“I don’t think I got the intro right until halfway into the tour”: The Van Halen song Joe Satriani struggled to nail
You might expect a virtuoso like Joe Satriani to pick up new guitar parts almost immediately. But when it came to learning certain Eddie Van Halen licks for the Best of All Worlds tour, Satch found he had his work cut out.
The Best of All Worlds tour sees Joe Satriani, Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony and Jason Bonham teaming up to perform classic Van Halen material. In November, Bonham pulled out of the band, and was replaced by session and touring veteran Kenny Aronoff.
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The band performed a considerable number of shows in 2024, and will host a Las Vegas residency commencing 30 April.
Now, in an interview in the new issue of Guitar World, Satch details some of the Van Halen classics that proved difficult to master in time for the tour.
“Opening with Good Enough, Poundcake and Runaround is amazing. I quickly realized that the order of Eddie’s embellishments is really important to the fans,” he recalls. “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.
“As for challenges, the Poundcake drill is hard to nail. 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.”
Elsewhere, Satriani touches on EVH’s evolving tone throughout the years, and how he approached making sure his tone for the Best of All Worlds tour was as accurate as possible.
“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 says. “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. We went for the 1986 Live Without a Net tone, because it was all Marshalls but with the extra stereo-ness.”
That collaboration with 3rd Power yielded the DRGN 100, the result of a “deep search into Ed’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. 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 on stage. 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.”
See tickets for the Best of All Worlds tour via the band’s official website.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
