhole. I came from the rock side with guitar heroes like Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, a little prog, some new wave and New York punk.

Then you have Billy with the punk-rock/Elvis thing, and our early producer Keith Forsey came from working with [Italian composer] Giorgio Moroder on dance records like Donna Summer. So, because we’ve always had this gumbo of different styles, we were never pigeonholed when it came to writing music.

Even though we had our biggest success in the ’80s, Billy’s roots go back to 1977 London. I think that’s served us really well. He’s got a timeless image and people appreciate that. He’s a real-deal rock ’n’ roll star. Honestly, we sound better now than we did back then.

You’ve worked on many side projects over the years.

I was fortunate in the ’80s because, as a sideman, people approached me probably more than if I’d been tied to a band. I got offers from Robert Palmer, Joni Mitchell, Michael Jackson and, of course, Top Gun. I was able to do all those one-offs while still working with Billy.

I like working with artists outside my comfort zone. For example, I worked with Ben Watkins [of Juno Reactor] on soundtracks like Once Upon A Time In Mexico and The Matrix. I love his records and wanted to understand how they were made, like sampling, loops and all that early ’90s electronic stuff. I like working with flamenco players and world artists, too.

The worst thing would be if someone asks me to do something for them that sounds like Rebel Yell. That’s exclusive to Billy Idol and I don’t want to retread; I turn down those requests.

Speaking of flamenco, didn’t you do a flamenco record at one point?

Yes, it’s called Flamenco A Go-Go, released in 1999. After a run playing with Vince Neil, opening for Van Halen for about six weeks, it just got to be total rock ’n’ roll excess [laughs]. I came off the road and had to reassess why I was even playing guitar.

One of my first loves is flamenco and my first guitar teacher was a flamenco guitarist. I remember going to see Paco de Lucía and that reignited this spark in me. I stopped playing electric guitar for a year. I went to Japan, France and England to make that record and travelled the world with just my nylon-string guitar.

When you’re playing genres other than rock, do you feel more creatively challenged?

Absolutely. One of the unique things about my style is how I was influenced by early synthesizers and keyboards like Keith Emerson with The Nice, Rick Wakeman, all that stuff. A lot of my guitar ideas come from keyboard sounds from the ’70s.

Same with flamenco rhythms applied to my acoustic work. I also listen to a lot of film scores and classical music.

Their arrangements are incredible. For me, being a successful guitarist is about coming up with parts that move the song along and not just doubling the bassline. I always want a guitar part that’s independent.

Are you consciously thinking ‘keyboards’ when you’re playing or does it just happen naturally?

Definitely consciously. Take the middle of Rebel Yell, during the ‘I walk the world’ section. That guitar line is me thinking of Emerson’s Lucky Man solo [Emerson, Lake & Palmer]. I’m not thinking guitar. Same with orchestral-style chord voicings.

On Flesh for Fantasy, for example, those chords are influenced by Allan Holdsworth but also by Rick Wakeman’s use of 9ths and 7ths. I never just play straight major or minor. There’s always something extra.

You’ve worked with many different artists over the years. Who else is on your bucket list?

Peter Gabriel. I love everything he’s done and I think he would be incredible to collaborate with. I enjoy working with artists that have influenced me. I got to share a stage with Neil Young once. When I got my first decent acoustic guitar, I played a lot of his stuff so it was amazing to play on stage with him.

What’s important, especially after decades, is not forgetting that feeling you had when you first picked up the instrument. You can’t let mortgages or taxes creep into your head. You’ve got to stay excited.

Thinking back to the ’80s, there was a lot of pressure to be able to shred, but you didn’t really fall into that.

I wasn’t from LA. I didn’t grow up watching Van Halen thinking, ‘Oh shit, what do we do now?’ A lot of guys did. Eddie shook up the world, no doubt. I became friends with him later, but I never wanted to play like him. Record labels were signing anyone who could tap and shred. The good ones, like Warren DeMartini and George Lynch, found their own voices, unlike guys that were just Eddie clones.

But, really, my true love is collaborating on a good song. I’m definitely not looking for my moment of glory three minutes into a song, waiting for the guitar solo. I enjoy being part of the band more than anything and having that dialogue with the guys on stage, playing and locking in with the drummer.

Dave Friedman claims you were very hands-on when it came to designing the Steve Stevens signature tube amp.

[Laughs] Yeah, Dave and I go way back, before he was even building amps. I’d moved to LA and my live rig was in bad shape so he rebuilt it for me. It started as a good Marshall ‘Plexi’-inspired amp with a great master volume. Then we expanded by adding a clean channel and we just kept refining it from there.

To my ears, I’m just replicating my favourite early ’70s records, especially the English ones and the glam stuff like T. Rex, Bowie, Sweet. Those records always had amazing guitar sounds. Those are the guitar sounds that I like to hear.

Tell us about your touring rig.

Dave Friedman built my rig for this tour, [it’s] all pedals now. I use a Fractal FM3 for delays, chorus and harmonies, a custom wah from Oxbow Studios that nails the Hendrix-era Vox sound, and I’ve also got the Rockaway pedal that I designed with J Rockett, which is like a Klon but with a graphic EQ.

Also there’s a couple of Ernie Ball volume pedals, a ring mod sequencer… I change things a lot. That’s the fun part about using pedals. It’s easy to switch stuff in and out.

We’re using in-ears, so no cabs on stage. I worked closely with several companies to develop my own IRs [impulse responses]. I went to front-of-house and compared my mic’d cabs to the IRs, and the IRs sounded better. A lot of players fool themselves with their stage sound and don’t realise that the audience is not hearing what they’re hearing.

With IRs and a great front-of-house guy, my live tone is more consistent record-quality. I used to hate in-ears, but I’ve learned how to make them work using specific reverbs, house mics blended into the mix and other little tricks. Now I can hear everything clearly without blasting my ears.

Don’t you miss that wall of sound behind you?

I’m 66 years old – I’m too old for that now [laughs].

• Dream Into It is out now via Dark Horse.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Eddie Van Halen's 5150 Studios was, at the time of its construction in 1983, almost as groundbreaking as the man's playing.

Even for a band like Van Halen, who were by 1983 headlining shows to many thousands of people, the traditional record company hierarchy still ruled. Eddie Van Halen's shattering of the electric guitar rulebook didn't necessarily matter much to the band's label, Warner Bros. – hits were the order of the day.

That hierarchy asserted itself in the form of the band's producer, Ted Templeman, who pushed for the band to focus on bankable singles, wherever they came from, in lieu of artistic progression – a tale as old as time. This dichotomy came fully to light with the band's acclaimed, influential, but slower-selling 1981 record, Fair Warning, and its covers-heavy '82 follow-up, Diver Down, which indeed produced the sort of hits Warner craved.

Bursting at the seams with ideas as he was, though, Eddie Van Halen had no interest in becoming best known to the public as a virtuoso who found his greatest commercial success with re-workings of others' material.

Going forward, he wanted the space – a space – to work up original material without someone looking over his shoulder, reminding him of commercial obligations, and without racking up those dreaded and formidable per-hour studio tabs.

Now under the proud stewardship of his son Wolfgang, 5150 Studios was originally envisioned by Eddie Van Halen as more of a personal workshop.

Ever behind on the times, record label suits still saw proper, established studios as the only environs in which a successful record could be made (see the absurd saga of Boston's enormously successful debut album, where executives demanded guitarist Tom Scholz re-record his home demos in exacting detail, but in a professional studio.)

“I didn't initially set out to build a full-blown studio,” Van Halen explained to Guitar World in a 2014 interview. “I just wanted a better place to put my music together so I could show it to the guys.”

Workshop or something more, though, there were some hurdles to clear first...

“Back then, [Los Angeles] zoning laws disallowed building a home studio on your property. I suggested that we submit plans for a racquetball court,” Van Halen told GW.

“When the city inspector came up here, he was looking at things and going, ‘Let’s see here. Two-foot-thick cinder blocks, concrete-filled, rebar-reinforced… Why so over the top for a racquetball court?’ I told him, ‘Well, when we play, we play hard. We want to keep it quiet and not piss off the neighbors.’ We got it approved.”

Much to the surprise of even the guitarist himself, though, the band's longtime engineer, Donn Landee, had a plan to level 5150 up from its original plan to a one-stop shop studio.

“Slowly, the studio turned into a lot more than I originally envisioned,” Van Halen recounted. “Everybody else was even more surprised than I was, especially Ted. Everybody thought I was just building a little demo room. Then Donn said, ‘No man! We’re going to make records up here!’”

You'd think the powers that be would be thrilled – no more worrying about studio costs! But this also meant a lack of oversight, the label surrendering control of the recording process to the artists, who would now theoretically be free of the pressure to put a lid on experimentation, due to time (and therefore cost) constraints.

“When Ted and everybody else heard [the plans for a full home studio], they weren’t happy,” Van Halen said.

Nevertheless, the album that became 1984 was the first to be recorded at 5150, and if you're reading this, you probably know how that went. A #1 hit single, an incredible 10 million copies sold – Van Halen's insistence on doing things their way, in their own environment, paid off handsomely.

Though labels obviously still keep a close eye on the progression of their artists' recordings, the ever-increasing ease of home recording (without having to build anything resembling a top-of-the-line studio like 5150) has rendered the you-need-the-professionals-around attitude obsolete – one can hardly imagine a C-suite figure sternly requiring that home studio loyalist Billie Eilish re-record tracks at Electric Lady.

As Van Halen told GW upon 1984's 30th anniversary, the album's monster success was a vindication of his singular, un-meddled-with vision, and further proof that labels needn't always fear their artists taking the reins of the recording process.

“Everybody was afraid that Donn and I were taking control. Well… yes! That’s exactly what we did, and the results proved that we weren’t idiots.”

Wolfgang Van Halen has reiterated his claim that too many guitarists are unable to look past the flashy aspects of his dad’s playing, highlighting another facet of his virtuosity that doesn’t get enough recognition.

On a new episode of the Cody Tucker Show, Wolfgang champions a rather different aspect of his dad’s musicality.

“I think everybody looks at him as Mr. Tap, and he’s Mr. Shred, but I think that’s just a flavor of what he did,” he explains (via Blabbermouth). “And I think it’s the fact that he was such a good songwriter and rhythm guitar player, which allowed him to be the shredder guy on top of it.

“There are plenty of people who are just great shredders, and they’re just running through scales and stuff, and that’s not as interesting,” he adds, echoing recent comment he made about the appeal of Taylor Swift's music.

Wolfgang also singles out another underrated guitarist in his book, AC'DC's lesser-championed Young brother, Malcolm.

He says, “Obviously, Angus is very in your face and dancing around, while [Malcolm] was just in the back, but I think he is the greatest rhythm guitar player in history. He just had such a grit, and he’s absolutely one of my favourites.”

In related news, Wolfgang recently spoke to Guitar World about his dad, Allan Holdsworth, and his unintentional Van Halen-isms, and explained his two distinct approaches to tapping.

What is it?

Five years ago the guitar world lost Edward Van Halen, a leading light and sonic visionary who shattered the ceilings of gear, technique and music itself. We are left with a legacy not only of his songs but also the innovative products he helped create.

Back when Ed was developing his legendary ‘brown’ sound, which can be heard on the Roth-era Van Halen albums from ’78 to ’84, high-gain amplifiers didn’t exist.

His techniques for squeezing out new levels of rich saturation without pedal assistance have influenced the guitar amplifiers that now bear his initials.

While some celebrity endorsers may be happy to lease their name simply for a kickback, Edward was not that guy. His critical perfectionism is lore among many techs and designers, such as Chip Ellis at Fender and James Brown at Peavey.

Indeed, Edward was known to leave a guitar feeding back on top of a dimed tube amp for days at a time for stress-testing purposes! As such, the EVH range is built with this ‘military-spec’ ethos at its core.

The original 5150, developed alongside amp designer James Brown, was released in 1992 and has become what is widely considered as a default ‘best-in-class’ high-gain amp head.

With a Soldano-influenced preamp achieving high levels of modern gain, the 5150 amps come in two main flavours – EL34 and 6L6 variations.

The 6L6 power valves are used to provide clean bold power, whereas the EL34-equipped models tend to produce a little more midrange growl, especially when pushed hard. It has since been released in a variety of versions, sizes and wattages while largely retaining its sonic DNA.

The Iconic series came out in 2021, bringing the 5150 sound to those with more modest budgets by replacing the huge array of preamp valves with a hybrid preamp circuit composed of valves and solid-state technology. Construction-wise, the head has a well-made, robust feel, although there are subtle clues to its lower price point.

‘Speakerless recording’ and ‘direct to PA’ use on silent stages are both provided for with the speaker-emulated XLR output and power amp mute switch.

The rear panel is also graced with an effects loop, which is not only to be used as a portal for your time-based effects but also as an input for any other already preamplified signal to access the power section, footswitchable boost, reverb, resonance, presence and Power Level switch – great for modellers and pedal-based preamps.

Finally, the aforementioned Power Level switch toggles between two settings: the full 15 watts and quarter power. At this lower setting, every ounce of goodness is preserved but at levels unlikely to aggrieve those around you.

Specs

• PRICE: $659/£589/€742
• ORIGIN: Indonesia
• TYPE: 15W valve head
• VALVES: 2x ECC83S, 1x EL34
• OUTPUT: 15W to 4W via ¼-power switch
• DIMENSIONS: 508 (w) x 254 (d) x 242mm (h) 
• WEIGHT (kg/lb): 10/22
• CABINET: MDF
• CHANNELS: 2 plus boost
• CONTROLS: Gain, Volume and voicing switch (Overdrive and Burn) per channel; Low, Mid, High shared EQ, Boost volume, Reverb, Resonance, Presence
• FOOTSWITCH: Supplied 2-button for channel selection and boost
• ADDITIONAL FEATURES: Speaker emulated XLR
• CONTACT: EVH Gear

Usability and sounds

Selecting Channel 1, which is signalled by a green LED, it sounds articulate and transparent enough (but admittedly, it’s not usually the main selling point of this style of amp).

While it doesn’t seem to nod to any specific historic amplifiers, it has an even response with clean, deep lows and plenty of sparkle, making it an ideal partner to the high-gain channel.

We also have a front-panel overdrive button to bring mid-gain levels of drive to this channel, providing some chunky overdrive and sustain. Reaching for the digitally derived reverb, we’re met with a heavily pre-delayed short spring-type sound. Possibly not the most inspiring reverb we’ve encountered, but it will certainly provide a halo around your notes.

Switching to the main course, Channel 2, the roaring gain hits you instantly. This amp can scream with all the power Edward’s legacy demands, but the sustain and definition also grab your ear and indeed your pick.

There’s a familiar chewiness to the notes and a slight but helpful sculpting to the midrange, eliminating any boxiness. Tight palm-muted riffs are a 5150 party piece, and this amp is every bit the generous host, just like its larger forebears.

The presence and resonance further boost the clarity and loudness without harshness or excessive whomp.

The gain range has a sweet spot somewhere between 4 and 6, where the percussive grab and sustain meet a good balance, pickups depending.

The architecture of this amp is worth a mention at this point, too, since we’re getting more power-section saturation here than in the higher-powered versions, both EL34 and 6L6 variants. In the preamp section, and in keeping with all the Iconic models, we find a hybrid of solid-state and valve gain. Purists, stay cool: all the classic 5150 tones are present.

The Burn button engages the additional voicing for the second channel, yielding even more full-bodied richness along with a good dash more of saturation. Genuinely glorious to play, this Burn function brings us a little closer to the full-tilt of the eight ECC83-loaded flagship 5150 model, allowing those legato runs and pick harmonics to fly.

The EQ section, used by both channels, has well-chosen ranges but has a nicely balanced tone with controls around 6 for our humbucker-equipped super-S. We enjoyed the extra focus and definition on tap via higher settings of the middle control, too.

The Resonance control dialled in that solid bottom-end often necessary for contemporary heavy styles; Presence, unsurprisingly, adds the sparkle but without any harshness or brittleness. Behind the scenes, a helpful noise gate has been cleverly integrated to tighten up the response accordingly at high levels of gain and more so when the Burn function is deployed.

Our solo flights are given wings with the level-adjustable footwitchable gain boost, placed post effects loop, which is one of the many facilities that positions this amp just as much for stage use as it does for studio and home use.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★½

All the grin-inducing firepower of the full-flight EVH 5150 is packed inside this stripped-down model, though with subtle differences that (while maybe appreciable only to those very familiar with the original) don’t detract from the classic tone.

Indeed, the slight extra power-section growl adds back a little warmth that may have been affected by the hybrid solid-state/valve preamp design.

Guitar World verdict: The wide-ranging features, from the footswitchable boost to the speaker emulated output, will certainly have you covered for most eventualities. If you, like many players, find 15 watts (or even the quarter-power setting) hits a sweet spot in the loudness department, then this tribute to a legend is worthy of your attention.

Hands-on videos

Kyle Bull

Amps, Pedals and Pickups

• “With its tone knob backed off this thing gets sasquatch-hairy without losing clarity. It’s a surprisingly killer stoner rock machine”: EVH SA-126 Standard review
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

40 years ago, Maryland native Paul Reed Smith took a chance on starting his own guitar company with no idea how things would pan out. It’s a good thing he chose to roll the dice.

He’s since become one of the world’s most respected builders – someone whose creations encapsulate the very notion of a well-crafted and custom-made boutique instrument.

Early on, he’d made guitars for Peter Frampton, Al Di Meola and Carlos Santana, and having witnessed firsthand how well his innovations had been working out for them, he launched PRS Guitars at the 1985 NAMM Show, debuting the newly designed Custom 24.

It’d be fair to say a lot has happened over the four decades since then, with top-shelf musicians like John Mayer, Orianthi and John McLaughlin signing up to become signature artists, as well as the more metallic players from bands like Alter Bridge, Opeth and Periphery.

While it’d be fair to say Smith’s output has taken some degree of influence from the classic formulas pioneered in the ’50s, models like the Custom 24 are notable for having their own kind of identity – from the 25-inch scale length that sits right in between the original Gibson and Fender designs to the custom bird inlays, jaw-dropping flame finishes and highly dependable tremolo system.

With the U.S.-made Core line retailing for several thousands of dollars, there were many years where these guitars were generally regarded as instruments for doctors, dentists and lawyers. That all changed in 2001 with the launch of the overseas-produced SE Santana, which kick-started a whole line of models marrying quality with affordability.

Since then, the line has expanded with various semi-hollow, extended range and piezo options – building up a fierce reputation as the best guitars you can find within their price range. It’s been one hell of a journey, says Smith, whose company now stands as the world’s third best-selling brand.

If you could go back in time and talk to the young man just starting out, what would you say?

“Don’t stop – it’s going to take you longer to mature than you think, but you’ll survive, so don’t worry about it too much!” I had a dream once, and I’ve never told anyone this, but I heard this loud voice and woke up in a cold sweat. The words I heard were, “It’s 10 times more complicated than you ever imagined.”

And that’s been true, from finally getting the pickups right for John Mayer, getting our necks to remain stable and our finishes to not injure the tone. I decided not to be a hermit – like “Nobody gets to talk to Paul!” – and instead, be the kind of person who talks to everybody.

What do you think has helped separate you from every other brand?

Guitars are tools for a job. I remember watching Carlos Santana playing the Oscars, and all I wanted was for the guitars to stay in tune and do what he needed. I just want my guitars to do their job.

I don’t sit there and feel this sense of pride, like, “I made that.” I just hope the performance goes well. You only get one shot when you’re on the Oscars. You break a string? You’re dead. That’s it – sharp bridge saddle? Done. It only takes one thing to go wrong.

How’d you get into building?

There are two kinds of people. One will say, “I’ve got nothing to offer” and people will say, “No kid, you come with me.” Then you’ve got the other kind who keep shouting about what they have, and everybody is like, “You’ve got nothing. Shut up and go home!” I was in group two.

Some of the musicians I’ve worked with are in group one. They’d go to the studio and get told to sit in a chair and not move. Brent Mason is that way. He’d send in demos of himself singing, because he’s a great singer, and they’d ask, “Who is on guitar?”

When they found out it was him, the deal was done. I’d show people my guitars and everybody would say, “No, no, no!” But nice people like Carlos Santana would say, “What have you got?” He didn’t care about what anyone else thought.

You had to make your own luck, to some degree.

Well, I didn’t get invited to make Eric Clapton a guitar at 13. I started my journey because I wanted to play guitar, but like oil and water, it ran away from me. But if I opened a case on the counter of the biggest music shop in Washington, D.C., it would draw a crowd. The world was saying, “This is what you have to offer,” but it still wasn’t “Come with me.”

I was told my whole life that if you make something magical, the world will beat a path to your door. What a load of bullshit. If you make something magical, you might be able to get an appointment for 15 minutes.

Guitar makers come around once every 30 years, and I’ve studied them all. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve put guitars in cases and said, “Go do your job.” I don’t need to be there when the case is opened.

I also realized you can be a nice guy and get no orders, or you could be a difficult human being and the world will give you tons. It’s nothing to do with how you are, it’s to do with the caliber of the art you make. Guitars will sound good and play well regardless of how nice the builder is.

You were a custom builder for high-profile artists before launching your own company.

I made a deal with all of them saying if they didn’t fall in love with the guitar, I’d give them their money back. Carlos would say, “You mean, if I don’t love it, I don’t have to buy it? Under that deal, I’ll take it!” At that time, asking $2,000 for a guitar was outrageous. I think $900 was the ceiling. When we came out with a guitar at $1,000, it was pretty out there.

I remember having a meeting with our reps and all of them telling me we can’t do this. It’s not that I wanted to charge more; it cost more to make because it took more time and the parts cost more money. That’s just the way it was – and is.

Ted McCarty was an early mentor. What do you remember about him?

He wasn’t famous when I met him. He was a forgotten man, and I love that he got put back on the map. The last time I took him to NAMM, I rolled him around in a wheelchair and everybody came out to say goodbye to him, knowing it was the last time. He was cool, a real champion.

He’d fall asleep and then I’d wake him up saying, “Ted, you’ve got an interview,” so he’d do that and go back to sleep. He was kinda like the grandfather I never had. He trusted me. He handed us the baton, like in a relay race.

The SE line felt like a long time coming. It’s incredible how close they can be to your Core models.

That was our goal. At one point, the SEs were going to go away; we were having trouble with sales. And all the guitar teachers in America made their students buy SEs because they couldn’t teach kids how to play guitars that wouldn’t stay in tune. The teachers saved the line and we were back at the races. But it was almost done. That happens a lot in the guitar business.

Your guitars are no longer just for doctors, dentists and lawyers. Did that perception ever bother you?

No. The reason people would say those things is because doctors and dentists would have enough money to buy early Private Stocks and 10 Tops. When the S2 and SEs came out, that was over. Did it bother me? No. What bothered me was that one time I saw a catalog that said, “Best fit and finish in the entire industry” on our page, but on the Gibson page it said, “The sound of rock and roll.” I thought to myself, “Wrong comment on the wrong page!”

Frankly, there’s a new sound we’ve come up with on our TCI guitars that doesn’t sound like a Gibson, Fender, Les Paul, SG, Strat, Tele, Ibanez or anything. It’s a humbucker that sounds like a single coil, and I couldn’t be happier.

There’s a lot of speculation out there about where tone comes from. You’ve always seemed to be on “team wood”.

According to the internet, the only thing that’s important when you play a Stradivari violin is the Neumann microphone hanging over the top of it. People say the same about guitars. I don’t buy it. That means dead strings mean nothing. I mean, really? Put Vaseline all over your strings, pluck it and tell me your guitar sounds the same. I just don’t buy it.

What I do buy is that the pickup is half of it, but it ain’t all of it, no way. For some people, if a guitar has no sustain, they buy a compressor. If it has no after-ring, they buy a reverb pedal. I understand that. I mean, Jimi Hendrix had a Uni-Vibe, a wah-wah, this and that, but I’m sorry, if you listen to the rhythms on The Wind Cries Mary, that’s just him playing a new guitar and amp and he sounds gorgeous.

I don’t buy the simplistic view. You can’t take one of the only pieces I have away from me, saying it makes no difference. Alright then, make a guitar out of balsa wood and rubber, then add your pickup. I just don’t buy it.

What’s the greatest sound you’ve ever heard from a PRS on an album?

Smooth by Santana. I went to Japan when that song was a hit and it was the sound of Tokyo. You walked down the street and every store with speakers outside would be playing that song. I was in a grocery store yesterday and that song is still playing. Out of all the PRS guitars I’ve made, the one used for that song had the most impact.

He got something like 10 Grammys for that song. He walked into my office after that, slammed the door and said, “I swear to God I haven’t changed,” basically telling me the fame hadn’t gone to his head. And he said thank you to every single person in my factory. In the Jewish world, we call him a mensch, the very highest level of human being. He was spectacular that day and has always been.

Who would you love to work with that you haven’t had the chance to yet?

Jimmy Page, except I did make a guitar for him. He used one of our guitars on the Outrider tour, and it was some of the best tremolo work I’d ever heard. I did make a guitar for Eddie Van Halen, but that’s a long story and he’s gone.

People don’t know this, but Jeff Beck had a PRS at home and he loved it. He told me I’d never see him with it but he used it to record. We’ve been trying to get it back; it wasn’t part of the auction this year, but I know he loved that guitar. Of course, he’s not with us anymore either – and the same goes for Stevie Ray Vaughan. I could say Eric Gales, but he’s played our guitars plenty of times.

Joe Bonamassa told me that the first guitar he bought with his lawnmower money as a kid was a PRS McCarty. I like Joe, but I don’t think we are in his destiny right now. There are an awful lot of people playing PRS guitars that you don’t know about, but I do know they do. So I’d have to say David Gilmour.

I’ve met him, he’s a sweetheart and was really nice to me. The way he plays guitar is very written and intentional. American players are more like wild Mustangs – they just go for it. English players look for more beautifully written parts.

Apparently, David spent two weeks on the Comfortably Numb solo. That’s the story. I don’t know if it’s true, I don’t even care if it’s not true, it’s just a good story.

What can we expect from PRS over the next couple of years?

I’d like to see the McCarty IIIs and TCIs accepted. It’s staggering, the amount of artists playing the Silver Sky, which came out of us retooling an old 1963 pickup. I played a Charcoal Phoenix at our 40th-anniversary party. That went well. The new John McLaughlin went well. I’d like to see this stuff establish itself.

You have to remember Les Pauls were out of business until Slash picked one up. Strats were out of business until Hendrix picked one up. Then people like Danny Gatton, Roy Buchanan and Bruce Springsteen brought Teles back.

The guitar market is slow to move. I want some of our new products to get their feet more grounded in the longterm evaluation. I would like to see more acceptance across the board.

• Find out more at PRS Guitars.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

A new, unheard album of Van Halen songs has reportedly been released.

Sidelining the age-old David Lee Roth versus Sammy Hagar conversation, the new compilation album comprises instrumental recordings pulled from the soundboard during rehearsals for their 2007 tour.

As Van Halen’s final iteration – featuring Eddie’s son, Wolfgang, on bass – prepared for their debut tour, the group, sans singer, rehearsed tirelessly.

The material, which included run-throughs of Unchained, Runnin’ with the Devil, and Hot For Teacher, were recorded at 5150 Studios between November 2006 and January 2007. The recordings have been compiled and release by writer and filmmaker Andrew Bennett, who was documenting the band’s activity at the time.

“Eddie, Alex, and Wolfgang Van Halen were rehearsing full set lists twice a week,” a description of the album reads. “And since this was prior to the return of Dave, these recordings are performed with no singer. Finally, no Sam versus Dave debates.”

Bennett’s two-week spell in the heart of the band was documented in his 2020 book, Eruption in the Canyon: 212 Days & Nights With the Genius of Eddie Van Halen. It came two years after Bennett was sued by the group and prevented from releasing a documentary featuring ‘from the vault’ footage of 5150.

There's been no word from the Van Halen camp at this time concerning claims of copyright.

“I had the honor to film numerous jam sessions at 5150,” Bennett says. “During this time, the engineer would give me the uncompressed files from various rehearsals. These tracks are a new way to hear the genius details of the band.

“I hope that when you drop the needle on this record player, your reaction is, ‘Holy shit! I have never heard Van Halen like this.’”

Head to VH Sessions for more.

Late last year, Alex Van Halen sent the internet into a frenzy when he said he was open to using AI to turn unfinished riffs and ideas from the late Eddie Van Halen into full songs.

Wolfgang Van Halen was only 16 when the EVH 5150 III dropped in 2007. Since then, the guitar amp his father Edward made famous has become a huge success.

With that, Wolfgang has made an observation, telling GW, “I feel like you can’t be in a metal band without at least having a 5150 or using a ripoff of some sort.”

“It’s one of the most successful amp brands of all time,” adds Matt Bruck, the man who helped EVH develop the amp. “The legacy continues. We were incredibly fortunate to have Ed for the time that we had him. I’m humbled and honored by what it is, but I’m not surprised.”

“There’s a lot of pride involved,” says Van Halen, who plays 5150 IIIs live and in the studio. “I certainly have no problem representing and using it at every opportunity. The amp is really Matt and my dad’s baby. I’m just happy to be here and see it happen.”

What do you remember about how this amp was put together?

Bruck: The process was long and difficult, because the amp was reimagined from the ground up, which meant we had to establish a new foundation to build up from.

This meant a new chassis and formulating the transformers, which are amazing, built like a tank, and over spec’d – the way they should be if you’re going for something great.

Van Halen: I remember Dad testing it up in the studio. You could hear it from the bottom of the house, this slight feedback. As you went up toward the studio, it started to get louder. Then you opened the door to the first room, and it was a little louder.

When you opened the door to where the guitar was, there was a guitar sitting there, with every knob pinned, feeding back. He literally kept it there for a week, just to crash test it and make sure it didn’t explode. [Laughs] I think that’s the most rigorous testing an amp could go through.

Bruck: I wrote down all this shit so I’d have some facts, but I forgot about the story Wolf just told. I’m so happy he laid it out because it’s true. We were just getting to the end of development, which took about a year and three quarters, and the last phase was called “crash testing.”

Was “crash testing” a phrase Eddie coined, so to speak?

Bruck: It was where he would just try to destroy a piece of equipment. [Laughs] It was so when it went to market, it would be reliable. He just dimed the thing, left it leaning against the cabinet, and created this eternal feedback loop. I was terrified the place was going to burn down.

What was Eddie’s reaction to that?

Bruck: I was saying, “It’s going to get hot. It’s going to explode. We’re going to have a fire.” He was like, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll see how long it goes.” After about five days, he was like, “Okay, it passed the test.” That gives you insight into the uncanny genius and how much of an outside-the-box thinker Ed was.

Van Halen: It was like Dad’s version of how they test video game controllers – where they have a robot pressing a button three million times before it breaks. It was the amp version of that. [Laughs]

• Review: EVH's 5150III 50-Watt 6L6 Head is the perfect gigging and studio amp for discriminating players
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Few musicians affected the guitar landscape quite like Eddie Van Halen, and Steve Stevens has said that seeing his virtuosity firsthand hit him so hard, it forced him to temporarily leave rock guitar behind.

As Wolfgang Van Halen once said, Eddie “kind of ruined” the 1980s guitar scene as his dazzling talents created an influx of copyists all desperate to be the next best thing. But not everyone was as eager to follow suit.

For Stevens, who earned his name making guitar solos with toy ray guns as Billy Idol’s guitarist, sharing a tour bill with Van Halen had the opposite effect.

“After a run playing with Vince Neil, opening for Van Halen for about six weeks, it just got to be total rock 'n' roll excess. I came off the road and had to reassess why I was even playing guitar,” Steven relays in a new Guitarist interview.

The rock 'n' roll overstimulation prompted Stevens to pivot. He spent some time away, focussing solely on another genre far removed from his usual work. And it gave way to his most experimental album to date.

“One of my first loves is flamenco, and my first guitar teacher was a flamenco guitarist," he continues. “I remember going to see Paco de Lucia, and that reignited a spark in me.”

That resulted in the album Flamenco A Go-Go in 1999. Although it proved a temporary detour into flamenco music, Stevens was leaving his comfort zone behind. He never wanted to compete with EVH, so he changed tactics.

“I stopped playing electric guitar for a year,” he reveals. “I went to Japan, France, and England to make that record and travelled the world with just my nylon-string guitar."

Stevens basked in the creative challenge brought on by his stylistic switch. And he was able to bring ideas from outside of the guitar’s long-standing traditions into the record’s picture.

“One of the unique things about my style is how I was influenced by early synthesizers and keyboards like Keith Emerson with The Nice, Rick Wakeman, all that stuff,” he details. “A lot of my guitar ideas come from keyboard sounds from the ‘70s.

“Same with flamenco rhythms applied to my acoustic work. I also listen to a lot of film scores and classical music. For me, being a successful guitarist is about coming up with parts that move the song along and not just doubling the bass line.”

Elsewhere, Stevens has discussed the pedalboard he had custom-made by amp-building genius Dave Friedman and how Paul Stanley sparked his love affair with Hamer guitars.

He's also explained why he turned down the chance to work with David Lee Roth, and what it was like recording with Michael Jackson. He’s had a busy career.

Wolfgang Van Halen has opened up on how some listeners are still caught up with unfairly critiquing his guitar chops by refusing to separate him from his late father, Eddie Van Halen.

As the mastermind behind Mammoth, a band with whom he writes and records all the parts, he’s carving out a name in his own right, away from his dad’s shadow.

Back in 2021, Wolfgang had said, “Dad would rather people not try and sound like him but sound like themselves,” and, following the release of his epic third album, The End, he is proving to be doing just that.

Yet, after years of reputation-building with Mammoth, he feels some fans still get hung up on his lineage.

“People tend to lose focus,” he tells Song Cake [interview below]. “They just sit there and go, ‘Oh, he doesn't play as well as his dad,’ or ‘It's not as good as this Van Halen song.’ It's all focused on the fact that I might not be tapping well enough in their opinion, or not playing well enough, rather than, hey, isn't it cool that I created this whole thing by myself with all these different pieces, all these different parts?

“It's about the song construction at the end of the day, for me, as it was for Dad, even though people seem to focus on the playing,” he develops. “It's about creating the song. Because if you don't have that, you just have shredding through scales. And there's not really much soul on that.”

To that, he points to one of the world’s foremost guitar players – one who was ranked the 8th best guitarist of the last two decades in a 2024 poll conducted by UK retailer guitar guitar, given the influence of her super stardom.

“Do you see Taylor Swift shredding scales?” Wolfgang asks. “I don't think so. She writes a song that makes you feel [something]. If you’ve got a melody and a song that makes you feel things, makes you remember somebody you lost, makes you miss something, makes you think of being back home, at the end of the day, that's what a song is about.”

That’s not to say Wolfgang doesn’t let loose. “There’s room for shreddiness,” he concedes.

He’s recently showcased his two tapping approaches – one of which a new Hot for Teacher–inspired Mammoth track springboards from.

In related news, Wolfgang has reflected on the risk of covering Van Halen songs live. Reflecting on his stint in the family band, he's also said that he often had to keep his dad in check.

Michael Anthony has come a long way since his days as an exuberant kid with a battered P-Bass, ratty bell-bottoms, and three-inch platforms.

He’s been inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, sold in excess of 80 million records with Van Halen, and still has plenty to say about playing bass guitar for one of rock ‘n’ roll's most iconic bands.

Committed fans will recall Anthony’s proudest moment, a thunderous bass solo performed during Van Halen's live shows – delivered via a Jack Daniels bottle-shaped bass, following a swig from the requisite half-empty bottle of J.D.

In the November 1995 issue of Bass Player, Anthony remembered his own awe-inspiring moment – finding himself face-to-face with the self-proclaimed “greatest bass player in the world”, Jaco Pastorius.

Jaco, who was always a firebrand on stage and never predictable off it, crossed paths with Anthony while on tour with jazz fusion powerhouse Weather Report.

“It's funny – during our first Japan tour, around 1979, I met Jaco at a Tokyo hotel,” said Anthony. “I got into the elevator, and here was this guy wearing baggy shorts, a beret, and a loud Hawaiian shirt. I introduced myself, not knowing who he was, and he just said, ‘I'm Jaco Pastorius.’”

“We had a couple of drinks at the hotel bar,” continues Anthony. “And he told me about Weather Report. He also mentioned that he was familiar with our band. I don't know if he was a Van Halen fan, but he had heard our stuff. I think we were both more intent on getting drunk than anything else!”

Prior to their meeting in Tokyo, Weather Report’s 1977 epic, Heavy Weather, had sealed Jaco’s reputation as a four-string phenomenon. From the fretted bass guitar melody line line of Teen Town to the brilliance of Havona, it’s essential listening for bassists of all stripes.

Somewhere along the way, Jaco had also became the showman of the group.

“He’d take a solo every night and end it with the bass on the ground with a note sustaining,” Jaco’s close friend and contemporary, Michael Brecker, once said. “He’d do a running flip over the bass and dampen the note as he was in mid-air.”

Despite being given a similar platform to showcase his own bass-playing prowess, it’s always been one of Michael Anthony’s assertions that a great bassist should be able to speak volumes through their basslines, rather than the tendency today for bass players who feel soloing is the only way to really show the world what they can do.

“There are so many different kinds of bass players. Some of them use their instrument like a lead guitar. I enjoy listening to a few of those guys, but that’s not me at all. If you really pushed me I’d have to be honest and say that I see myself as a solid eight-out-of-10 bass player, I guess, but I’m happy with that.”

“Playing with Eddie Van Halen, he would just go off, and if you weren’t right there playing what you were supposed to it could get really confusing.

“At times it holds you back because you want to go out and showboat a bit, show the people what you can do, but the most important thing is to really be the anchor. That’s the secret, isn’t it?”

EVH has expanded its guitar amp line with the 5150III Hypersonic 6L6 – a 1x12 combo that marks the start of a brave new era for the company.

On paper, the latest addition to the Hypersonic range leverages new digital modeling tech to channel Eddie Van Halen tube amp-style tones in a more player-friendly package.

It is, in essence, EVH’s first fully fledged digital amp, and continues a trend set by the company earlier this year, when its intentions towards entertaining the digital amp and modeler markets were made clear with the launch of Hypersonic FRFR cabs.

At the time of writing, it is the only digital amp EVH has on offer. For a company whose heritage and history is so closely tied to cranked tube amp heads and ear-crushing stacks, it’s a major evolution.

As EVH puts it, “This digital innovation honors Eddie Van Halen’s spirit of experimentation and boundary pushing creativity.”

What’s more, the process of digitizing Van Halen’s tone has long been a topic of conversation. Last year, for example, Fender’s Justin Norvell told Guitar World of the rigorous process the firm went through to create an EVH-approved amp model for the Tone Master Pro floor unit.

Now it appears that digital emulation has fed into the development of a dedicated digital combo, taking a similar approach to that of Fender’s Tone Master amps.

As such, it boasts the form factor of a usual 1x12” with three channels, two sets of EQ controls, independent channel noise gates, onboard reverb and an effects loop to boot, as well as a Celestion speaker.

“This represents the next evolution in EVH amplification, delivering Eddie's iconic tone through innovative digital technology," explains Jon Romanowski, VP of Product of EVH Guitars.

“The Hypersonic 6L6 1x12 breaks down the barriers that have kept players from accessing authentic EVH sound, making it more portable and versatile than ever before.

“Whether players are recording at home or performing on stage, this amp delivers that unmistakable EVH tone that made Eddie’s sound iconic.”

According to EVH, the Hypersonic offers “EVH tone, volume and dynamics virtually indistinguishable from the all-tube original”, thanks its use of “massive digital processing power” to channel a faithful EVH tone.

Given it’s a digital amp that also prioritises convenience and usability, there are some notable additions to the spec sheet. The rear panel has power scaling with five attenuated settings – from one watt all the way up to 50 – a balanced XLR line out with IRs, and a silent switch for recording.

There’s also a headphones jack, MIDI in, a USB-C for updates, and a cabinet sim switch for moving between IRs.

And, thanks to the fact it doesn’t actually have 6L6 tubes, this thing is a lot lighter than your regular ol’ EVH combo. Coming in at 39lbs, it’s around 40% lighter than the Iconic Series 5150III 50W combo (62lbs). That’s an impressive weight off the scales.

The 5150II Hypersonic 6L6 is available now in Black and Ivory finishes for $1,699.99.

Visit EVH for more.

Getting endorsed by Jimmy Page is something most guitarists could only dream of. However, Steve Lukather is one of the lucky ones who’s received the highest of compliments from the Led Zeppelin icon.

Aside from releasing nine solo albums, Lukather has sat in and recorded on more than 1,000 records for the likes of Alice Cooper, Eric Clapton, Michael Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. What's more, over the last decade or so, he's been working as part of Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band.

“I have a funny story about Jimmy,” the session legend tells Forbes. “It was the one and only time I ever met him. I went over to this Guitar Center thing honoring Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap. In fact, I ended up producing four tracks on their next record because of that night.

“I showed up with Eddie [Van Halen] and my boys,” he recalls. “Hey, we're going to meet Jimmy Page, a big deal, right? Jimmy's standing there greeting everyone. He points at me.

“I think he's pointing at Ed, of course, but it's me, and he motions for me to come over. He said, ‘You have something that these other guys here don't.’ And I go, ‘What's that, Jimmy?’ He said, ‘You understand and I understand, but those other guitarists don't. We were studio players. They don't know what that means.’”

Page went on the say that he had read that Lukather wasn't being taken seriously because he was just a “studio guy” – a notion that Page, once a session guitarist himself, strongly opposed.

Lukather adds, “‘That's the opposite of the absolute truth. That sets you above these other guys,’ Jimmy said. I asked if I could give him a hug, and tell people he had said that. He laughed, gave me a hug and said, ‘Sure.’ That meant the world to me.”

Indeed, pre-fame Page cut his teeth in the session world, eventually becoming the first-call guy for renowned producer Shel Talmy. As a result, he secured sessions on songs by the Who and the Kinks, and even lent his chops to the incidental music of the Beatles' 1964 film A Hard Day's Night.

Earlier this year, Lukather set the record straight on his reported involvement on a new Van Halen album.

What is Wolfgang Van Halen’s go-to track to test out a new electric guitar? Does he riff through Another Celebration at the End of the World? Tap up Eruption? Or is his new harmonic slap workout from The End the ultimate fretboard tester?

Turns out, it’s none of the above. Instead, the Mammoth multi-instrumentalist dives into the repertoire of another classic rock ’n’ roll group whenever he needs to test out a new six-string. And, no, he doesn’t play any of the Forbidden Riffs.

Having developed the game-changing EVH SA-126 – a versatile semi-hollow that’s suitable for metal and rock – Wolfgang knows a thing or two about gauging the behaviour of a guitar.

“I think it would be something by AC/DC,” he says when asked in the new issue of Guitarist about his guitar-testing tracklist. “I’ll usually do Night Prowler because it has those big chords, which can tell you a lot about guitar.

“And then for single notes I might do Beating Around the Bush or something like that. I think those classic open chords can show you what a guitar is about right away. You can hear how the acoustics resonate together.”

Wolfgang defaults to AC/DC songs to test out his guitars for good reason. In that same conversation with Guitarist, he highlighted Angus Young as a key blues-based rock influence – and drew similarities with the playing approach of his father, the late Eddie Van Halen.

He continues, “I wasn’t much of a blues guy to begin with. But I think out of all the blues-based players, I really love Angus Young from AC/DC. He sticks to what is generally pentatonic stuff but has this anarchistic way of attacking it.

“That’s what makes it so attractive to me. It’s almost like he doesn’t know what he’s doing and it’s all about the way he does it, rather than the notes he’s playing. When you listen to him, it’s incredibly blues-based, but it’s the aggression he plays with that makes me enjoy it. I guess it was the same kind of thing with my dad.”

For Wolfgang, Young’s ability to get more out of less is a key trait of his playing. That’s probably why his riffs make such good material for testing out a guitar: it doesn’t need to be fancy. It just needs to work.

“It doesn’t need to be complicated,” he concludes. “You can hit one note with attitude and that’s all that matters.”

Elsewhere in his Guitarist interview, Wolfgang discussed what sets his favorite modern metal hero apart from his peers, and looked back on how he’d have to keep Eddie in check during early Van Halen gigs.

Pick up the new issue of Guitarist at Magazines Direct for further interviews with Kiki Wong, Joanne Shaw Taylor and Jared James Nichols.

Wolfgang Van Halen's advice is timely. With Black Friday fast approaching, now is the best time to pick up a new electric guitar for a bargain. It might be wise to brush up on Night Prowler and Beating Around the Bush for when you take delivery of a new guitar...

Visit our guide to the best Black Friday guitar deals to see what savings are about.

When The Last Dinner Party exploded onto the scene with the surefire hit Nothing Matters, back in 2023, one element that stood out was Emily Roberts’ Brian May and Queen-esque solo.

Many lauded it as a nod to the theatrical rock extravagance of the ’70s – with a modern twist, of course.

The quintet's return with their sophomore album, From The Pyre, sees Roberts delivering the goods and solidifying her position in the vanguard of players shaping the sound of rock guitar.

“Knowledge of the fretboard is important, being able to say the notes of each fret out loud without thinking about it,” Roberts says in an upcoming Guitar World interview, when asked if she has any tips to share with those who want to brush up on their fretwork technique.

“Learning other people's solos and picking different things from different people, you're not going to end up sounding like one particular person, but a Frankenstein of all of them.”

And this is why Roberts can play on a track like Nothing Matters and give it that Queen vibe, when in reality she is taking inspiration from a totally different source.

“That's been a big thing for me, especially with technique,” she continues. “Like the Nothing Matters solo, it's got one bit where I'm tapping on the frets. I got that idea from Eddie Van Halen, even though Nothing Matters sounds nothing like Van Halen.”

As for her obvious reference to ’70s rock, Roberts notes that she's always “had a love” for the rock music concocted during that era.

“There's so much power behind it,” she says. “I want to embody the power that I feel when listening to that music. Often, I don't feel powerful as a person, but when I play guitar, I really do.”

Recently, Roberts revealed her penchant for Music Man St. Vincent signature guitars – and why she’s ditching Fenders and Gibsons in favor of the St. Vincent model.

Guitar World’s interview with Emily Roberts will be published in the coming weeks.

Charlie Sheen's long-running sitcom, Two and a Half Men, featured its fair share of celebrity cameos, with Elvis Costello, Steven Tyler and ZZ Top all making an appearance on the show.

And, hardcore Two and a Half Men and Van Halen fans would know that Eddie Van Halen was also part of this roster of rock-stars-turned-actors, appearing in the opening episode of the seventh series, titled 818-jklpuzo, which aired on September 21, 2009.

Speaking about Van Halen's appearance in an interview with Loudwire, Sheen has recalled making the episode with the guitar icon, noting he wasn’t afraid to improvise in his acting, either.

“With Eddie Van Halen, during the table read for that episode, he made a change in one of the lines of dialog,” Sheen explains. “And you're not supposed to do that in like that kind of environment.

“His change was brilliant. The alternate that he added was brilliant. And he went ahead and just said it and didn't read the line that was there.”

He continues, “It's the thing where I'm constipated and he's at the studio, and then he comes out of the bathroom, and I think his line is, ‘Two burritos and a root beer float,’ something like that.”

And Van Halen being Van Halen, it would have been remiss not to have him shred a little in the scene.

“Then he plays that amazing lead, just shredding,” Sheen exclaims. “And I'm like two feet from him. I mean, can you get a better, private concert with Van Halen, anywhere, ever? They did five takes of it. And I'm like, ‘Are you sure we don't need a six?’

“But his idea, and it made such perfect sense, was Eruption. And that would have meant I would have been front row, like the only row, for a live Eruption! That was taken from me.”

We can only assume it was the productions concerns over royalties that ultimately prevented what would have been the ultimate poetic pairing of shred icon and bathroom humor.

In other recent Van Halen news, Wolfgang Van Halen recently recalled his time on bass duties with the band – noting he felt part of his role was keeping Eddie in check.

Since making its debut on October 11, 1975, NBC’s Saturday Night Live has been a pop-culture juggernaut like no other.

But before becoming a weekend staple for generations of late-night viewers, creator Lorne Michaels’ variety show began as a brash, uniquely irreverent counterculture experiment boldly pairing off-the-cuff outsider comedy with of-the-moment musical guests – for the record, the first show featured Billy Preston, Janis Ian and, arguably most memorably, Andy Kaufman miming his way through the Mighty Mouse theme song.

Indeed, while it’s a comedy-first operation, music has always been a major part of SNL’s appeal – and, obviously, that means we’ve seen a lot of guitarists grace the show’s stage.

It’s been a spot for bands to crank it up just before their careers went supernova. Others faltered spectacularly on live TV, beneath the bright lights of Studio 8H and under the watch of millions of viewers at home.

Some of the greatest guitar virtuosos showed up unannounced for once-in-a-lifetime jams. A pair of blues-loving bees morphed into the show’s breakout musical act.

While it’s all made for hundreds upon hundreds of must-see moments, to paraphrase the show’s iconic metalhead character, Wayne Campbell – a.k.a. Mike Myers, an obtuse on-air shredder in his own right – some were more worthy than others.

So, in honor of the show’s staggering 50 years on the air, ladies and gentleman, behold the 50 greatest guitar moments in SNL history.

50. The Rolling Stones – Shattered

Season 4, Episode 1; October 7, 1978

While nabbing the Stones was a major coup, the band’s lone SNL appearance isn’t remembered for being great. Mick Jagger’s voice is shot and unpretty through Beast of Burden, but Shattered taps into the sleazy urgency of the Some Girls era.

It also embodies the chaotic, anything-goes-in-the-moment spirit of live TV right about the time Jagger starts snapping his ivory sportcoat at Ronnie Wood, wet-towel style.

49. The Devil Can’t Write No Love Song sketch

Season 25, Episode 5; November 13, 1999

Garth Brooks plays a down-on-his-luck musician willing to sell his soul for a hit. Ready to make a trade, Lucifer – a horned-and-bearded Will Ferrell – bursts onto the scene with a devil-red Fender built out of a “hell-spun mixture of the bones of fornicators.” Trouble is, the dark lord is a damned terrible songsmith. Fred’s Slacks is a brittle-toned, out-of-tune geek-rock atrocity, and his originals only get cringier from there.

48. Joan Armatrading – I’m Not in Love / Down to Zero

Season 2, Episode 21; May 14, 1977

The highlight of Joan Armatrading’s SNL performances is the sound of her rich and oaken vocal – but her stately 12-string chording chimes through the mix quite nicely, too.

Whether through the dew-eyed I’m Not in Love or the yearning folk-rock of Down to Zero, guitarist Jerry Donahue also brought a waterfall-rippling wave of flanged-out fretboard elegance to the arrangements.

47. System of a Down – B.Y.O.B.

Season 30, Episode 18; May 7, 2005

The SNL censors were prepared to bleep out the F-bombs SOAD’s Serj Tankian and Daron Malakian regularly scheduled into their zany, kinda thrash/kinda ska single B.Y.O.B. The latter let loose an unscripted “fuck yeah” during a surf-zested string slide, though, which ended up putting he and the rest of System on SNL’s blacklist. They never played the show again.

46. Metallica – Fuel

Season 23, Episode 8; December 6, 1997

An argument could be made that SNL blew it by not booking Metallica during the height of ’80s thrash and that they slept on the biggest metal band in the world circa Enter Sandman.

But producers gave ’tallica fans that which they desired by finally bringing aboard the band during their Reload period. Fuel found Kirk Hammett all-gassing his wah-wah solo. James Hetfield kept on theme by strapping himself to a flame-emblazoned Flying V.

45. The Tragically Hip – Grace, Too

Season 20, Episode 16; March 25, 1995

When original Not Ready for Prime-time Player Dan Aykroyd was asked to co-host this episode, he agreed – with a caveat: fellow Ontarians the Tragically Hip had to come along with him.

Gord Downie grinned cherubically as he flubbed his first line, but Canada’s Band otherwise nailed the artfully hard-rocking Grace, Too, guitarist Rob Baker flexing a wide, flavorful vibrato into its finale.

44. Adam Sandler – The Thanksgiving Song

Season 18, Episode 7; November 21, 1992

Sandler used his Weekend Update segments to test out goofball characters like Cajun Man and Opera Man. The news desk was also where he developed his voice as a singer-guitarist, and that all starts with The Thanksgiving Song.

Coming out the gates with cheerful 7th chords and a toothy grin, he uses the quaint acoustic jazz-folk song to toast turkey dinners and serve up a side of pop-culture non-sequiturs.

43. Queens of the Stone Age – Little Sister

Season 30, Episode 19; May 14, 2005

Though drummer Joey Castillo was already clonking his plastic jam block hard-and-heavy through this segment, Will Ferrell apparently felt that Queens could use more cowbell.

The comedian reprised his famous Gene Frenkle character – ill-fitting shirt and all – and whapped to his heart’s delight, but the impromptu percussive performance wasn’t the scene-stealer. Credit that to Josh Homme putting on a clinic with his serpentine flair.

42. Big Ricky & the Minnows – “Bass Lake” sketch

Season 50, Episode 16; April 5, 2025

A lakeside potluck jam on Tom Petty’s Free Falling goes horribly awry once Big Ricky – played by an increasingly exasperated Jack Black – realizes everyone hitting the stage is hoisting a bass and the soupiest tone of all time (“The quality of sound feels like a sinus infection”).

The low-end nightmare swells into a dozen rhythm-stringers and one particularly talented basset hound trying to find their footing within the frequency, with disastrous results.

41. Spinal Tap – Big Bottom

Season 9, Episode 18; May 5, 1984

Talk about bass chops, these guys got ’em. Unlike Black’s bass sketch, Tap’s low-end monstrous performance of Big Bottom was no shit sandwich. Performed on air just two months after This Is Spinal Tap hit screens, the band’s performance of their multi-bass opus rumbled with hilarious, horn-dog fervor.

Derek Smalls lays down the initial rhythm with a double-neck bass. Nigel Tufnel hits those perfect fourths like a pro. The synth-bass is on point, too. But it might be David St. Hubbins mud-flappin’ lead bass prowess that pushes the ludicrous metal anthem into overdrive.

40. J Mascis & the SNL band – Out There

Season 25, Episode 16; April 8, 2000

It’s a travesty that J Mascis never got to chop through this Where You Been? stunner on the show with the rest of Dinosaur Jr. in the ’90s. Nevertheless, a 20-second sampling of Out There – which Mascis performed while sitting in with the house band – found the alt-rock guitar hero wham-smashing his way through a micro-sized but massive-sounding SNL moment. This performance took us to the commercial break seconds after the show staged its iconic “More Cowbell” sketch.

39. The Black Crowes – Sometimes Salvation

Season 18, Episode 9; December 12, 1992

Sometimes Salvation is a funny pick because the Crowes’ aching, extended blues ballad shares a similar feel to the SNL band’s longtime closing credits jam, Waltz in A. Where it differs is that the Georgia rockers also had Marc Ford sustaining a series of seismically reckless and romantic bends through his spacious solo. And it’s spectacular.

38. Foo Fighters – Times Like These

Season 28, Episode 13; February 22, 2003

Foo Fighters are prolific SNL guests, having hit the program nine times since 1995. Their third pop-in at 30 Rock came during the promotion cycle for One by One and began with a crunching version of All My Life.

But Times Like These is what makes the highlight reel – not just because the Foos crushed their yearning anthem with ease, but because Jim Carrey stormed the stage mid-song to air guitar his right leg like a maniac.

37. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Stone Cold Bush / Under the Bridge

Season 17, Episode 14; February 22, 1992

Dubious to include, but hard to ignore, the Chilis left a strange taste in millions of mouths with this off-kilter two-fer. Stone Cold Bush was funky, but merely fine – Flea gets appropriately slappy on the bass, but things get weird when vocalist Anthony Kiedis soccer-slides toward John Frusciante and boots his bandmate in the butt.

Under the Bridge is even more tense, with Frusciante cresting through a loose fluidity that paints a bit too outside the lines – and with a lot of brown. He ends the alt-ballad howling in falsetto like a hound from hell. The rest of the band seem stunned over their tragic Magik performance.

36. Boz Scaggs – Lowdown

Season 2, Episode 2; September 25, 1976

Elliot Randall’s wildcard solo is one of SNL’s most uproarious musical WTF moments. Halfway through the hit’s soft disco shuffle, Randall rips out to center stage for a furious hellfire of hammer-ons.

He tries to hit a behind-the-nut bend but kind of biffs it, then walks back with a huge smile to resume his soulfully rhythmic plinking.

Slang-style praise or secret diss, Scaggs jumps back in to croon with perfect comedic timing: “You ain’t got to be so bad.”

35. Prince – Partyup

Season 6, Episode 11; February 21, 1981

Prince’s most storied SNL performance arguably isn’t this one, and it wasn’t even in public – rather, a slow-jammed Let’s Go Crazy during the show’s 40th-anniversary afterparty in 2015 apparently had cast members losing their minds. But his televised Partyup in ’81 was still plenty iconic, with the Purple One parading around in thigh-high boots and sex-grinding his guitar with slinking funk licks.

34. Tracy Chapman – Give Me One Reason

Season 15, Episode 9; December 16, 1989

Here’s a good reason to have owned a VHS machine in the ’80s: Chapman’s rhythm-locked, Grammy-winning blues-rocker Give Me One Reason was performed on SNL a full six years before it made it onto an album.

Chapman anchored its television debut with subtle, staccato acoustic fingering and her soulful vocal, though the house band gets into the action, too; Tom “T-Bone” Wolk injects jumping-bean bass accents while bandleader G.E. Smith delivers Delta-ready slidework.

33. Devo – (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction

Season 4, Episode 2; October 14, 1978

Devo’s subversive take on the Stones classic harnesses the palpably anxious and painfully horny undercurrent of the anthem arguably better than when it’s ever sung by Jagger.

Sweet release arrives through this performance, where Devo – deep in their matching hazmat suit-and-3D glasses era – twitch through the tune like a bunch of broken androids, Mark Mothersbaugh wilding out while using a Hagstrom 1 with boosts and overdrives duct-taped all over its cherry body.

32. Pearl Jam – Not for You / Rearviewmirror / Daughter

Season 19, Episode 18; April 16, 1994

Pearl Jam were arguably the biggest band in the world in the spring of 1994, so SNL showcased the hell out of the Seattle quintet during their second appearance on the show – even offering them a rare third song. Their Daughter performance, in particular, presented an extended Jam; the group gave the alt-rock anthem a funky two-minute outro full of vibe-heavy fretless bass and ad-libbed Crazy Horse lyrics.

31. AC/DC – Stiff Upper Lip / You Shook Me All Night Long

Season 25, Episode 15; March 18, 2000

AC/DC’s SNL debut found the band cranking into their Back in Black classic a whopping 20 years after its initial release. In a solid performance, Angus Young wails hard and goes full-Curly while spinning around the ground during the finale.

Earlier in the evening, though, the eternal schoolboy and brother Mal arguably locked in harder for the gritty, then-current and super-underrated Stiff Upper Lip.

30. Punk Band Reunion at the Wedding sketch (Crisis of Conformity – Fist Fight in the Parking Lot)

Season 35, Episode 14; February 6, 2010

What begins as a father sheepishly getting his old band back together at his daughter’s wedding reception quickly devolves into one of SNL’s most raging hardcore performances ever. Fred Armisen sneers his way through ’80s-style Reagan-punk lyrics, while the arrangement itself quotes Suicidal Tendencies’ Institutionalized.

The table-crashing, glass-smashing melee gets all-too-real once drummer Dave Grohl’s mic cuts out. A cream Strat-strapped Kutcher saves the day by lunging over with another mic – which also reveals he’s definitely not the one punk-chording through their Parking Lot.

29. The Replacements – Bastards of Young / Kiss Me on the Bus

Season 11, Episode 7; January 18, 1986

G.E. Smith was a Replacements fan and called the group when SNL needed a last-minute replacement for the Pointer Sisters. The Replacements proceeded to get drunk backstage with host Harry Dean Stanton and strolled out to deliver slapdash Tim songs while sloshed out of their skulls.

Paul Westerberg fumbled lyrics, Bob Stinson played a loaner Les Paul after he fell on his own guitar on the way to the stage. The night was best summed up by the first line of Bastards of Young: “God… what a mess.”

28. Bonnie Raitt – Thing Called Love

Season 15, Episode 11; January 20, 1990

Nearly 12 years to the day after her first SNL appearance, Bonnie Raitt returned to the show to slide through this blues-rock blazer. At one point she bats at the body of her Strat to gain some gnarly sustain. Later, she juxtaposes a fiery, near-30-second glass slide solo against the arrangement’s laidback, roadhouse-reggae breakdown.

27. Lenny Kravitz – Are You Gonna Go My Way / Always on the Run

Season 18, Episode 18; April 17, 1993

Everything went Kravitz and co-guitarist Craig Ross’ way. Sporting the rawest and most iconic rock riff of ’93, the pair brought harmonized pull-offs and Hendrix-ian sharps to a pitch-perfect performance of Are You Gonna Go My Way – and then Ross delivered a wailing solo.

They then dug into their retro-rock war chest for Mama Said single Always on the Run, expertly swaggering themselves through fuzz-funk syncopation before Ross splintered off with another heater solo.

26. Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit / Territorial Pissings

Season 17, Episode 10; January 11, 1992

Nirvana’s Nevermind dethroned the King of Pop’s Dangerous from the Number 1 spot on the Billboard chart the same week they dropped by SNL. Understandably, they played Teen Spirit, the industry-revolutionizing game-changer that got them there.

That said, Territorial Pissings was the livelier of their two performances; Cobain capped the manic track by smashing his guitar into a tower of logo-less cabs; Krist Novoselic hucks his bass into the air like loose change; Grohl rains drum hardware across the soundstage.

25. Rage Against the Machine – Bulls on Parade

Season 21, Episode 17; April 13, 1996

Interestingly, the SNL time bookers paired billionaire media mogul and Republican nominee hopeful Steve Forbes with left-leaning political rap-rockers Rage Against the Machine.

Rage tried to hang upside-down U.S. flags across their cabs as a form of protest, which led to an onstage confrontation with patriotic stagehands, who yanked away the subversive Stripes milliseconds before the band kicked into Bulls. Tom Morello crushed it with his wah work and mock-scratch technique. Then the band got booted out of the building.

24. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – You Don’t Know How It Feels / Honey Bee

Season 20, Episode 6; November 19, 1994

Petty’s fifth of eight appearances on SNL came during his Wildflowers cycle and boasted a new, temporary Heartbreaker behind the drum kit: Dave Grohl. The performance interestingly falls between the latter’s post-Nirvana, pre-Foo Fighters period, and he hits those cans heavy.

You Don’t Know How It Feels was a crowd pleaser, but the real treat is Honey Bee. The swamp-soupy garage-blues tune had Mike Campbell dripping out liquid gold guitar leads, but Petty hits an uncaged-and-uncouth, bendy solo of his own.

23. Aerosmith on Wayne’s World

Season 15, Episode 13; February 17, 1990

Satirically or not, SNL’s resident headbangers-cum-cable access hosts hoisted the flag for heavy music during a time where the show probably should have booked more metal acts.

Nevertheless, Wayne and Garth still got their party on with Aerosmith one time, with Joe Perry and Brad Whitford beefing up Mike Myers’ mock-squealing Wayne’s World theme as a basic-but-brawny basement rocker. Aerosmith also hit a pair of Pump tunes for the show, but this was their biggest bash of the night.

22. Fear – Beef Baloney

Season 7, Episode 4; October 31, 1981

Fear was brought onto SNL as a favor to fan and then-former castmate John Belushi, whom showrunners were hoping would pop back on the program for a cameo.

Fear then invited hardcore kids from across the Eastern seaboard – including members of Minor Threat and Negative Approach – to mosh out during a chaotic four-song medley. Bassist Lee Ving is constantly chasing a micstand as it gets knocked about by stage divers.

21. Phoebe Bridgers – I Know the End

Season 46, Episode 11; February 6, 2021

Phoebe Bridgers wasn’t the first person to smash a guitar on SNL, but she’s the one who got the most flak for it. I Know the End starts subtle, but the indie-rocker ended up primal screaming her way through the climax – which likewise found co-guitarist Harrison Whitford delivering quixotic scalework – before yanking off her jet black Danelectro and decimating it against a speaker wedge. The misogyny brigade tried to shame her on socials; Bridgers sold the axe for $100,000 and donated it all to charity.

20. Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band – Hot Head / Ashtray Heart

Season 6, Episode 2; December 22, 1980

Beefheart’s underrated early ’80s period found the experimental icon making music with the meanest-sounding iteration of his Magic Band. They put on a feisty performance for a shocked SNL crowd – guitarist Moris Tepper, in particular, spewing hot fire with his junk-blues sliding.

Beefheart cradled a cigarette, brilliantly rifling off a dadaist word salad through a haggard wheeze that sounded like his lungs had burnt right down to the filter.

19. Living Colour – Cult of Personality / Open Letter (to a Landlord)

Season 14, Episode 16; April 1, 1989

Living Colour’s April Fool’s appearance found Vernon Reid going off-the-charts gonzo with his inspired fusion playing.

He cut loose through a mind-bending, minute-long solo on Cult of Personality and then leaned into a vivid display of ambulance siren-styled inverted bending on Open Letter (to a Landlord).

The only thing that might’ve outshone Reid’s playing was Corey Glover’s extremely late-’80s, iridescent purple-and-yellow BodyGlove wetsuit.

18. Rihanna (with Nuno Bettencourt) – Diamonds

Season 38, Episode 7; November 10, 2012

Nuno Bettencourt never got the funk out on SNL during Extreme’s peak. Despite this, the Boston virtuoso was able to shine bright like a diamond when he popped up on the show as part of Rihanna’s backing band. The focal point is the pop star, without question, and Bettencourt begins the song with minimalist, volume pot-craning ambiance. But by song’s end, he’s soaring through the mix with a boldly prismatic vibrato.

17. David Bowie – Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

Season 22, Episode 12; February 8, 1997

Armed with a Parker Fly, an unruly series of harmonic slides and an onslaught of out-of-control pinch-squeals, ace guitarist Reeves Gabrels (nowadays a member of the Cure) was a beast to behold on Scary Monsters.

Bowie & Co. were supposed to play something off 1997’s Earthling, but they went rogue and performed the retro cut as a form of protest after the singer objected to a sketch idea – and as a dig on Lorne Michaels, who told Bowie about a terrifying cocaine binge he’d been on while listening to Scary Monsters in the ’80s.

They were ushered out of the building ASAP. Bowie reportedly regretted not grabbing the fruit basket on the way out.

16. Top of the Pops sketch (aka Ian Rubbish & the Bizarros – It’s a Lovely Day)

Season 38, Episode 21; May 18, 2013

Fred Armisen’s SNL tenure was full of musical characters, one of his most memorable being comically hate-filled Spirit of ’77 punk eccentric Ian Rubbish.

While the U.K. snarler had many memorable lyrical barbs, Armisen’s last show as a full-time cast member found him slapping on Rubbish’s peroxide wig and a Fano Alt de Facto to deliver an earnest farewell anthem called It’s a Lovely Day.

It turns into a jam featuring Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones, J Mascis, Aimee Mann and Michael Penn. Is this one of Armisen’s top-10 greatest TV appearances of all time? Yeah, probably.

15. H.E.R. – Hold On

Season 46, Episode 4; October 24, 2020

H.E.R. wowed guitar-heads doubly in this Season 46 standout moment. She shot melodious, mile-wide vibrato through the ceiling during a revelatory performance of R&B slow jam Hold On.

She also used her time on SNL to showcase a then-brand-new signature Fender Chrome Glow Strat, which reflected a rainbowed array of colors beneath the stage lights that was almost as resplendent as her tone.

14. Robert Cray – Smoking Gun / Right Next Door (Because of Me)

Season 12, Episode 13; February 28, 1987

While Smoking Gun was tight, we’re going to suggest that it’s Cray’s run-through of Right Next Door that left a stronger impression on the music-loving public.

There’s a sleek, clean-channel mystique coursing through the smooth-blues arrangement, Cray accenting his adulterous tale with perfect, passionately plinking accent rhythms.

By song’s end, he bait-and-switches us with a yearning backend climax of wry little wriggles and finger-snapped string work. Of course, if you're going back and watching all these, don't deprive yourself of Smoking Gun.

13. The Smashing Pumpkins – Cherub Rock

Season 19, Episode 5; October 30, 1993

The Pumpkins went in for the kill during their first appearance on SNL. The performance of loud-quiet-loud classic Today was spectacular, but the alt-rock champs went nuclear on Cherub Rock.

Billy Corgan shreds his sinewy vocal cords throughout and wails a furious solo on his modded Bat-Strat. James Iha likewise gets in a few nasty and textural bends before they put this all-out bash to bed.

12. Beastie Boys – Ricky’s Theme / Heart Attack Man

Season 20, Episode 8; December 10, 1994

The Beasties’ second muscial spot of the night began with instrumental soul jam Ricky’s Theme, where auxiliary Beasties player Money Mark’s morning glory electric piano glistened against Ad-Rock’s sly-and-wily wah-wah guitar and MCA’s lithe standup basslines.

An extended cymbal segue leads to gear-swapping and a furious aesthetic pivot, as the Boys then go buckwild with a pacemaker-exploding old-school hardcore freakout. Ad-Rock smashes an S-shape into the ground – splinters fly into the air as the screen fades to black.

11. Adam Sandler – Lunch Lady Land

Season 19, Episode 11; January 15, 1994

From Red Hooded Sweatshirt to The Chanukah Song, most of Adam Sandler’s SNL music went unplugged. But unencumbered by the confines of the Weekend Update desk, the Sandman went full-electric with a black Gibson Les Paul to strum this Bruce Springsteen-ian opus about elementary foodstuffs revolting against their maker.

Sandler sells his Jungleland rip with goofball heartland earnestness. Of course, the sight of Chris Farley’s hair-netted Lunch Lady gracefully plié-ing across the stage near Kevin Nealon’s sentient Manwich pushes the performance into all-timer territory.

10. Fishbone – Sunless Saturday / Everyday Sunshine

Season 16, Episode 16; March 23, 1991

Despite its gloom-clouded song title, Fishbone were beyond brilliant on Sunless Saturday. Frontman Angelo Moore somersaulted across the stage with manic energy and put on an acrobatic vocal performance. John Norwood Fisher flexed thick bass thwaps across the soul-metal fusion piece.

A double-strapped Kendall Jones switched between acoustic strums and flanged-out-and-frantic tap solos on an S-shape. Keeping things on-theme, they then dipped into the funkily Vitamin D-dosed “Everyday Sunshine” for their second song.

9. St. Vincent – Birth in Reverse

Season 39, Episode 21; May 17, 2014

While the Season 39 finale brought out rappers 2 Chainz and Lil Jon for a pair of sketches, Annie Clark commanded the stage with playfully panicked art-punk energy during her performance of Birth in Reverse. Early on, she’s twitching out jazz chords on a vintage 1955 M-75 Aristocrat.

By the finale, a choreography routine finds St. Vincent and guitarist Toko Yasuda harmonizing post-shred bristliness while parading the stage like a pair of nectar-crazy hummingbirds.

8. Elvis Costello – Radio Radio

Season 3, Episode 8; December 17, 1977

“I’m sorry ladies and gentlemen; there’s no reason to do this song here.” In one of the show’s most iconic moments, musical or otherwise, Elvis Costello came into 8H to play Less Than Zero but abruptly and awkwardly halted the single to re-route his band toward a spritely but unexpected Radio Radio.

The swerve had staff panicking behind the scenes. He’d later say it was because Zero was too slow; it might’ve been that its lyrics on the rise of British fascism were, well, incredibly British. Costello satirically recreated the chaos for SNL’s 25th-anniversary special in 1999, hijacking Beastie Boys’ Sabotage to once again play Radio Radio.

7. David Gilmour with G.E. Smith & the SNL Band – Song for My Sara

Season 13, Episode 7; December 12, 1987

This episode brought out two musical guests, wildly juxtaposing Buster Poindexter’s broad, brass-heavy calypso-sleaze smash Hot Hot Hot with Gilmour’s tastefully funky instrumental, Song for My Sara.

Supported by the SNL band, the latter echo-quaked melodious vibrato from his headless Steinberger GM 3T. T-Bone Wolk thumb-and-finger popped his way through the piece. G.E. Smith is all smiles while supporting the Pink Floyd legend. The song was never officially released, making Gilmour’s drop-in appearance even more unique.

6. Eddie Van Halen with G.E. Smith & the SNL Band – Stompin’ 8H

Season 12, Episode 13; February 28, 1987

Van Halen’s lone and unplanned SNL appearance arose out of boredom. As then-wife Valerie Bertinelli was rehearsing skits that week, EVH ended up in the music office trading licks with Smith, and together they whipped up a bluesy lil’ choogle named after the show’s 8H soundstage.

Eddie goes full Orca-moan on his striped Kramer 5150 before flitting between tasteful quarter-note taps and cut-throat runs. Smith is ear-to-ear grinning while chopping at his Tele. The two guitarists literally – but playfully – butt heads mid-stage, though they stood united for this memorable drop-in moment.

5. Stevie Ray Vaughan – Say What! / Change It

Season 11, Episode 10; February 15, 1986

As Double Trouble drummer Chris Layton recalled years later, host Jerry Hall’s then-husband, Mick Jagger, was around during rehearsals. Mick almost sat in with the band for their SNL debut but ultimately didn’t have the stones to go through with the team-up. Instead, a mass of Texas talent graced the stage, with SRV first hitting 12-bar instrumental Say What! as a screaming, whammy-and-wah-wild workout.

For the cocksure Change It, he strutted through flavorful blues runs alongside fellow Strat-smith, brother and Fabulous Thunderbirds co‑founder Jimmie Vaughan.

4. George Harrison and Paul Simon – Here Comes the Sun / Homeward Bound

Season 2, Episode 8; November 20, 1976

Back in the first season, Michaels went on-air to offer the Beatles a hilariously paltry $3,000 – to split however they’d like – if they appeared on his show (“You want to give Ringo less? That’s up to you”). Paul McCartney and John Lennon were apparently watching the show together in NYC and damn near took a cab to 30 Rock to collect. But it was Harrison who became the first Beatle to play on SNL, and he did it with another music icon.

In one of most stunningly tender musical moments of the early years, Harrison and Paul Simon teamed up to strum and folk-finger through the former’s Here Comes the Sun and the latter’s Homeward Bound, back to back. Outside of their acoustics and gentle vocal harmonies, it’s pin-drop silent in the studio, the audience watching history in the making.

To say the least, the performance was more than alright – it was god damned magical. McCartney would ultimately show up as a musical guest four times between 1980 and 2012, and he closed out this year’s 50th-anniversary show with another Abbey Road classic, The End. Ringo hosted in 1984.

3. Jack White – Taking Me Back / Fear of the Dawn

Season 48, Episode 13; February 25, 2023

Ever since the White Stripes bashed through a radically raw Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground on 8H in 2002, Jack White has been an SNL fixture.

On top of being a five-time musical guest, he once ripped a solo as a six-stringing wedding crasher in a 2018 sketch and also covered Rockin’ in the Free World during this year’s SNL50 concert.

While he cut a memorable double-handed tapping tribute to EVH in 2020, his mic stand-toppling, pedalboard-maximalist Taking Me Back / Fear of the Dawn medley in 2023 was a fiendishly feral display of fuzz-blown sonics and wah expressionism.

2. The Blues Brothers – Soul Man

Season 4, Episode 6; November 18, 1978

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd prototyped their musical-brothers band in the first season with a buzzy, bee-costumed performance of Slim Harpo’s I’m a King Bee. They eventually bought some fedoras and rechristened themselves as Jake and Elwood Blues.

Flanked by members of the SNL band (blues vet Matt “Guitar” Murphy and Stax session all-stars Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn), this Season 4 cold open is the Brothers’ defining moment – and it led them toward a hit record and a blockbuster film.

After smashing into a sweat-box vamp of Otis Redding’s I Can’t Turn You Loose, they choogle through a cool-as-ice cover of Sam & Dave’s Soul Man. Cropper steps into the spotlight with sleek vibrato waggling while Elwood honks his harmonica.

1. Frank Ocean with John Mayer – Pyramids

Season 38, Episode 1; September 12, 2012

Pop-bluesmith John Mayer’s earnest-but-animated performance style was roasted on the show several times, via squinty-eyed, fat-tongued and faux-ripping impersonations from Bill Hader, Jimmy Fallon and host Ashton Kutcher. Mayer got the last laugh with his staggering 2012 guest solo for Frank Ocean.

The R&B singer walks over to a vintage arcade cabinet and starts gaming once Mayer unearths deep, atmospheric bends on a finish-obliterated Strat. A fighting game plays on in the background, but Mayer delivers the knockout blow.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Don’t let the finality of The End fool you. Despite the connotations of the title of Wolfgang Van Halen’s third and latest album as Mammoth, the hard rocker’s thrilling new era has only just begun.

When Guitar World catches up with him over Zoom, the musician – progeny of Eddie Van Halen, and a dynamic master-tapper in his own right – is riding high from leading his live band through a series of opening dates on Creed’s Summer of ’99 tour. It’s put the ever-rising act in front of huge arena crowds and had Van Halen sharing laughs backstage with his old Tremonti bandmate and Creed guitarist, Mark Tremonti.

Each night so far, Mammoth has electrified the masses with The End, the tapped-and-slapped ripper that roared to the top of the Billboard Mainstream Rock charts over the summer, and which is likewise affixed to one of the most memorably goofy-and-gory music videos of 2025 – featuring vampiric maulings aplenty and a scene where Wolf’s mom, Valerie Bertinelli, punches out a ghoul during a mid-concert bar brawl.

It’s been a fun few months, to say the least, but Van Halen also explains that The End arose out of a long period of tension and turmoil – its songs reflecting an existential dread informed by terrifying natural disasters and general anxiety.

“During the last show we played with Metallica in Mexico in 2024, I had a really traumatizing panic attack on the airplane,” he says. “I’d never had that before, and that was the impetus of my lyric writing when it came to the subject material on The End.”

As such, The End marks a highly personal exploration of identity, the weight of expectation, human connection and more. But despite that heady thematic whirl, The End – recorded at his late father’s 5150 Studios with longtime collaborator and producer Michael “Elvis” Baskette – remains a jubilantly rocking offering full of energized anthems, phase-glazed soloing, grungy melodicism and daringly funkified struts.

It feels like you’re poking at some interconnected ideas on songs like The End, Same Old Song and Something New.

With the way I write, it’s very much a therapeutic release. Working those thoughts out is a way of calming the voices in my head and subduing my anxiety. I was working through a lot this time around. The vocals were recorded in January while we had everything in 5150 packed up and ready to go at any moment, because of the Los Angeles fires.

So there’s a lot of nerves, stress and anxiety there. I was thinking about all of my dad’s instruments and all of his belongings before I could even think about mine. We had a U-Haul truck filled with everything. It was tough to be creative in that environment, and I’m already a really anxious person, you know?

How close had the wildfires gotten?

At one point there were four separate fires within two miles of us – you’re just kind of sitting there watching the news and watching the LAFD be the incredible heroes they are. It was the winds that were the scariest, just how it would carry over miles. We were incredibly lucky. I know a lot of people who weren’t. It was a terrible time to be in the area.

How long did it take to get back into the recording sessions?

There were about two weeks where we couldn’t work more than an hour without getting some sort of alert – I didn’t have the brainpower to focus on it, because I was just like, “I need to make sure Frankenstein [Eddie Van Halen’s iconic parts guitar] is safe.”

Once stuff started to calm down, that’s when we really started slamming. There were two ideas I wanted to finish, but we didn’t have the time. They might show up on something else in the future.

Getting into some of the urgency that is on the record, there’s a really dramatic tempo pivot that kicks off the record, in the intro to One of a Kind.

I thought it’d be fun to really start this off with something different, almost like a jump-scare. You’re kind of lulled into this one thing, and then it explodes. But it was also fun to play with something that we hadn’t before, which was a dramatic time change.

It’s almost Sabbath – not the arrangement itself, but with how Sabbath get halfway through a song, and then they start chugging on something else and it’s badass. I also thought it was fun to tie that to the lyrical motifs of the song.

What’s the song about?

A lot of stuff on the album is about somebody losing themselves to some sort of negative influence. By the end of the song, that negative influence wins. That’s why I thought about ending on that really gross note – how it hits that last note and just feeds back for a little bit.

Something else that jumped out at listeners is the tapping intro to The End.

There’s a little callback in the intro to Source of Infection off of Van Halen’s OU812, where I think maybe Donn Landee says Take one, and then Dad does all this tapping stuff. I actually yelled that into the pickup of the guitar on The End, which was pretty funny.

But yeah… I had that idea for a bit, but it seemed a little over the top. I almost used it as a challenge of, like, “How can I make a song out of this?” It was one of the last ideas I pulled out for pre-pro. It was very inspiring and we had a lot of fun doing it.

People have been trying to sleuth out the slapping technique of your verse riff, too.

I really need to post a how-to video, but I haven’t had the time. But it’s literally just a slap bass part. And you’re plucking harmonics. Originally, the idea was to use it on the bass – like that one moment right before the first chorus, where it drops and the bass is playing it. But when I was showing my producer, Elvis Baskette, I was like, “I have this idea – imagine this on a bass,” and I did it on the guitar. Then he’s like, “Dude, you should do that on the guitar.”

Was it easier to throw that down on bass guitar or to transpose it onto Frankenstein?

On the guitar you almost have to lay back and be real soft with it, whereas with the bass you can dig in more, because obviously they’re bigger strings. But I found that the more I relaxed while doing it on guitar, the easier it was to get the sound I wanted.

An Instagram video you posted reveals you’ve got some electrical tape covering the D string, near the pickups.

That’s just a studio trick to make sure there’s no buzz. It was just to deaden any possible extraneous noise. Obviously, I don’t really have a problem doing the riff live now, but when you’re recording, you just want it to be as quiet as possible.

You’ve used Frankenstein on earlier Mammoth records. Have you learned anything in particular about how to harness the sound of that guitar over the years?

Not really. But any moment I have it in my hands… just being able to hold something that my dad had such a history with is nice, since my dad’s not around anymore. It’s a little bittersweet, but it’s a nice thing to have on the record with me. I think that’s why I try to bring it out on every record.

Do you have that same kind of connection with other pieces of gear at 5150?

Pretty much everything, yeah. I mean, just the fact I’m recording in 5150 is enough. But because Frankenstein is arguably one of the most famous instruments in music history, let alone guitars… the emotional and historical weight of it all is a lot to handle. You almost have to push it to the side and just enjoy the moment.

How defining a factor is your own signature EVH SA-126 on this record?

I have a ’burst – I believe it was the second prototype of the 126 – and that was the backbone of Mammoth II. Pretty much everything recorded on The End was the goldtop 126 I have now, other than the Frankenstein guitar parts. It’s just been so fun to have this instrument that Matt Bruck, Chip Ellis and I put together become the defining sound of what Mammoth has become.

How about the guitar amps?

Amp-wise, it’s pretty straightforward, and it’s what we’ve been using on tour, which is the 50 watts. I have the EVH 5150 III 6L6, and the specific one I have in the studio is the one I used for the Taylor Hawkins tribute shows [in 2022]. The cabinet, too.

I Really Wanna has some great phases running through it. Can I assume that’s a classic MXR in there?

Yeah! The other effects I used were just fuzzy sorts of vibes. We have this Foxx Tone pedal we used a lot. We always had a layer of Uni-Vibe… or maybe it was a Univox? Elvis is the guy for all the effects.

I’m never really relying on an effect unless it’s something extremely specific – like on Happy, we used the MXR Rockman [X100 Analog Tone Processor] for this clean lead over the chorus, so it really cuts through. And during The Spell there’s a lead thing starting in the second chorus where we’re doing wah, just to sweeten it up.

The Spell is driven by those funky sharp-ninths. Where did that song come up in the process?

I was thinking of Lenny Kravitz when I was writing that song, paired with a ’70s rock vibe. It felt vintage, because I’m doing what I guess people call the “Hendrix chord.” But I also think of the last note Dad hits on You Really Got Me – a lot of Van Halen songs end with that big note. But that’s definitely one of my favorite choruses on the record. I’m happy with that one.

You mentioned Happy earlier – that song feels like one of the larger vocal showcases on The End.

With that initial vocal melody in the verse, I was basically thinking of Failure and Nirvana. And in that headspace, I was like, “We should straight-up do a Smells Like Teen Spirit sort of thing and have the guitar solo be that vocal melody.”

That song starts off with the lyric “I need control – it shows.” How could that line speak to the broader experience of making music on your own as Mammoth?

You could certainly make that comparison, but with the overarching theme of the record and anxiety, I think it’s more about trying to find your comfort zone amid chaos. That’s a criticism I never saw coming, honestly. Like, “He’s really selfish because he plays everything.”

I always thought it was just a fun thing for me to do. I’ve been in bands before where it’s been a collaborative effort, and it’s very much still a thing with me and my producer, Elvis. He helps me to avoid second-guessing myself, and he tells me when I should keep digging on something.

But a lot of people say things like, “Why don’t you just have other people on the record? It’ll deepen the sound,” or some real ethereal bullshit like, “You’ll give it more zhuzh if you have more people on it.” [Laughs] I don’t know… this is exactly how I want it, and I’m very happy with it.

The music world faced a great loss this summer with the death of Ozzy Osbourne. The day he passed, you performed his song Mama, I’m Coming Home in Hartford, Connecticut. How did Ozzy’s death impact you at that moment?

I think it was around three o’clock that day when we all looked at our phones and everybody went silent. It was really tough. We felt like we needed to do something, because how could you not? He affected everything we do, forever. It would’ve felt weird to go out there and try to play Crazy Train or Paranoid. Mama, I’m Coming Home felt like the right thing to do.

I was very nervous because I didn’t have all the lyrics memorized, and I didn’t even know how to play it. But we sat in the dressing room and listened to it over and over again. We played through it two-and-a-half times in soundcheck, and then we kept doing it acoustically backstage. I don’t even remember the rest of the show because I was so focused on Mama. I didn’t want to mess it up.

You didn’t play Crazy Train that night, but was that a formative song for you to work your hands around, as a developing guitarist?

Absolutely, which is why it was such an insane thing to be asked by Ozzy and Sharon to play it at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction he had last year. And knowing my dad’s connection with Sabbath… he would tell me all the time about that tour in 1978 where Van Halen opened for them. One of my dad’s favorite riffs of all time was Into the Void.

You had to pull out of Black Sabbath and Ozzy’s Back to the Beginning farewell concert in Birmingham. What would you have played? Was there a plan in place?

Not really. It was all very down-to-the-wire. The rehearsal schedule kept moving, because obviously it was an incredibly monumental thing to put together. I don’t put missing the show on anyone – it was a crazy thing to organize.

But the rehearsal dates for this tour kept looming over everything, and the rehearsal dates for Back to the Beginning kept changing. We just weren’t able to do both, and that really sucked, but I’m happy I was able to do the Hall of Fame thing, so at least I got to see Ozzy, give him a hug and talk to him a little bit.

Are you excited to transition from doing these six-song shows with Creed into playing the fuller, hour-and-a-half sets on your own headlining tour this fall?

This is going to be our craziest tour yet. Up until now, all the headline shows we’ve done have been mainly performance focused. We didn’t have much of a show built around it other than lights and a backdrop.

This time we’re bringing stuff we’ve never brought out before. And now that we have three albums of material to pick from, I’m excited to really cater the set wherever we go. It’s going to be a good time.

We don’t necessarily want to ruin a surprise, but are you going to be killing any vampires on stage during The End?

[Laughs] No, there’s not going to be much acting. Our show is just going to be a bit more souped up in comparison to what it’s been before.

• The End is out now via BMG.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

In 2007, Eddie Van Halen launched a tube amp under his EVH gear banner, the EVH 5150 III, that continued the legacy of one of guitar music’s most beloved high-gain amps.

As such, it should come as no surprise that Van Halen took the development of the amp very, very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he developed a mad-scientist torture test to ensure the amp was borderline indestructible.

As EVH leaders Wolfgang Van Halen and Matt Bruck recall in the new issue of Guitar World, that test involved plenty of volume, lots of feedback, and (above all) patience.

“The process was long and difficult, because the amp was reimagined from the ground up, which meant we had to establish a new foundation to build up from,” Bruck says of the amp, which has been selected as one of the most influential pieces of gear of the 21st century.

He adds, “This meant a new chassis and formulating the transformers, which are amazing, built like a tank and over spec’ed – the way they should be if you’re going for something great.”

While Bruck is quick to point out the lengthy R&D phase, Wolfgang highlights the testing phase, for which his father devised “the most rigorous testing an amp could go through”.

“I remember Dad testing it up in the studio. You could hear it from the bottom of the house, this slight feedback,” he remembers. “As you went up toward the studio, it started to get louder. Then you opened the door to the first room, and it was a little louder.

“When you opened the door to where the guitar was, there was a guitar sitting there, with every knob pinned, feeding back. He literally kept it there for a week, just to crash-test it and make sure it didn’t explode.”

Bruck says Eddie called it the “crash testing” phase, and while those around him were a bit skeptical of his methods, Van Halen himself held his nerve.

“It was where he would just try to destroy a piece of equipment,” Bruck adds. “It was so when it went to market, it would be reliable. He just dimed the thing, left it leaning against the cabinet and created this eternal feedback loop. I was terrified the place was going to burn down.

“I was saying, ‘It’s going to get hot. It’s going to explode. We’re going to have a fire.’ He was like, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll see how long it goes.’

“After about five days, he was like, ‘Okay, it passed the test.’ That gives you insight into the uncanny genius and how much of an outside-the-box thinker Ed was.”

Safe to say Eddie Van Halen’s “crash testing” methods left an impression. A few years ago, his rig builder Dave Friedman spoke about his guitar amp “torture test”.

Visit Magazines Direct to pick up the latest issue of Guitar World, which features a rundown of the most important gear releases of the 21st century.