Guitar Tricks Insider February/March Digital Edition | Page 6

ESSENTIAL ALBUMS

Some of us are just players. We stretch the boundaries within the comforts
of the known. But a few guys decide that’s not enough and invent a whole
new language. In the ‘50s, Chuck Berry invented electric rock guitar playing
out of whole cloth. In the ‘60s it was Jimi Hendrix who played like an alien
from a distant planet. In the ‘70s it was Eddie Van Halen who stepped onto
the stage, turned everyone’s heads, and changed the way the rest of us
play. Like Berry and Hendrix before him, Van Halen spoke a language none
of us had heard before. Yet all of us understood. And then the rest of us,
who are just plain rock players, well, we all tried to speak like him. Finally,
for those of us still trying, here are some of Eddie’s vocabulary builders.

EDDIE VAN HALEN

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DIGITAL EDITION

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Live at Leeds, by The Who
Wheels of Fire, by Cream
Cream Goodbye, by Cream
So, by Peter Gabriel
Van Halen, by Van Halen
Blow by Blow, by Jeff Beck

FEB/MAR