The hardest Van Halen song to play on guitar: “I get pretty damn close”
It doesn’t feel like Eddie Van Halen slipped up in the studio all that often. The magic seemed to be channelled from his brain to his hands half the time, and it seemed like the odd flubbed note was just an inconvenience for him compared to the classic licks he created. Eddie was still human, just like the rest of us, and towards the end of Van Halen’s career, he tested his capabilities onstage when working on the song ‘Learning to See’.
For the last decade of the group’s existence, most fans would consider themselves lucky if they had gotten any new material from the group in the coming years. There had been rumblings of some new music here and there, but it wasn’t until 2012 that the band sans Michael Anthony got together to produce a new album with David Lee Roth on A Different Kind of Truth.
But there are two sides of Van Halen at all times, and any gasp from the Sammy Hagar era of the group was only relegated to the album The Best of Both Worlds. Aside from being one of the last Van Halen-related projects that Anthony got to work on, the best-of collection also came complete with three new tracks for fans to sink their teeth into.
While something like ‘Up For Breakfast’ doesn’t exactly imply that you’re going to be in for a hard rocking experience, ‘Learning to See’ is at least closer to what Eddie had been doing in the years since, using his finesse behind the fretboard to create layers of guitar rather than just showboating for the hell of it.
That’s not to say that the playing had gotten easier for him. When asked about the hardest song he had to play every night, Eddie said ‘Learning to See’ was extremely challenging, telling Brad Tolsinki, “I have to replicate with one guitar what took six guitars to record. I have to make ten effects changes on the song to get it as close as I can, and most of the time, I get pretty damn close to pulling it off.”
You can really hear that kind of effect when listening to the song with headphones. If the years behind the board had taught Eddie anything, it was about his ability to get the stereo image as large as he wanted, and compared to every other band, this is the kind of mix that even Brian Wilson would be in awe of, including little pieces of guitar parts that are only there for a second before they’re gone forever.
Despite the spark of creativity, this also marked one of Eddie’s darkest periods. Outside of bringing the old group back together, the guitar icon had been going through a bit of a wilderness period where he wasn’t taking care of himself, leading to many of the sessions either getting delayed or working on different parts for hours on end until he thought they were finished.
While ‘Learning to See’ is an example of a song thrown together by a studio madman, it never fails to be engaging throughout its runtime, either. Even though most people could learn every piece of the musical puzzle and manage it alright, Eddie created a guitar orchestra when he played this piece, and the fact that he even managed to get it to sound halfway decent live is a work of genius.
What makes ‘Learning to See’ such a revealing chapter in Van Halen’s story is how it captures Eddie pushing against his own limitations rather than anyone else’s. Earlier in his career, difficulty often came from innovation, from inventing techniques that others struggled to copy. Here, the challenge was logistical and physical, translating dense studio layering into something one musician could realistically command onstage. It was less about flash and more about endurance and precision.
In that sense, the song stands as a late career testament to his obsessive relationship with the instrument. Even during turbulent personal years, Eddie was still chasing the perfect sound, still trying to close the gap between imagination and execution. ‘Learning to See’ may not sit alongside his most iconic riffs, but it reveals the same restless drive that defined him from the beginning, a guitarist unwilling to simplify things just to make life easier.
