Megadeth’s Chris Broderick on Learning Guitar, Loving Eddie Van Halen

Like many great guitarists, Megadeth’s Chris Broderick clearly remembers the first time he picked up his choice instrument. At the time, Broderick was just a little tyke and shelved out a whopping (not really) $40 for his first guitar.

“[My friends] all played in a band together, and I was like, ‘Oh, that is interesting [laughs],’” Broderick told Glide Magazine. “I’d always go over to my friend’s house and constantly nag him to play his guitar all the time. And he’d be like, ‘No, no, let’s go ride motocross’ or something else.

“But I’d be constantly nagging him, so finally I bought a guitar from one of his friends, spray-painted it red, threw some black electrical tape on it and tried to become Eddie Van Halen [laughs].”

Van Halen, Broderick says, is the first band that really turned him on to heavy music. “It was not only [Eddie Van Halen’s] tapping, but also he knew a little finger style as well on the guitar with like ‘Spanish Fly’ and stuff like that. I thought that was really cool. I mean, it was everything about his playing; it was very unique and had a lot of fire behind it.”

Broderick joined Megadeth in 2008, and he says that past four years have gone by fast. “You know what, in a way it feels like an eternity, because it’s almost like a different life since I’ve joined Megadeth,” he said, laughing. “I do remember what I was doing before them but it is so different. It’s almost like the difference between when you’re touring and when you’re not touring. It feels like two different lives that you have.”

View the original article here

Mean Streets: A Van Halen Tour of the Sunset Strip

A few months ago, I, your intrepid reporter, camera in hand, delivered a tour of AC/DC-related locations in my adopted hometown of Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne is a beautiful city – it reminds many Americans of the best bits of San Francisco or Portland – and it’s utterly swelling with Oz rock history. It was a really fun article to write, and to reflect on a very, very famous band and its physical connection to a location that I find myself surrounded by every day.

But it’s not every day that I find myself in Los Angeles. That happens once a year for the NAMM Show. And with the new Van Halen album, A Different Kind of Truth, mere weeks away, I recently took the opportunity to hang out in L.A. for a few days and check out a few Van Halen historical sites before heading down to Anaheim for NAMM.

The first stop for any self-respecting Van Halenite is the Whisky A Go Go. This legendary nightclub literally gave birth to the go-go dancing craze, and it was here that the career of The Doors really took off – they were the Whisky’s house band for a while. The Whisky is one of several venues where Van Halen would play mostly covers, with the occasional original thrown in, and you can hear the influence of this period on the band’s later music in the form of tracks like “You Really Got Me” and “You’re No Good,” as well as about half of the Diver Down album. The Whisky was revisited by the band in its Sammy Hagar-led incarnation in March 1993, their first performance there in 15 years. This gig was immortalized in the form of a live video for the song “Dreams” to promote the band’s only official live album to date, Live: Right Here, Right Now, released a month earlier.

The most recent Sunset Strip venue to feature in Van Halen history is the Roxy Theater. Known as the location for much (but not all) of Frank Zappa’s Roxy & Elsewhere album, the Roxy was opened in 1973 and was the location where comedian Paul Reubens first introduced his Pee Wee Herman character. It’s also the site of live albums by Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, NOFX, Warren Zevon and more. Van Halen used the venue in late 2011 to film the video for their new single “Tattoo,” and, according to the Roxy’s blog, the band loved the venue so much that they stayed on to rehearse for their forthcoming tour. 

Some of the more prominent Van Halen-related Sunset Strip landmarks aren’t there anymore. The Starwood was on the northwest corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Crescent Heights Avenue. It opened in 1972 and closed down in 1981. In the nine years in between, it hosted bands such as Black Flag, The Go-Go’s, The Knack, FEAR, Motley Crue, Quiet Riot, The Runaways, The Ramones, AC/DC, Dokken, The Jam and many more. It was here that Van Halen ultimately became stars, when producer Ted Templeman and Warner Bros. executive Mo Ostin caught a Van Halen set and promptly signed them to the label.

Another legendary VH venue that no longer exists is/was Gazzarri’s. As anyone who has seen The Decline of Western Civilization 2: The Metal Years will know, this club was famous for its glam metal nights in the ’80s, as well as Van Halen’s residencies there in the late ’70s. Van Halen first played here in the mid-’70s, and David Lee Roth recounts many colorful encounters with charismatic owner Bill Gazzarri in his autobiography Crazy From the Heat. Gazzarri passed away in 1991 and the club closed its doors in 1993. A year later, the building was damaged in the Northridge earthquake, and was rebuilt as Billboard Live, which became the Key Club in 1998.

Though not particularly a part of Van Halen folklore, any tour of the Sunset Strip must include the Rainbow Bar & Grill. Found right next door to the Roxy, the Rainbow is where Joe DiMaggio met Marilyn Monroe in 1952, it’s the regular haunt of Lemmy from Motorhead, and virtually every Behind the Music includes an anecdote that begins with, “So I was drinking at the Rainbow one night and…” One particularly interesting external feature is the array of band names carved into the bricks with a nail by a Sunset Strip native named Rich Legg. According to this AENONFIRE article, Legg has the Rainbow’s permission to carve the names and logos, and some of the bricks are particularly well executed, including the Alice in Chains and Judas Priest logos. And of course Van Halen is there, stretched across two bricks – most bands only get one.

So after my little Sunset Strip visit, I turned and headed back towards my hotel, bidding a temporary farewell (I’m sure I’ll be back before I return to Australia in a few weeks) to the Van Halenized patches of the Sunset Strip. But as I looked back up the hill towards Sunset, one last site caught my eye. Black, white and red color combination, stripes… could it be…?

View the original article here

Sammy Hagar: Chickenfoot will Never Play Van Halen Songs

Rocker extraordinaire Sammy Hagar says that you’ll never hear Chickenfoot play Van Halen songs. He said that you’ll never hear him sing his solo material with the supergroup, either.

“We really do not want to dilute this band and become a Van Halen cover band, or become a Sammy Hagar cover band or a Joe Satriani cover band… The idea is that we are Chickenfoot, and we will stay that,” Hagar told Get Your Rock Out. “I don’t think we will ever play any of our old catalog unless you catch us in Cabo jamming, and then it’s more Hendrix and Zeppelin and Montrose and that kind of stuff.”

But, that doesn’t mean that Hagar fans won’t still have an opportunity to hear the Red Rocker perform his pre-Chickenfoot tunes.

“I save that for my solo tour – if you see Sammy Hagar on tour, you’re going to get my whole catalog,” he said. “You’re going to get [songs] from Montrose to the early Red Rocker years, Van Halen – the Van Hagar era … everything but Chickenfoot.”

View the original article here

New Van Halen Album Details Released

Van Halen have announced more details about their much-anticipated new album, A Different Kind of Truth.

Of course, it will be the band’s first album with David Lee Roth on vocals since 1984’s 1984 and Van Halen’s first album of any sort since ’98’s Van Halen III. A Different Kind of Truth will be released on February 7.

Today, the band also released their new single, “Tattoo.” Check out the official video for the song here.

Van Halen, A Different Kind of Truth tracklisting:

“Tattoo”
“She’s the Woman”
“You and Your Blues”
“China Town”
“Blood And Fire”
“Bullethead”
“As Is”
“Honeybabysweetiedoll”
“The Trouble With Never”
“Outta Space”
“Stay Frosty”
“Big River”
“Beats Workin’”

View the original article here

New Van Halen Single Imminent!

Van Halen’s new single, “Tattoo,” will be released on Tuesday, January 10, finally giving fans their first taste of new music with David Lee Roth since the two new tracks on the Best of Van Halen, Volume 1 compilation in 1996.

The Van Halen News Desk site has exclusively revealed that the new album will be released on February 7. The title is still a secret.

VHND also reveals that the first show of Van Halen’s forthcoming tour will be in Louisville, Kentucky, in February. The full list of tour dates will be released very soon – some time between now and when the shows go on sale on January 10.

Meanwhile Van Halen will perform for media at Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, New York, on Thursday, running through a 45-minute set, their first public performance since the end of their 2007-08 reunion tour with Roth.

View the original article here

Van Halen Confirm 2012 Tour

It’s confirmed: 2012 is going to be a huge year for Van Halen, as the hard rockers have confirmed that they will hit the road after the New Year. The news came out Monday (Dec. 26) via a YouTube video showing David Lee Roth and the rest of the band rehearsing together on stage. Individual tour dates have yet to drop, but the video announces that the first round of tickets will go on sale starting Jan. 10. Watch the official, two-minute announcement video, below.

Van Halen recently signed with Interscope Records and are planning to release a new album in 2012. The set is a long time coming, as the band’s last full-length album with Roth was 1983’s 1984. Today’s Van Halen lineup features Roth, original members Eddie and Alex Van Halen and Eddie’s 20-year-old son Wolfgang Van Halen, the latter who joined the group in place of bass player Michael Anthony in 2006. (Anthony now plays with former Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar in Chickenfoot.)

Who’s stoked for the latest creation from Roth and company? Let us know your thoughts in the comments area!

View the original article here

How to Fake it Like Eddie Van Halen: Symmetrical Scales

Symmetrical scales are one of the most fun – and easiest to wrap your head around – ways of making harmonically interesting music without having to spend 10 years at music school (although if you can afford to spend 10 years at music school, please do, then tell me all about it so I may live vicariously though you, ’cos that sounds rad!). Two very well known exponents of the symmetrical scale are Eddie Van Halen and Dimebag Darrell. Darrell was quite open about borrowing the idea from Eddie, whose most famous example of the technique can be heard on his solo to “Ice Cream Man” from Van Halen’s self-titled debut. Eddie’s “Ice Cream Man” solo starts in the key of the song but quickly evolves into a bizarre, out-there-sounding tumble through cascading note flurries.

So what is a symmetrical scale, and how does it help you to rock? Well, it’s simply a “fake” scale made up of repeating the same fret pattern on each string. That is to say: playing a symmetrical pattern on each string. It’s not really a scale in the traditional sense, since it actually incorporates fragments of all sorts of different “real” scales.

A word of caution before we go any further: some of the coolest-sounding symmetrical scales can involve very wide fretboard stretches, so make sure that you warm up your hands first. And for maximum rock power and ergonomic freedom, point your guitar headstock skyward to better align your hand with your fretboard. Seriously, don’t do this stuff until you’re warmed up.

Seriously.

Okay, now that this ominous warning of proper tendon care is out of the way, let’s look at some musical examples. Each of these is designed to be played over a simple 8th-note palm-muted E5 power chord vamp at 100bpm – just count “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8” per bar as you chug away.

What you’re seeing in Figure 1 (Below) is a scale made up of the 12th, 13th and 15th frets of each string. The notes are E F G A A# C D D# F G G# A B C D E F G. As you’ll see, you don’t get a nice repeated octave until you get to the very last string, since both the lowest and highest strings are tuned to E. There’s something coolly robotic about this particular scale, and it also makes a nice hammer-on exercise. 

Figure 2 is cleverly designed to include a lot of repetitions of the same note on different strings, which should lead to some pretty interesting melodies.

Figure 3 is a lick constructed using the same pattern as Figure 2, but this time it’s got some melody goin’ on, rather than just being a scale run-through. I’ve purposely left off any kind of articulation here because there are many ways you could do it: you could pick every note; you could tap each of the 17th fret notes (and perform a “hammer-on from nowhere” when you need to switch strings immediately after the tapped note the second note of bar two); you could pick only the first note on each string and hammer or slide the rest – the choice is up to you. You can even create symmetrical patterns that require a bend from a specific fret on each string.

Now, of course, make up your own symmetrical scale and see what happens. Obviously you can make the stretches as wide as you like, especially if you decide to tap a note or two. You also don’t need to confine yourself to one pattern per string. Why not make a two-string pattern that you repeat? As always, have at it and have fun!

View the original article here

Mark Tremonti Spills More Details on New Van Halen Album

As previously reported on Gibson.com, Alter Bridge/Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti recently spent some time at Van Halen’s 5150 studio listening to material from the band’s forthcoming album. The as-yet-untitled CD will be the group’s first with singer David Lee Roth since 1984’s…err, 1984.

Tremonti appeared recently on Colorado’s 94.3 KILO Radio and divulged more details on his visit.

“What makes it so great,” he told host Ross Ford, “is that they took what they could from all their old demos back in the ’80s and pretty much did what they could to create songs out of old ideas. So it sounds like vintage Van Halen. Musically, it sounds in the era. I didn’t hear any vocals — David [Lee Roth] was not there. It was just [Eddie, Alex and Wolfgang Van Halen] and the music sounded like very authentic, old-school Van Halen.”

Tremonti said he nearly stepped into hot water when he complimented his pal, Wolfgang.

“I remember commenting on Wolfgang’s bass parts. I said, ‘Man, that was a great chordal thing you did at the end there.’ And then Eddie looked at me and said, ‘How was my part?’ [I said], ‘Dude, you’re Eddie Van Halen. Your part is incredible every single time!’ He was very, very nice. I couldn’t have had a better experience.”

View the original article here

Eddie Van Halen Talks Smithsonian, Michael Jackson

Earlier this year, a replica of Eddie Van Halen’s “Frankenstein” guitar was donated to The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The guitar god recently talked to Smithsonian Magazine about how the guitar initially came about.

“The original Frankenstein was a result of me tinkering and experimenting with different elements of electric guitars that I liked,” he said. “I created an instrument that wasn’t offered as an ‘off the rack’ guitar by any manufacturer at the time.”

Although Van Halen still has the first Frankenstein guitar, he doesn’t tour with it anymore.

“I retired it from regular use. It took so much abuse from endless touring and recording; I wanted to pay some respect to it and let it survive and not let it get destroyed completely,” he said. “At the same time it became something so well known beyond my wildest dreams that it’s value made it a target for theft and I wanted to protect it. I still play it every now and then. It’s priceless to me.”

While the guitarist didn’t talk about Van Halen’s upcoming tour or album plans, he did discuss his favorite artistic collaboration.

“Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ is a stand out for me,” he said. “Quincy Jones called me up and asked me to play on it. When I got there it took me 15 minutes to rearrange the song and I played two solos and told them they could pick the one they liked best. Then Michael walked in and said, ‘Wow! I really like that high fast stuff you do.’ It was a lot of fun to do. It’s crazy that something could take such a short amount of time and can grow into something beyond anything you could ever imagine.”

View the original article here

Slash Discusses New Album, Van Halen, Corey Taylor

Slash has a bit of insider knowledge about the new Van Halen. The guitarist spilled the beans to U.K.’s Rock Radio, according to Blabbermouth.net.

“They’re finishing [up their new album right now], actually,” he said. “I don’t wanna speak on their behalf, but one of the guys that works for us works for Van Halen in the studio and he told me that they’re in the mixing stages.”

Of course, Slash has got an album of his own in the works. The former Guns N’ Roses axeman said he’s in the writing stages for the follow-up to his 2010 solo debut.

“The band is so great and Myles [Kennedy] is one of the most fantastic singers I’ve ever worked with or even seen or heard; he is amazing. So we are actually knee-deep in writing for the next record. We’re all going to perform on it. It’s gonna be really, really good; the material we have is awesome.”

Slash said the album will be released in 2012, although fans might get a preview of some songs at one of his live shows.

“The thought [of debuting some of the new tracks on tour this summer] has crossed my mind, so if there’s something that’s developed enough to the point where we can pull that off, then we will, ’cause I think that’d be a cool thing to do,” he said.

He also discussed what happened with Corey Taylor when the Slipknot/Stone Sour singer tried out to be Velvet Revolver’s new frontman.

“There is a lot of controversy over this one. Corey came down and we had kept it pretty quiet and then word got out that we had worked with him,” he said. “And we did write some songs with him and made demos and all that kind of stuff, but it just didn’t end up working out. But then word got out about him coming down way after the fact. So then it became this new rumor that was six months behind schedule. But it didn’t end up working out.”

View the original article here