Long ago, Joe Satriani decided Eddie Van Halen’s virtuoso body of work was off limits. Fearful of inadvertently stealing the maestro's licks, he vowed never to learn Ed's riffs or licks, and said breaking that rule would be "torture.”
Then, last year, Satch did exactly that when he signed up for the Best of All Worlds tour. Joining forces with Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony and Jason Bonham, the guitarist took to stages across the U.S. to pay tribute to Ed.
Doing so was no small feat, and he's now revealed which of Van Halen's songs gave him the most trouble.
Even before he got around to playing the songs, Satriani had quite a lot to deal with. Realizing that his live rig wasn't suited to the task at hand, he turned to 3rd Power Amps for a custom-made tube amp designed to replicate his favorite era of Eddie’s tone.
He also made some choice modifications to his signature Ibanez guitars and left no stone unturned in his pursuit of Ed's tone and technique. That attention to detail left Hagar thrilled with Satch's effort, despite his belief that the guitarist was not — on paper at least — a “perfect match” for Ed.
Turning to the songs, Satch also came to realize that the order of the setlist is as important as how he plays and sounds.
“Opening with ‘Good Enough’, ‘Poundcake’ and ‘Runaround’ is amazing,” Satriani tells Guitar World. “I quickly realized that the order of Eddie’s embellishments is really important to the fans. Even though Ed would move things around, this audience knows the studio versions and they will want the scream here, the harmonic cascades there and the finger tapping there.”
The audience’s ear for nuances aside, a few songs proved tricky to master.
“The ‘Poundcake’ drill is hard to nail,” he continues. “The beginning of ‘Summer Nights’ is difficult because of the picking and gain structure. I don’t think I got the intro right until halfway into the tour. It felt so odd to my fingers.”
Tonal diversity was another headscratcher. Satch designed his Dragon 100 amp — which is now available as a plugin — to capture Eddie’s transitional 1986 tone. It was an era, immortalized on the Live Without a Net live album, that saw the band pivot from David Lee Roth to Hagar, and it has come to stand as Satch’s favorite.
But Eddie wasn’t a one-trick pony when it came to tone. As Satriani says, “Ed had a million sounds. ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love’ to ‘Panama’ is a huge jump, then to ‘Summer Nights’ is a crazy jump.
"He went from mono to mono, with a little bit of stereo from the Eventide to widen the pitch, and then full stereo. He used Marshall, Soldano, Peavey and EVH. Those are huge changes in terms of preamp gain and compression. He went from a lot of midrange to quite scooped.
“So I asked Dylana Scott at 3rd Power Amplification to solve it for me,” Satch concludes. “We went for the 1986 Live Without a Net tone because it was all Marshalls but with extra stereo-ness.”
Indeed, it wasn’t a spur of the moment idea to chase that specific era of Eddie’s tone.
“Going back some years, when David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen first called me about a tribute, I started this deep search into Ed’s tone,” Satriani reveals. “His sound was lighter and thinner than my JVM, which was designed to make all my high notes super fat.
“That’s what I usually do for two hours onstage. I’m not playing many chords. But when I play with Sammy, it’s 95 percent rhythm and then eight or 16 bars of solo. A quick rip before coming back.”
In related news, Peavey’s CEO has suggested its signing of Joe Satriani is to blame for Eddie’s split from the firm, which led to the creation of the Fender-owned EVH brand.
Steve Lukather has also clarified the role he is playing in a reported new Van Halen album, which is being spearheaded by Alex, and is using Eddie’s unfinished demos as a launch pad.
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