“All that stuff”: The Eric Clapton songs Eddie Van Halen knew note-for-note
Music teachers will try to tell you that the best way to learn is through skill and tradition. Do your scales, learn your chords, learn to read sheet music and that’s the way. But ask the rockstars, and they’ll tell you that imitation works just as well. Ask Eddie Van Halen, and he would have said that Eric Clapton is a great place to start.
Like with any new skill, learning guitar takes repetition and dedicated practice. So, making sure that a student stays motivated to keep picking up the instrument is just as important as anything else, and sometimes, the dull repetition of scales and boring learning songs aren’t enough to keep a person locked into their lessons. The best way to learn is often by picking someone or something to aspire to, setting a certain song or a certain star as the ultimate goal.
With such a wealth of music at the world’s disposal, no one needs to be sitting there trying to learn ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ anymore. There is no better way to learn than by playing your favourite songs; that’s what Eddie Van Halen would tell you.
“For guitar, I never had a lesson in my life, except when a friend of mine a long time ago showed me how to do barre chords. I just learned from there,” the Van Halen leader said in 1980 to Guitar Player magazine. By this point, the band had already released their self-titled debut record, which was one of rock’s most commercially successful debuts of the time. The guitarist was already well on his way to establishing himself as one of the best players in the genre. But he’d credit all of that to the teaching power of another.
With no formal training, Van Halen instead learnt from his own record collection. When Guitar Player asked how he did it, he mimicked Eric Clapton’s solo in ‘Crossroads’ from Cream’s Wheels of Fire. He said, “I know that song note-for-note, and also ‘I’m So Glad’ [from Fresh Cream] and the live version of ‘Sitting on Top of the World’.” He added, “I used to know all that stuff.”
Van Halen learned from Clapton as a beautiful example of the cyclical nature of inspiration. Clapton himself learnt from the inspiration of blues records, teaching himself from his own favourite records until he could write his own tracks. Then, Van Halen did the same, learning from the songs Clapton wrote until he could write his own. Since there are no doubt countless guitarists who learnt to play by copying Van Halen tracks are now out there making their own music, and so the cycle continues.
It’s proof that, even at a time when the cost of music, of live gigs and studio time, is going out, the act of making it can be accessible. It doesn’t need to cost a fortune in lessons from some tired and uninspiring stuff old teacher. Instead, you can simply hit play on your favourite song and slowly teach yourself to sound just like your favourite star.
