This Van Halen Riff is IMPOSSIBLE

Over the years, I've tried a lot of Eddie Van Halen's signature techniques, like his turbo-speed swing rhythms and a lot of other cool stuff we all know and love Eddie for, but there's one Van Halen

riff

that I love it. I've never been able to get under my belt and in today's video we're going to talk about what makes it so

impossible

to replicate. Yes, hello kids, I've been good friends with Uncle Ben for as long as I can remember, even before he started playing guitar. I've been obsessed with Eddie Van Halen and over the years I've tried to learn as many classic Van Halen tunes as I could to try to absorb some of his powers, but there's one

riff

in particular that I've never been able to get my hands on. down and it's that introduction to hanging them high on the butts of the Diver Down men and with very good reason because it's incredibly fast, you have

this

complicated alternative selection pattern that's like jumping ropes and stuff there, it's a nightmare, but I'm not going to let him beat me, so I recently did a lot of research on

this

Rift to find out exactly how Eddie does it and I found some pretty interesting things that will help me approach this riff, but unfortunately I also discovered one thing that is absolutely mind-blowing that It shows me that I will never master this riff.

I'll show you at the end of the video which is pretty crazy, as always today's video is brought to you by everyone who supports my channel on my patreon page patreon.com Ben Elder guitars sign up today to access tons of bonus videos, tracks accompaniment, downloadable tablature and much more this week, everyone who supports my channel, even with just a dollar a month, will have access to a special super extended version of this video This is actually my second attempt at making this video the first time that I did it. I was so excited and exuberant about this riff that I included way too much detail for a normal YouTube video for all my Patreon followers.

I'm going to get a super detailed look at this riff over there on the Patreon page. My hair is down in the video. I look pretty fantastic, if I do say so myself, and you got to have access to all that good stuff for just a little while. money per month, so don't delay, sign up today, team wives for today's video. I'm playing my old Ibanez rg550 here with Fishman fluence Classic pickups and running it through the Kemper profiler using the Jimmy Brown top sound profile I have. I have a whole video dedicated to that profile package here on my channel, so be sure to check them out as they sound absolutely crazy if you're trying to achieve that foreign old school Eddie tone, so the riff itself is deceptively simple because It's actually just two notes.

There is one B and two different A's used in this riff, how difficult could it be? Well, it turns out to be harder than Satan's dick because here's the deal, it's this alternate picking at this crazy tempo that goes back and forth between notes like this, just add about 200 BPM to that and you'll get pretty close, well, here 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 each phrase with the alternative selection that Eddie is making along.

Along the crack, this becomes a nightmare because essentially what you have to do is play two different versions of the same riff, one that starts with a downward stroke, from the bottom up, and another that starts with an upward stroke. and forward and backward at extremely high speeds. I've never been the most amazing alternative selector out there, so I've always had trouble getting it at the right tempo. But here I recently watched through a bunch of different live videos of Eddie playing this over the years and found some clues that make it a little bit easier for one, the hand position that he's using.

When I first tried to learn this, I found a tab probably on you know. an old tab website that was written in cuneiform in the early 2000s and made me play it like that now after watching videos of Eddie playing it I 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 jump where you have an obstacle on that string and you try not to hit it every time, so that makes It a little easier, Dweezel, Zappa told me that he's also seen footage of Eddie at random times touching the first figure with a big stretch like this.

God, I can't make that weird, but again, that would be another way to help him avoid that power jump. It's not uncommon to see Eddie play his own riffs in a thousand different ways over the years, so I guess Eddie felt like playing it that way sometimes. Thanks, you'll notice I'm not using my index finger or anything like that. play that note if I'm using my thumb this way Eddie was kind of thumb on a player a lot of times for some of the reasons we're going to mention okay look at this so with the first finger every time you play With this guy With wraparound grip, you can place the tip of your index finger on the A note and also place the bottom of your finger on all unused high strings.

I call this the soft capo or skin capo technique, I think Ed Gein. He had one of those in his house anyway, so the nice thing about it is that with that soft bottom of the finger playing those high strings, you can play that note and be very careless with it and actually accidentally play the other ones. strings too and it still sounds like you were playing that string again if I wasn't muting them and I accidentally played the high strings which sound like shit. They are both good mutes, you can play very aggressively and not worry if you hit that pick and accidentally hit some of the other high strings, so that's a plus - the thumb does the same idea here for the low strings too.

All you have to do is bend your thumb like that and you can easily fret that B note and that's also I'm going to put the tip of my thumb slightly covering the a string so we can take a note and lock out a note that I don't want to play. listen as I go back and forth between those two strings, you can probably I don't hear it, but when I played it right there, I accidentally hit the a string on that second repeat, but you don't really hear it because it's muted by the thumb. The right hand is the wrecking ball.

The left hand is damage control. The team turns out that all those years I was worried about what was happening with my playing hand. I should have focused on my fidgeting hand because this guy has 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, it can still end up sounding very sloppy, that weird, not exactly what we're going for. You have to control the duration of those nodes and you can do it by type. of swinging your left hand like this here if you move your left hand and you can see Eddie doing this on live videos, you can see him swinging his hand back and forth like this here Changing the pressure from the thumb side to the first finger side you can toggle which note is heard and control the duration of the unused note.

Look at this, so I'm going to lean towards the thumb. Lean towards the first finger. Now you will notice it every time you move it. hand gives me the fret power that I need for that and also cuts this note, we only want to hear one note at a time, we don't want to hear any bleed between these notes, so every time you move that hand back and forth you can actually control how long each of those notes is look at this abroad it makes it so much easier. I'm not even thinking about what my right hand is doing anymore.

Generally I'm just hitting the direction of the strings I'm trying to play and I'm not worried if I hit one of those other strings because my left hand is playing Damage Control, this Controlled Chaos approach is so typical of the way playing Eddie and you gotta think this is the only way you could play this stuff while you know how to fly through the air and do split kicks over David Lee Roth's head while you play this, you know, live on stage in the huge Dome, You can't really worry about your pick bowing and Yada yada yada while those things happen With those things I discovered in mind, I'm making more progress on this riff than I ever have in the past, but that also means I have to figure out what the hell is going on with that last one. lick that we hear before the vocals come in, it's nothing like that, there are a lot of typical Eddie tricks for this era of his playing, he's playing something that outlines a type of B major sound, what is the fifth root, second and third.

There and then he switches to a minor pentatonic approach better known as blues, so the fast lick that he plays is something like this once again. One of the things you have to do to make this sound good is to trademark it out of thin air, which Eddie does a lot with old material, so this lick is nothing special, it just walks around the minor pentatonic scale, but the The way you do it is what makes it great, you just pick the first note and then those other notes just get hammered in, you do it fast enough and it sounds like they're being picked, it's actually a lot harder to do it slow and make it sound. ring and seeing that hammer right there gives you time to get to the bar see those little drops like that too weird so at this point I feel really good like I'm finally solving this red but I want to double check my work, so I dragged the original MP3 into logic that way.

I can hear it a little closer here and this is where I found something that's really scary. This lets me know that I will never succeed in taking down this Rift. Actually, I'm not even close to playing this like Eddie. mind blowing check this out okay so every time you hear the melody it starts with that straight 16th note that we've been talking about throughout the video but to make sure I was getting everything exactly right I used the Vera speed function by Logic. and I turned down the audio and that's when things got really scary listen to this, thank you, it's not straight sixteenth notes, it's moving all of that at that breakneck pace, this is really

impossible

, I'd never heard this until I turned down the audio.

I always assumed it was one, two, you know, 16 in a row, but what he's actually doing is more of that kind of blues swing, Shuffle, which he does better than anyone in history, which is what makes him so impossible to replicate, that's why. None of us sound good when we play I'm the Chosen One or a Passionate Master or any of those other really fast, up-tempo swing tunes. Eddie's swing sense is supernatural, like if you want to be able to play a swing like this at that tempo that's so fast it makes it sound like straight sixteenth notes, you have to spend ten thousand hours playing drums with your brother, playing these rhythms like swing in seedy bars.

You have to spend ten thousand hours doing that alone if I want to reach this level again listen to this back and forth It's like watching a magic trick or something at full speed sounds like 16. slow down you hear these notes are not straight that's impossible to see with a straight rhythm every note is the same distance from each other it's like looking at the inches on a ruler they are all evenly spaced with a swing rhythm it's like a heartbeat at super high speed the notes are more separated and closer to each other at the same time Timing and controlling that level of swing at higher and higher speeds becomes increasingly difficult.

That's why Eddie Van Halen is Untouchable. That's why this guy is the absolute King. It's not the taps, the punches, the barbell jumps and all that kind of stuff. It's absolutely flawless and inhuman mastery of GrooVe. That's why the way Eddie plays speaks to all of us. That's why none of us sound like Eddie and I never will, so I guess I'll never manage to take down this Rift, but in the end. of the day, that's totally fine with me because every time I want to hear this riff played to absolute perfection, all I have to do is listen like crazy, so there you have it guys, a deep dive into Van's riff Halen most impossible to replicate of all.

In my opinion, I'm sure you have your own opinion on what you think is Van Halen's hardest riff, so let me know what's down there in the comments section below and maybe we'll cover it in a future video. Thank you all so much for liking this video, subscribing to the channel and ringing the bell to receive notifications. Also be sure to scroll through my channel and look for all of my other Van Halen content that I have because there's a ton of cool stuff for you guys. To check it out below, if you like this video and want to help support the channel, as well as get access to all that cool bonus stuff, including the special extra long turbo cutaway in this video, be sure to head over to patreon.com beneller guitars and sign up Today, even for just a dollar a month, it's okay guys, it's beenfun as always, but as far as I'm concerned, I think I'll probably continue working on this riff and I recommend you do the same, let's click on it more.