JOE SATRIANI Says He Spent Hours Watching YouTube Videos Of Other Guitarists Playing EDDIE VAN HALEN's Parts While Preparing For 'The Best Of All Worlds' Tour

In a new interview with Andy Guitar, Joe Satriani reflected on taking part in the 2024 "The Best Of All Worlds" tour with Sammy Hagar during which Hagar and his bandmates in THE CIRCLE — Satriani and ex-VAN HALEN bassist Michael Anthony — performed largely VAN HALEN material. Asked if he watched a lot of old concert videos of Eddie Van Halen in order to reproduce the legendary guitarist's parts live or if he was "going from the original recordings a lot", Joe said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "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?' 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.'

Satriani added: "There are players out there like — I was thinking of [BON JOVI and TRIUMPH guitarist] 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."

Back in December 2023, Satriani spoke to Ultimate Guitar's Justin Beckner about how he planned to play Eddie Van Halen's parts on "The Best Of All Worlds" tour. Asked if there are some VAN HALEN songs that he found most challenging to perform, Joe replied: "The main thing is that for the last five decades I've tried so hard to be myself and to be me and not copy anybody. I've been lucky, since the late '80s, to have a solo career, so I really had a job that forced me to be myself as much as possible. So I made a point not to play like anybody. But it happens eventually when you're having fun, you're at a party and someone says, 'Oh, can you play this song?' and you realize, 'I have no idea how to play that song. I love that song. I've listened to it a million times. I don't know what the guy's doing.' And then you go to learn it and you go, 'Wow, that's really weird. It feels so awkward for me to be like this.' And it's not the parts, 'cause I can hear the chords and I know what everything is when I hear it. It's just the sensibility of timing, vibrato, picking. If you're so deep into your own thing, it's really hard to get out of it and try to properly emulate somebody else's playing. It would almost be like if you gave a guitar to Eddie and you said, 'Okay, Eddie, we want you to play 'Summer Song' note for note.' He'd be, like, 'What? I don't play like that. I don't do that. I just kind of do this, this and this.' Of course we'd love it no matter how he did it — it would be fun — but it wouldn't be exactly the same."

Joe continued: "When I was young and I was in cover bands, I knew what it was like to try to get as close as possible when you were playing — for me, it was [LED] ZEPPELIN and [BLACK] SABBATH and THE [ROLLING] STONES and stuff like that; that's what we played. But eventually, you'd have to go, 'I don't play like that. That's not my vibrato.' If I go to play AC/DC, there's no way I can do Angus's [Young] vibrato. He just has his own vibrato. If you're gonna try to play like Jeff Beck — he's so personal. You can play the notes and remind people of this part he did and that part, but it's not gonna sound quite the same.

"If we heard Eric Clapton trying to play 'Since I've Been Loving You' by LED ZEPPELIN, there's no way it would sound the same. It would be great, but it wouldn't sound the same. So, what I noticed right away, when I realized, 'I really have to figure out these songs,' [I asked myself] what is Eddie — what's he operating on?

"So here are a couple of things I've noticed," Satriani added. "Number one, he plays so on the beat and makes it feel like he's pushing the beat, but he's actually not. It's really amazing how he does it. And I realized, when I went back and I listened to my stuff back to back, I thought, 'Oh, that's me, sitting on the backbeat as much as I can,' because I'm playing the melody. When you play the melody, you don't wanna be on top. Actually, you want the band to be pushing, and you're sitting back here, like a singer, playing. I like the way Robert Plant sings in 'Since I've Been Loving You'. He's so behind. Or listen to any hip-hop song — the vocals are way in the pocket; they're just late on purpose. So that's something I've worked on my whole life is 'sit back, sit back, sot back,' and all of a sudden you go to play a song like 'I'm The One', and it's like, 'No, you have to be the guy way in front.' And Alex [Van Halen] is gonna be going, 'No, no. Sit back here.' And that's a difficult sensibility when every nerve ending in your body is saying, 'Sit back.' But to make the song work, you've gotta sit forward. That's the first thing I noticed, like the difference between Eddie's sensibility in timing and mine in terms of timing.

"Our vibratos aren't that different," Joe said. "He holds hick pick [with his thumb and middle finger], so he's always got [his index] finger for tapping, and I don't. So I always have to do something. And what I started to do early on was to use my pick for a lot of hammer-ons because I just wanted to be different, and I thought I'd get a better sound, I'd be able to do some different things that other players weren't doing. And I saw guys using their fingers back in the early '70s, when Eddie was my age, just a young teenager. There were other guys doing tapping for decades before, but as my generation started to figure out how to do tapping, I saw the thing was a split. There's tapping for effect, tapping for riff, and then there's tapping to create an entire musical piece. And Eddie did all of it. The way that he would do the tapping, when he would use it, [was] totally opposite of the way that I had forced myself to go with it.

"The third thing is… Again, we're talking about someone who was just an incredible virtuoso in several areas. One of the things that Eddie had was this super-tight swing that was ultrafast with his right hand. And that is something, again, that once… I remember hearing for the first time and thinking, 'Well, I'm gonna have to work on that.' That's gonna take me, I thought, I bet, three months of 45 minutes a day just working with a metronome to work that into my bag of tricks.' 'Cause that's kind of like what it is."

Hagar and Anthony previously worked with Satriani in the supergroup CHICKENFOOT. They recorded two albums between 2009 and 2011 and toured across America but never performed any VAN HALEN material. More recently, Hagar and Anthony played some of the VAN HALEN catalog with guitarist Vic Johnson and Bonham in SAMMY HAGAR AND THE CIRCLE.