David, Alex, and Michael should play a couple of tunes with Jacob. Do this on this SAMMY 2024 tour. When they come to California.
It would be cool to have Wolf play as well with two guitars and singing backups so Dave doesn't have to stretch. You would have 4 singers. Dave, Jacob, Michael, and Wolf.
The other guitar players that I see doing this could be Dweezil, Nuno, Gilbert. Id have each do a song with the above band.
As soon as I heard the Runnin With the Dweezil at the end of the first episode I had hopes Jacob would also be a guest... I knew it was him. I even mentioned it to Dweezil in private. I was introduced to Jacob's playing leaving an arts festival with his awesome cover of On Fire... A stuffy lady on the bus told me to turn it down. I was so in the moment I looked her in the eye and said, no... My wife pretended to be mad at me until later when she laughed at me like we were kids again. Great episode! I have been waiting literally years for this!
Fantastic episode with Jacob! I’ve been following his YouTube channel for many years and I’ve always been awed at his incredible work ethic and his truly unbelievably great vocals and as Dweezil mentioned his mastery of doing what I had heretofore thought was intrinsically impossible…singing and playing Van Halen music on guitar at the same time with a great command of both in detail. If I hadn’t seen Jacob doing it, I would have told you it was impossible.
I encourage anyone that is able to see his band play in The Great White North or elsewhere to do so. If nothing else, please watch his band’s live footage. It isn’t really apparent from this interview, but Jacob is an incredible showman…every bit as cocky as David Lee Roth and dedicated to bringing the party rock to a MILF near you! He’s scary good and I’m really a fan!
On another note, I had been wondering what song was being played by Mammoth on the snippets that were shared near the end of the Billy Corgan episode. “War Pigs” and “Funk #49” were pretty obvious, but I was perplexed by the first song. I’d asked around to everyone I could think of, including Dweezil, but I could find no joy for months.
At last, I figured out that this song is the very obscure gem called “Double Cross” by the local Dallas/Ft. Worth area late 60s/early 70s band Bloodrock! Edward’s singing sounds EXACTLY like the vocalist in that band Jim Rutledge. I think this is a badass heavy song of the late 60s/early 70s, which was officially released in March of 1970.
I spoke with Greg Renoff (who is, as most fans should know by now, the author of ‘Van Halen Rising’ and ‘Ted Templeman: A Platinum Producer’s Life In Music’) about this tune and he believes (and I concur) that this very obscure song was likely brought into the cover repertoire of Mammoth by the late bassist Mark Stone. Still, a very cool “ZZ Top meets Black Sabbath and Cream” tune!
The episode with Greg Kurstin is super cool! I really love that a keyboard player could be such a fan of Van Halen though it is obviously guitar based music. It was wonderful to hear “Unchained” on piano just as Edward wrote it! It just sits right as Dweezil and Greg mentioned. And to think “Hear About It Later” was also written on piano. Two drop D masterpieces on what is generally acknowledged to be the band’s greatest album with the best guitar work! Thanks again!
Thanks Dweezil so much for including Pete in this incredible podcast series, these past 2 episodes were certainly a feast for the ears. An EVH aficionado, a great player and a good Canadian boy, Pete is certainly "one of us"!
Oh man…I LOVE how you described what’s going on in Van Halen music writ large…mainly the Ed and Al THING that people have so much difficulty comprehending and executing, including of course myself! It is tempo and FEEL intertwined, pushing and pulling…but isn’t that part and parcel of great music? From Led Zeppelin to Dave Brubeck and just beautiful music in general?! It isn’t locked to a grid as you say as virtually all modern music is.
I’m currently working on creating tempo maps for “I’m the One” going bar-by-bar to try to quantify the exact changes in bpm as Al and Ed engage in their push and pull…while Mike is keeping up as best as he can! What I’m finding is what I guessed and sort’ve “felt” about this “swing” to use an overused and often misunderstood word to describe it. This isn’t necessarily about the varying tempo, though that is a part of it…it is the FEEL that is going on with this push and pull of tempo between Ed and Al. And what I see most often is that it is Ed that is pushing the tempo and Al is “pulling” him back…reining him in so to speak. I find this going on a lot…but it is this telepathy that the great rhythm sections have that makes things so full of feeling and so difficult to capture.
As Van Halen fans often recognize, the band is about how the guitar and drums lock in…whereas with most other rock, blues and soul bands it is about the bass and drums locking together and driving the rest of the band. It seems so obvious to say this stuff, but a lot of people miss this point. People who study Edward’s playing so often give up on unlocking this part of Van Halen music because it is so damned difficult to play along with these “swinging” tempos as you learn the material. That’s a Rubicon that people can’t or won’t cross…I see a lot of people, including myself at times, just get frustrated and say “No one swings like Edward! I can’t do it…I give up and I’ll just play some nonsense that kind’ve seems close enough!”.
But if you persevere and really get into the true magic of instrumental Van Halen music which is really about Al and Ed’s synergistic push and pull of tempo, dynamics and feeling, there’s so much beauty in that one aspect to behold apart from the other great pieces of the musical Russian nesting doll of Van Halen music like Dave and Sammy’s great singing and vocal melodies and Mike’s killer backing vocals and truly perfect for the music bass parts. This music is so intricate and I think you’ve really hit on some perfect words to describe what is almost indescribable!
I love how you and Pete actually touch on the “meta” part of the music going beyond the technique and the technical and the gear…that higher thing is what it’s all about!
I think you also totally nailed the Van Halen process of writing, recording and playing the music live. They eventually settle on what gets committed to the recording and then when they play live, they essentially settle on a live arrangement and then play it pretty much the same way every time barring any unforeseen circumstances. This isn’t free jazz…it is Van Halen!
And for the record, I think Ed is doing alternate picking on the “Light Up the Sky” main riff! I’ve found that Ed did do Downstroke metal style chugging on rare occasions for a few notes here and there, but more often than not, I really hear and see in live videos that he’s just straight alternate picking. In fact, you can clearly see him using alternate picking right here in 2015 and from what I can see in the Fresno 1979 footage he’s doing the same there:
Best $51.50 I ever spent. This gift keeps on giving! Super fun two episodes getting into the nuts n bolts of EVH style and genius. Thanks for diving into this Dweezil and Pete. I felt I was right there in the studio with y'all sharing licks and geeking out. Hope the series continues.
So I have a question for Dweezil which may have been asked and answered at some point, but here goes:
My pals Greg Renoff and podcaster/classic rock/VH cover band guitarist Jeff Goebel and other friends of mine have been going down every possible rabbit hole for information on the source or sources from which Edward drew for his famous right hand tapping technique.
We have essentially all agreed that the most solid evidence on balance points toward Harvey Mandel being the person that Edward got his right hand tapping technique from. There are reliable eyewitness accounts from George Lynch who attended a Mandel show at the Starwood with Edward where Mandel played his many advanced right hand tapping runs live and a local scenester who actually saw Terry Kilgore teach Ed the technique after he himself was taught the technique by Mandel. Neal Schon is also quoted as saying that Edward specifically told him that he learned the technique from Mandel by way of Terry Kilgore.
It is an almost foregone conclusion that despite Ed’s best attempts to claim that he came up with the idea on his own after seeing Page’s “Heartbreaker” solo open string legato triplets, he almost certainly actually learned the technique wholly from Terry Kilgore who was taught directly by Mandel and the very reliable account of Lynch having attended a Mandel show at the Starwood where Mandel performed many advanced right hand tapping runs which were all over his 1973 solo album ‘Shangrenade’ and which he he’d been playing since 1969.
Another very distinct possibility is that Edward was aware of right hand tapping from seeing and/or hearing Derringer band guitarist Danny Johnson doing advanced right hand tapping runs in Derringer…who also played a great hard rocking live version of “You Really Got Me” well prior to Van Halen’s breakthrough recording and who also played guitar in the band ‘Private Life’ that Edward produced in the late 80s.
My question and the question from my friends to Dweez is this…Did you ever discuss the origins of tapping with Ed as it related to Frank’s pioneering right hand tapping as we see it in this famous clip of “Black Napkins” from 1976 at around the 2:40 mark?
My dad was tapping on the neck with a pick to make what he called "Bagpipe Sounds" starting as far back as 1973. It was a more randomized hyper fast flutter sound within lines. It wasn't uniform like Eruption.
Thanks for that memory! It’s clear from that footage that 1973’s “bagpipe sounds” evolved into something more “uniform” by the time of that 1976 footage. I think I get what he was driving at with “bagpipe” if the tapped note was a very short one that quickly jumped to the next note in the way that notes in bagpipe music can.
It is really interesting that the whole right hand tapping technique was essentially “in the air” for some progressive rock guitarists and forward thinking guitar players in general. I reckon it is obvious that Edward popularized it because he ultimately made great popular music that reached the masses in a way that others didn’t, but the actual technique and the same basic runs were definitely being done by others just as well, especially from Hackett and Mandel.
Thanks David! It was great fun…I’m glad you enjoyed it! Dweezil is great at editing and audio magic to such a degree that he made a simpleton like me sound passable!
Wow! This is awesome! A fantastic resource! Thanks again Allen for sharing all of your materials with us. Many practice hours ahead to look forward to!
Near the end of the episode, I also played one of my favorite variations of the repeating open string licks similar to those in “Eruption”, “Somebody Get Me a Doctor”, “I’m the One” (second solo), “5150” etc. in F# during the “Hot For Teacher” solo. Here is my complete transcription of that solo where you can see exactly how Eddie played that iteration of the lick where he mixed up his straight picking with his normal “single open E picked with the rest legato” patterns with added picked notes at various points in an off-the-cuff way which doesn’t follow his usual non-varying pattern all the way through all of the repeats:
The “Hot For Teacher” solo is based almost entirely on the Clapton/Cream “Sitting On Top of the World” ending solo licks…the phrasing and the overall composition of each part of this solo is breathtaking!
I also played through the solo from “Girl Gone Bad” which is one of my favorite of all of Ed’s solos at the very close of the episode. To me, the song is a strong candidate for being perhaps the best song the band ever did…right up there with “Push Comes To Shove” or “Hear About It Later”. To my mind, it is the closest the band ever came to Led Zeppelin…a masterpiece! And the solo showcases some of Edward’s old familiar licks played with swinging gusto and with a nice long legato phrase near the beginning of the solo…a clear example of the influence of Holdsworth before Ed goes to his more familiar five-note pattern with one Upstroke picked note at the 14th position (same as in the “Beat It” solo in the 12th position) and his raked Am arpeggio/A blues phrasing to wind it up. I love it! Here’s my transcription of the complete “Girl Gone Bad” solo:
Also, here is a video lesson in which I go over these five note patterns from “Beat It” and “Girl Gone Bad” which contains some tips on how to execute this pattern cleanly:
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Great Episode!
Here is a fantasy.
David, Alex, and Michael should play a couple of tunes with Jacob. Do this on this SAMMY 2024 tour. When they come to California.
It would be cool to have Wolf play as well with two guitars and singing backups so Dave doesn't have to stretch. You would have 4 singers. Dave, Jacob, Michael, and Wolf.
The other guitar players that I see doing this could be Dweezil, Nuno, Gilbert. Id have each do a song with the above band.
Thoughts?
Regards,
Jimmy
As soon as I heard the Runnin With the Dweezil at the end of the first episode I had hopes Jacob would also be a guest... I knew it was him. I even mentioned it to Dweezil in private. I was introduced to Jacob's playing leaving an arts festival with his awesome cover of On Fire... A stuffy lady on the bus told me to turn it down. I was so in the moment I looked her in the eye and said, no... My wife pretended to be mad at me until later when she laughed at me like we were kids again. Great episode! I have been waiting literally years for this!
Fantastic episode with Jacob! I’ve been following his YouTube channel for many years and I’ve always been awed at his incredible work ethic and his truly unbelievably great vocals and as Dweezil mentioned his mastery of doing what I had heretofore thought was intrinsically impossible…singing and playing Van Halen music on guitar at the same time with a great command of both in detail. If I hadn’t seen Jacob doing it, I would have told you it was impossible.
I encourage anyone that is able to see his band play in The Great White North or elsewhere to do so. If nothing else, please watch his band’s live footage. It isn’t really apparent from this interview, but Jacob is an incredible showman…every bit as cocky as David Lee Roth and dedicated to bringing the party rock to a MILF near you! He’s scary good and I’m really a fan!
On another note, I had been wondering what song was being played by Mammoth on the snippets that were shared near the end of the Billy Corgan episode. “War Pigs” and “Funk #49” were pretty obvious, but I was perplexed by the first song. I’d asked around to everyone I could think of, including Dweezil, but I could find no joy for months.
At last, I figured out that this song is the very obscure gem called “Double Cross” by the local Dallas/Ft. Worth area late 60s/early 70s band Bloodrock! Edward’s singing sounds EXACTLY like the vocalist in that band Jim Rutledge. I think this is a badass heavy song of the late 60s/early 70s, which was officially released in March of 1970.
I spoke with Greg Renoff (who is, as most fans should know by now, the author of ‘Van Halen Rising’ and ‘Ted Templeman: A Platinum Producer’s Life In Music’) about this tune and he believes (and I concur) that this very obscure song was likely brought into the cover repertoire of Mammoth by the late bassist Mark Stone. Still, a very cool “ZZ Top meets Black Sabbath and Cream” tune!
The episode with Greg Kurstin is super cool! I really love that a keyboard player could be such a fan of Van Halen though it is obviously guitar based music. It was wonderful to hear “Unchained” on piano just as Edward wrote it! It just sits right as Dweezil and Greg mentioned. And to think “Hear About It Later” was also written on piano. Two drop D masterpieces on what is generally acknowledged to be the band’s greatest album with the best guitar work! Thanks again!
ok
I'll be so sad when this series ends.
Loving all the recent episodes, Dweezil! Looking forward to the one with Jacob Deraps too
So I have to email premier guitar for the subscription info?
Thanks Dweezil so much for including Pete in this incredible podcast series, these past 2 episodes were certainly a feast for the ears. An EVH aficionado, a great player and a good Canadian boy, Pete is certainly "one of us"!
Oh man…I LOVE how you described what’s going on in Van Halen music writ large…mainly the Ed and Al THING that people have so much difficulty comprehending and executing, including of course myself! It is tempo and FEEL intertwined, pushing and pulling…but isn’t that part and parcel of great music? From Led Zeppelin to Dave Brubeck and just beautiful music in general?! It isn’t locked to a grid as you say as virtually all modern music is.
I’m currently working on creating tempo maps for “I’m the One” going bar-by-bar to try to quantify the exact changes in bpm as Al and Ed engage in their push and pull…while Mike is keeping up as best as he can! What I’m finding is what I guessed and sort’ve “felt” about this “swing” to use an overused and often misunderstood word to describe it. This isn’t necessarily about the varying tempo, though that is a part of it…it is the FEEL that is going on with this push and pull of tempo between Ed and Al. And what I see most often is that it is Ed that is pushing the tempo and Al is “pulling” him back…reining him in so to speak. I find this going on a lot…but it is this telepathy that the great rhythm sections have that makes things so full of feeling and so difficult to capture.
As Van Halen fans often recognize, the band is about how the guitar and drums lock in…whereas with most other rock, blues and soul bands it is about the bass and drums locking together and driving the rest of the band. It seems so obvious to say this stuff, but a lot of people miss this point. People who study Edward’s playing so often give up on unlocking this part of Van Halen music because it is so damned difficult to play along with these “swinging” tempos as you learn the material. That’s a Rubicon that people can’t or won’t cross…I see a lot of people, including myself at times, just get frustrated and say “No one swings like Edward! I can’t do it…I give up and I’ll just play some nonsense that kind’ve seems close enough!”.
But if you persevere and really get into the true magic of instrumental Van Halen music which is really about Al and Ed’s synergistic push and pull of tempo, dynamics and feeling, there’s so much beauty in that one aspect to behold apart from the other great pieces of the musical Russian nesting doll of Van Halen music like Dave and Sammy’s great singing and vocal melodies and Mike’s killer backing vocals and truly perfect for the music bass parts. This music is so intricate and I think you’ve really hit on some perfect words to describe what is almost indescribable!
I love how you and Pete actually touch on the “meta” part of the music going beyond the technique and the technical and the gear…that higher thing is what it’s all about!
I think you also totally nailed the Van Halen process of writing, recording and playing the music live. They eventually settle on what gets committed to the recording and then when they play live, they essentially settle on a live arrangement and then play it pretty much the same way every time barring any unforeseen circumstances. This isn’t free jazz…it is Van Halen!
And for the record, I think Ed is doing alternate picking on the “Light Up the Sky” main riff! I’ve found that Ed did do Downstroke metal style chugging on rare occasions for a few notes here and there, but more often than not, I really hear and see in live videos that he’s just straight alternate picking. In fact, you can clearly see him using alternate picking right here in 2015 and from what I can see in the Fresno 1979 footage he’s doing the same there:
Best $51.50 I ever spent. This gift keeps on giving! Super fun two episodes getting into the nuts n bolts of EVH style and genius. Thanks for diving into this Dweezil and Pete. I felt I was right there in the studio with y'all sharing licks and geeking out. Hope the series continues.
Love the new episodes with Pete! Still the best podcast ever!
Loving the Pete Thorn episode, Dweezil!
So I have a question for Dweezil which may have been asked and answered at some point, but here goes:
My pals Greg Renoff and podcaster/classic rock/VH cover band guitarist Jeff Goebel and other friends of mine have been going down every possible rabbit hole for information on the source or sources from which Edward drew for his famous right hand tapping technique.
We have essentially all agreed that the most solid evidence on balance points toward Harvey Mandel being the person that Edward got his right hand tapping technique from. There are reliable eyewitness accounts from George Lynch who attended a Mandel show at the Starwood with Edward where Mandel played his many advanced right hand tapping runs live and a local scenester who actually saw Terry Kilgore teach Ed the technique after he himself was taught the technique by Mandel. Neal Schon is also quoted as saying that Edward specifically told him that he learned the technique from Mandel by way of Terry Kilgore.
It is an almost foregone conclusion that despite Ed’s best attempts to claim that he came up with the idea on his own after seeing Page’s “Heartbreaker” solo open string legato triplets, he almost certainly actually learned the technique wholly from Terry Kilgore who was taught directly by Mandel and the very reliable account of Lynch having attended a Mandel show at the Starwood where Mandel performed many advanced right hand tapping runs which were all over his 1973 solo album ‘Shangrenade’ and which he he’d been playing since 1969.
Another very distinct possibility is that Edward was aware of right hand tapping from seeing and/or hearing Derringer band guitarist Danny Johnson doing advanced right hand tapping runs in Derringer…who also played a great hard rocking live version of “You Really Got Me” well prior to Van Halen’s breakthrough recording and who also played guitar in the band ‘Private Life’ that Edward produced in the late 80s.
My question and the question from my friends to Dweez is this…Did you ever discuss the origins of tapping with Ed as it related to Frank’s pioneering right hand tapping as we see it in this famous clip of “Black Napkins” from 1976 at around the 2:40 mark?
My dad was tapping on the neck with a pick to make what he called "Bagpipe Sounds" starting as far back as 1973. It was a more randomized hyper fast flutter sound within lines. It wasn't uniform like Eruption.
Thanks for that memory! It’s clear from that footage that 1973’s “bagpipe sounds” evolved into something more “uniform” by the time of that 1976 footage. I think I get what he was driving at with “bagpipe” if the tapped note was a very short one that quickly jumped to the next note in the way that notes in bagpipe music can.
It is really interesting that the whole right hand tapping technique was essentially “in the air” for some progressive rock guitarists and forward thinking guitar players in general. I reckon it is obvious that Edward popularized it because he ultimately made great popular music that reached the masses in a way that others didn’t, but the actual technique and the same basic runs were definitely being done by others just as well, especially from Hackett and Mandel.
Dang, Zappa was on the Mike Douglas show? Nice camera work, never knew Frank used so many upstrokes on downbeats. Thanks for posting that.
Hi DZ! Any estimate when the Line 6 Helix Van Halen presets will become available for us subscribers?
Amazing Pod cast tons of info super love the deep dive thanks Allen and Dweeze!
Thanks David! It was great fun…I’m glad you enjoyed it! Dweezil is great at editing and audio magic to such a degree that he made a simpleton like me sound passable!
Wow! This is awesome! A fantastic resource! Thanks again Allen for sharing all of your materials with us. Many practice hours ahead to look forward to!
Near the end of the episode, I also played one of my favorite variations of the repeating open string licks similar to those in “Eruption”, “Somebody Get Me a Doctor”, “I’m the One” (second solo), “5150” etc. in F# during the “Hot For Teacher” solo. Here is my complete transcription of that solo where you can see exactly how Eddie played that iteration of the lick where he mixed up his straight picking with his normal “single open E picked with the rest legato” patterns with added picked notes at various points in an off-the-cuff way which doesn’t follow his usual non-varying pattern all the way through all of the repeats:
The “Hot For Teacher” solo is based almost entirely on the Clapton/Cream “Sitting On Top of the World” ending solo licks…the phrasing and the overall composition of each part of this solo is breathtaking!
I also played through the solo from “Girl Gone Bad” which is one of my favorite of all of Ed’s solos at the very close of the episode. To me, the song is a strong candidate for being perhaps the best song the band ever did…right up there with “Push Comes To Shove” or “Hear About It Later”. To my mind, it is the closest the band ever came to Led Zeppelin…a masterpiece! And the solo showcases some of Edward’s old familiar licks played with swinging gusto and with a nice long legato phrase near the beginning of the solo…a clear example of the influence of Holdsworth before Ed goes to his more familiar five-note pattern with one Upstroke picked note at the 14th position (same as in the “Beat It” solo in the 12th position) and his raked Am arpeggio/A blues phrasing to wind it up. I love it! Here’s my transcription of the complete “Girl Gone Bad” solo:
Also, here is a video lesson in which I go over these five note patterns from “Beat It” and “Girl Gone Bad” which contains some tips on how to execute this pattern cleanly:
https://youtu.be/lIL27p_MAfA?si=2VHmj5yBHTIeCN5R
Girl Gone Bad is def a standout cut for me. He put the whole prog rock crowd on notice with that tune.