Joe Satriani recently talked about taking part in the 2024 “The Best Of All Worlds” tour with Sammy Hagar. During the tour, Hagar and his bandmates in The Circle, Satriani and ex-Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony — performed largely Van Halen material.
Speaking with Andy Guitar, he was asked if he watched a lot of old concert videos of Eddie Van Halen to reproduce the legendary guitarist’s parts live or if he was “going from the original recordings a lot.”
Joe Satriani explained that learning Eddie Van Halen’s music went far beyond simply figuring out the chords and arrangements. He said the real challenge was replicating Van Halen’s unique fingering, string choices, and playing style.
“Well, I definitely started with original recordings and just used my ear to get the chords and the arrangement. And that’s the easy part. The hard part is the quirky fingering string choices.
“Every guitar player, we have our own pluses and minuses, and it might be speed, timing, touch, tone, intonation — all kinds of things that certain people have a lot of, and then there are areas where we’re kind of deficient, let’s say, than the next player,” Joe explained. “And so, yeah, you have to kind of come up against that and see, like, ‘Well, how do I measure up in that particular area, and how do I work around it?’
Satriani credited online guitar communities and YouTube musicians for helping him study different techniques and approaches to emulating Eddie’s iconic sound, while acknowledging that fully capturing the “magic” of his playing is impossible.
He added: “But I think one thing that really helped me was this amazing community, these guitar players of all ages dedicated so many hours to figuring out exactly how Ed played a lot of these songs. And so I would, after I learned the song, I’d go and I’d spend an hour or two on YouTube just watching how other people address this immense problem of trying to emulate Ed’s playing. And you can’t capture the magic, but you can get pretty close to the fingering, and some players are better than others. And it was just great for me to sit across from the screen and just go, ‘Okay, he’s doing that on the first three strings. This guy’s doing it on the third string. She’s doing it somewhere else,’ and how some people pull it off.'”
Joe Satriani said that capturing the spirit and energy of Eddie Van Halen’s playing is more important than perfectly copying every technical detail. He noted that Eddie often changed songs during live performances, improvising and surprising audiences by playing parts differently each time, which made his performances unique and exciting.
“There are players out there like — I was thinking of Phil X, who will play great Van Halen songs without any vibrato bar. And it reminds you that the spirit is sometimes more important than just imitating the part that might be. There’s a lot of ways. And then when you go deep into any live clips or if you have memories of seeing Van Halen, like I do, you remember, like, ‘Oh, yeah, [Ed] played it differently every single time.’ He shocked you at how he would just forget about some part or purposely not play it the way it is on the record and just replace it with something you never expected. And you loved it anyway. You have to keep that in mind.”
