This Van Halen Riff is IMPOSSIBLE

over the years I've tried my hand at a lot of Eddie Van Halen's signature techniques like his tapping turbo speed swing grooves [Music] and a lot of the other cool stuff that we all know and love Eddie for but there's one Van Halen riff that I've never been able to get under my mitts and in today's video we're going to talk about what makes it so impossible to replicate [Music] yeah hey kids it's your good buddy Uncle Ben as long as I can remember even before I started playing guitar I've been obsessed with Eddie Van Halen and over the years I've tried learning as many of those classic Van Halen Tunes as I can to try and absorb some of his powers but there's one riff in particular that I've never been able to get down and it's that intro to hang them high off of Diver Down [Music] ass [Music] men's asses and with pretty good reason because it is insanely fast you've got this complicated alternate picking pattern that's like string skipping and stuff in there it's a nightmare but I'm not about to let it beat me so here recently I did a bunch of research into this Rift to figure out exactly how Eddie does it and I found some pretty interesting stuff that's going to help me tackle this riff but I also unfortunately uncovered one thing that's absolutely mind-boggling that proves to me that I'll never Master this riff I'm going to show you guys at the end of the video it's pretty insane as always today's video is brought to you guys by everybody who supports my channel over on my patreon page patreon.com Ben Elder guitars sign up today for access to tons of bonus videos backing tracks downloadable tabs and so much more this week everybody who supports my channel even at just a one dollar a month level is gonna get access to a very special super extended version of this video This is actually my second swing at making this video the first time that I did it I was so excited and exuberant for this riff that I included way too much detail for a regular YouTube video so all my patreon supporters are going to get this super detailed look into this riff over there on the patreon page my hair is down in the video I look pretty fantastic if I might say so myself and you've got to get access to all that good stuff for just a buck a month so don't delay sign up today gear wives for today's video I'm playing my ancient Ibanez rg550 here with Fishman fluence Classic pickups and I'm running that into the Kemper profiler using the top Jimmy Brown sound profile I've got a whole video devoted to that profile pack here on my channel so be sure to check that out they sound absolutely insane if you're trying to nail that old school Eddie tone [Music] foreign [Music] so the Riff itself is deceptively simple because it's really only two notes there's a b and two different A's they get used in this riff how hard could it be right well turns out harder than Satan's dick because here's the deal it's this alternate pick thing at this insane Tempo that goes back and forth between the notes like this [Music] just add about 200 BPM to that and you're going to be getting pretty close okay here's the deal this pattern is mainly based on this three note figure one two three one two three one two three one two three and then it goes one two three four at the end of every phrase with the alternate picking that Eddie is doing throughout the rift this becomes a nightmare because essentially what you've got to do is play two different versions of the same riff one that starts on a downstroke down up down and one that starts on an upstroke up down up and he's going back and forth like that at extremely high speeds I've never been the most amazing alternate picker out there so I've always struggled with getting that down at the right Tempo But Here recently I watched through a bunch of different live videos of Eddie playing this over the years and I found some clues that make it a little bit easier for one the hand position that he's using okay whenever I first tried to learn this I found a tab probably on you know some ancient tab website that was written in cuneiform back in the early 2000s and um it had me playing it like this [Music] [Laughter] [Music] now after watching videos of Eddie play it I've realized that's not how he does it Eddie does it like this he puts the B note on the low E string and the a note is open this means that only half of the Riff has the nasty string skipping thing going on where you're having a hurdle over that a string and try not to hit it every time so that makes it a little easier dweezel Zappa told me he's also seen footage of Eddie at random times playing the first figure with a big stretch like this God I can't do that so weird but again that would be another way to help him avoid that strength skipping it's not uncommon to see Eddie play his own riffs like a thousand different ways over the years too so I guess Eddie just felt like playing it that way sometimes thank you [Music] you'll notice that I'm not using like my first finger or something to play that b note I'm using the thumb like this Eddie was kind of a thumb over a player a lot of the times for some of the reasons that we're about to mention okay check this out so with the first finger whenever you play with this kind of wrap around grip right you can get the tip of your first finger on the a note and also lay the underside of your finger across all the unused High strings I call this a soft Capo technique or a skin Capo I think Ed Gein had one of those laying around his house anyway so the cool thing about this is with that soft underside of the finger touching those High strings you can strike that a note and be really sloppy with it and actually accidentally hit the other strings too and it still just sounds like you're hitting that one string again if I wasn't muting those and I accidentally hit the high strings that sound like crap like that both good muting you can play really aggressively and not worry about it if you swat that pick and accidentally hit some of the other high strings okay so that's one advantage the thumb does the same idea here for the bass strings too all you got to do is bend that thumb around like that and you can really easily fret that b note right and that's also going to put the tip of the thumb slightly blotting out the a string too okay so we can get a note and block out a note I don't want you to hear while I'm going back and forth between those two strings you probably couldn't hear it but when I played that right there I accidentally hit the a string on that second repetition but you don't really hear it because it's muted out by the thumb the right hand is the Wrecking Ball the left hand is the damage control crew turns out all those years I was worrying about what was going on with my picking hand I should have been focusing on my fretting hand instead because this guy's got to make mistakes but if this guy is ready you'll never hear him now there's definitely a trick to this because even if your muting is great this can still end up sounding really sloppy like this foreign [Music] not exactly what we're going for right you've got to be controlling the duration of those nodes and you can do that by kind of rocking the left hand like this right here if you kind of rock the left hand and you can see Eddie doing this in live videos you can see him kind of rocking the hand back and forth like this right here Shifting the pressure from the thumb side to the first finger side you can kind of alternate what note is being heard and control the duration of the unused note check this out so I'm going to lean into the thumb lean into the first finger now you'll notice whenever I shift that hand it gives me the fretting power I need for that and it also Cuts this note off [Music] we only want to hear one note at a time we don't want to hear any bleed over going on between these notes so whenever you rock that hand back and forth you can really control how long each one of those notes last check this out foreign [Music] it makes it so much easier I'm not even thinking about what my right hand is doing anymore I'm just kind of generally swatting at the direction of the strings I'm trying to hit and I'm not worrying about it if I strike one of those other strings because my left hand is playing damage control this Controlled Chaos approach is so typical of Eddie's playing and you gotta think this is the only way you could possibly play this stuff while you know flying through the air and doing split kicks over David Lee Roth's head while you're playing this you know live on stage at the enormo Dome you can't really be worrying about your pick slanting and yada yada yada while that stuff's going on [Music] with those things that I discovered in mind I'm making more progress on this riff than I ever have in the past but that also means I got to figure out what the heck is going on with that last lick that we hear before the vocals come in it's nothing like that right there a lot of typical Eddie tricks for this era of his playing he's kind of playing this thing that kind of outlines a B major sort of sound [Music] what's the fifth root second and third in there and then he kind of switches over to a more you know bluesy minor pentatonic kind of approach so the fast lick that he plays is something like this [Music] one more time [Music] one of the things that you have to do to get this sounding right is that trademark hammer on from nowhere thing that Eddie does a lot on the old material so this lick it's nothing fancy it's just walking down the minor pentatonic scale but the way that he does it is what makes it cool he only really picks the first note and then those other notes are all just hammered on you do it fast enough and it kind of sounds like they're being picked it's like actually way harder to do slow and make it sound like and see that hammer on right there gives you time to get to the bar see those little dips like that too [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] so at this point I'm feeling pretty damn good like I'm finally getting this red figured out but I want to double check my work so I dragged the original MP3 into logic that way I can listen to it a little more closely here and this is where I found something that is truly terrifying this lets me know I'll I'll never get this Rift down I'm actually nowhere even close to playing this anything like Eddie this is mind-blowing check this out okay so whenever you listen to the tune it starts off with that straight 16th note thing that we've been talking about the whole video right [Music] but to make sure I was getting everything exactly right I used logic's Vera speed function and slowed the audio down and this is when things got really scary listen to this [Music] [Applause] thank you it's not straight 16th notes he is swinging that entire thing at that Breakneck Tempo this is actually impossible I've never heard this until I slowed the audio down I always just assumed that it was one two [Music] you know straight 16s like that but what he's actually doing is more like [Music] it's that bluesy swing kind of Shuffle thing that he does better than anyone in history which is what makes him so impossible to replicate this is why none of us sound right when we play I'm the one or a hot for teacher or any of those other really fast up-tempo swing Tunes Eddie's sense of Swing is Supernatural like if you want to be able to play a swing like this at that Tempo that's so fast that it makes it sound like straight 16th notes you've got to spend ten thousand hours playing with your brother on drums playing these like swing rhythms in dive bars I you got to spend ten thousand hours doing that alone if you want to get to this level again listen to these back and forth It's like looking at a magic trick or something full speed it sounds like 16. [Music] slow it down you hear that these notes are not straight [Music] that's impossible [Music] see with a straight Rhythm every note is the same amount of distance apart it's like looking at the inches on a ruler they're all spaced out evenly right with a swing Rhythm it's like a super high speed heartbeat kind of thing the notes are farther apart and closer to each other at the same time and controlling that level of swing at higher and higher speeds just gets harder and harder this is why Eddie Van Halen is Untouchable this is why this guy is the absolute King it's not the tapping and the shredding and the bar Dives and all that kind of stuff it is is absolutely Flawless inhuman command of GrooVe this is why Eddie's playing speaks to all of us this is why none of us sound anything like Eddie and I never will so I guess I'll just never get this Rift down but at the end of the day that's totally fine by me because anytime that I want to hear this riff played to absolute perfection all I've got to do is listen insane so there you go guys a deep dive into the most impossible to replicate Van Halen riff of all time in my opinion I'm sure you've got your own opinion about what you think the hardest Van Halen riff is so let me know what it is down there in the comment section below and maybe we'll cover that on a future video thank you guys so much for liking this video subscribing to the channel and ringing the bell for notifications also be sure to prowl around through my channel and search out all my other Van Halen content that I have because there is a ton of cool stuff for you to check out next if you like this video and want to help support the channel as well as gain access to all that cool bonus stuff including the extra special turbo long cut of this video be sure to head on over to patreon.com beneller guitars and sign up today even for just one Buck a month alright guys it's been fun as always but as for me I think I'm gonna go probably continue working on this riff and I recommend you guys do the same thing let's click it more picking

Channel: Ben Eller

Views: 599,612

Keywords: ben eller, van halen, eddie van halen, EVH, ben eller van halen, drop dead legs, mean street, mean streets, humans being, how to play, ain't talkin bout love, eruption, solo, live, last show, hardest van halen riff, full album, van halen 1, diver down, top jimmy, brown sound, van halen tone, lesson, van halen lesson, van halen tapping, best van halen riff you've never heard, panama, van halen solo, runnin with the devil, kemper van halen, kemper brown sound, impossible, intro

Id: 0GJO2SovRgU

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023