Eddie Van Halen Quotes

My guitar is a mutation between a classic Fender Stratocaster guitar, which I played for years, and a Gibson solid-body like an SG or a Les Paul. It contains all sounds of the basic classic rock n' roll guitars. It does what I want it to do.

I really enjoy working with luthiers, and have a couple of really old Les Pauls and one of my original Strats that I still carry on the road.

I wanted a Gibson type sound, but with a Strat vibrato ... I bought a body from Charvel for $50.00 and a neck for $80.00 - I slapped it together, put an old Gibson PAF in it and painted it up with the stripes

I figured out how to get the guitar to rumble...I put it on the middle pickup, turn the tone know down, grab it by the wang bar, and just shake it on the floor... a Stratocaster is pretty tough - I wouldn't recommend that anybody do that with their ES-335

.. the guitar is just a wonderful instrument. It's everything: a bartender, a psychiatrist, a housewife. It's everything, but it's elusive

A Strat was a thing of wonder .. when I was 14 or 15, the Shadows were a big influence, and they had the first Strats that came to England. I like to play all kinds of guitars, but I wasn't getting the sound I really wanted until I got a Stratocaster

Grab a guitar, put some kind of strings on it, a banjo string, then a violin string, then a guitar string, tune it any way you want, and make some noise, and see what you get. And work on it until you get something that you think is interesting. That's all there is to art for me.

As a kid, I loved any guitarists, whether it was Elvis Presley, Lonnie Donegan, Chuck Berry or even the cowboy guitarists like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. The image of the guitar appealed to me.

I play the guitar.

I play the guitar every day.

I'm a Telecaster connoisseur, and I love my Teles. I have one from almost every year since the very beginning, in 1950. I'm so obsessed with them.

What I do is, I look at rock guitar players, and I say to myself, 'What is this guy doing? What does he have that can inspire me?' I try to see what other people are doing and take what they have and turn it and twist it into my own thing.

My dad loved Les Paul, and I wanted to be just like that.

I really like the Budda head with a big Orange cabinet with Celestion 30 speakers and my '63 Fender Telecaster.

I like Telecasters because they are so versatile.

All I thought about when I was a kid was getting my guitar and entertaining people.

I don't like to be caught without a pick.

I'm always trying to evolve my sound. I love the simplicity of my setup. I play Gibson guitars and Marshall amps. So it's kind of like the standard rock sound.

I have a Gibson Thinline that I designed the body shape of, which I used a lot on the 'Fanatic' album that I'm going to shake out.

All my kids play guitar, sing, and dabble with writing.

Les Paul was my godfather.

I like Harvey Mandel.

When we first started, in the early Eighties, we had some crappy guitars - Japanese knockoffs that wouldn't hold standard tuning. Later, we'd shove drumsticks or screwdrivers under strings to scheme new noises, sure. But initially, open tuning was a technique used to make our cheap guitars sound better. It wasn't academic or conceptual.

My first guitar was an Ibanez semi-hollowbody, I think it was called the Artist, from the early '80s.

When Ray Flacke came out, it was like 'What in the heck is this?' ... there's a guy who had that Tele players attitude, and he plugged straight into that amp with a delay, and it was unbelievable the way he would bend those big strings ... he was really unique.