Eddie Van Halen Quotes

Basically, I use hammer-ons and pull-offs.

I'm amazed at how adventurous and how dangerous the music was, and still is. I haven't heard anything like it since. I'm quite surprised, because a lot of the music on there we never heard at the time.

I learned to do a few tricks that other people hadn't done before. I developed that trebly bass thing a little further.

So dance music is now pop music. So now, as a dance producer, what do I have to do? So I'm starting to do alien music, because pop is not pop anymore; we need to go alien to be independent.

The jazz chord substitutions in a country song... that was another thing that bent people's ears. I guess that my favorites are the unique ones. It's not how fast you play. It's that unique blending of different stuff I'm most proud of.

I make music with no boundaries.

I listen to other guitar players, yeah. It gives me new concepts and shows me where the instrument is going for the future and it is going some places. There are some musicians who are really putting out a good vibe with new theories. I try and keep up.

I like trying to make sounds that are interesting and are a bit weird. I try to make music that captures people's imaginations.

To make harmonics scream, I first dump my Floyd Rose real quick, hit a harmonic with my left hand while the string is still flapping, and then use the bar to pull it up to the pitch I wanna hit.

Some of my favorite harmonics are located between frets. There are two really cool ones between the 2nd and 3rd frets that I use a lot.

My more risky or avant garde music is not that well known to a wider audience, but I wish it was.

Ultimately, what interests me is using exotic sounds in my songs.

Using something that is really painful, generally, as the percussive element for a beat, I think is cool.

The sound of 'Take Her Up to Monto' and 'Hairless Toys' is the sound of me and the producer in the studio doing whatever we like. There is no reference. It's too easy to be referential now; I'm trying to find something else.

When you start running out of things to do on a guitar, you have to find other ways of making music with your instrument.

We're all about trying to play better every night, not just singing hit songs ... we ad lib, and every night there's jamming .. it's almost like the Grateful Dead meets Buck Owens some nights, because we'll go off on little adventures and sometimes we do crash the bus!.

Jeff Beck is compelled by his inner artistic drive to keep evolving the instrument. He'll use the whammy bar with the volume knob and the tone control all at the same time - creating harmonics that no human being should be able to hit.

It's easy to record songs. Anyone can make a track on garage band. I've been on the search to find that incredibly authentic place of sound and intention that only I can bring. Everyone has their own expression. I'm still on that quest and I hope to always be.

Improvisation is the courage to move from one note to the next.

Free improvisation, in addition to being a highly skilled musical craft, is open to use by almost anyone - beginners, children, and non-musicians.

There probably is a lot of music that no one's ever gonna hear. For anyone doing music, just do exactly what it is that makes you want to do it. If you like listening to odd, strange, bizarre noise and that makes you want to create it, do it. Even if everyone around you tells you it's crap or thinks it won't work, someone out there is going to appreciate it.

I have produced all kinds of music because I love all kinds of music.

For me, changing the sound and listening to new music - that's just so fun. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. You're never going to please everybody. I feel that at the end of the day, I should make what I want to make since somebody is going to hate it and somebody is going to love it too. I can't control that.

I think I always thought of the guitar as the vehicle to be able to make some musical idea up. The only appeal to learning more chords was having more chords to put into songs. I never got too wrapped up in becoming technically good. So writing songs happened pretty simultaneously with learning how to play the guitar.

I didn't know what I was gonna get the first time I sat down at a piano, but I loved it and it became my playmate for life.