Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" The piano is a universal instrument. If you start there, learn your theory and how to read, you can go on to any other instrument. "

Eddie Van Halen

Related Quotes:

" I don't really know what inspires me to write the music I do, but usually, the music will set the tone for the lyrics. "

Eddie Van Halen

" When I'm home on a break, I lock myself in my room and play guitar. After two or three hours, I start getting into this total meditation. It's a feeling few people experience, and that's usually when I come up with weird stuff. It just flows. I can't force myself. I don't sit down and say I've got to practice. "

Eddie Van Halen

" On 'Van Halen,' I was a young punk, and everything revolved around the fastest kid in town, gunslinger attitude. But I'd say that at the time of 'Fair Warning,' I started concentrating more on songwriting. But I guess in most people's minds I'm just a gunslinger. "

Eddie Van Halen

" I'm not a drunk anymore, but since they cut out my tongue, I sound drunk. "

Eddie Van Halen

" The only band I was really over-into was Cream. And the only thing I really liked about them was their live stuff 'cause they played two verses, then go off and jam for 20 minutes, come back and do a chorus and end. And I love the live jam stuff, the improvisation. "

Eddie Van Halen

" It's always about the music, never about anything else. "

Eddie Van Halen

" When I was growing up and listening to bands like the Dave Clark Five, the groove was what initially got me going. I really like that funky, heavy groove. "

Eddie Van Halen

" I'm writing, and just doing the same thing I always do. "

Eddie Van Halen

" David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music. "

Eddie Van Halen

" I'm blessed with a good pair of ears. That's how I fooled my piano teacher. I'd watch his fingers and I'd listen to it, and I just kind of basically learned it by myself. "

Eddie Van Halen

" Obviously you have to have rhythm. If you have rhythm, then you can play anything you need. If you have rhythm and you love music, then play and play and play until you get to where you want to get. If you can pay the rent, great. If you can't, then you'd better be having fun. "

Eddie Van Halen

" The one thing I do have is good ears. I don't mean perfect pitch, but ears for picking things up. I developed my ear through piano theory, but I never had a guitar lesson in my life, except from Eric Clapton off of records. "

Eddie Van Halen

" Cancer is like a cockroach. It just comes back stronger. I'm tearing apart the immune system of the cockroach and seeing how it ticks. I've opened up my own pathology center. "

Eddie Van Halen

" There's a plaque on our wall that says we've sold over 65 million albums, and I don't feel I've accomplished anything. I feel like I'm just getting started. "

Eddie Van Halen

Getting Started

" It's always a Catch-22 situation. They hate you if you're the same, and they hate you if you're different. "

Eddie Van Halen

" Imagine if Beethoven had a tape recorder. Then you'd know exactly what he meant. Maybe he meant 'Da da da da' instead of 'Boom boom boom boom!' Who knows? "

Eddie Van Halen

" On 'Honeybabysweetiedoll' I used a Whammy, a Boss OC-3 octave box, a Sustainer and a Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler. That's only on the intro, where all those weird noises are happening. "

Eddie Van Halen

" I started doing all kinds of weird stuff on the guitar, which became part of my playing. I started doing harmonics and tapping on the guitar and pulling off strings and doing all this weird stuff that no one had ever done before. "

Eddie Van Halen

" I was trying to take the band in a direction that I thought was appropriate, and Roth was trying to take the band in more of a Las Vegas direction. And there he is. "

Eddie Van Halen

" I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland. And when we moved to America, it was just the typical thing except I was really good at it; so was my brother. "

Eddie Van Halen

" The name Van Halen, the family legacy, is going to go on long after I'm gone. "

Eddie Van Halen

" My son, Wolfgang, plays drums, guitars and bass. "

Eddie Van Halen

" It comes back to the same old question people are always asking me: 'When are you going to do a solo record?' Well, if I did, it would probably be similar to 'Baluchitherium,' meaning it would be Van Halen music - which I write anyway - but without singing. "

Eddie Van Halen

" I mean it's funny, playing music, how of course you want it to do well, you want them to like it, but it's not competitive like an election, it's the Olympics, it's not a Formula 1 race. The Billboard charts are just to show you what people like. "

Eddie Van Halen

" Music is for people. The word 'pop' is simply short for popular. It means that people like it. I'm just a normal jerk who happens to make music. As long as my brain and fingers work, I'm cool. "

Eddie Van Halen

" I've had a hip replacement, I've beaten cancer, I had my hand operation, and I stopped drinking. Something inside of me just went, 'I'm done.' "

Eddie Van Halen

" It's all about sound. It's that simple. Wireless is wireless, and it's digital. Hopefully somewhere along the line somebody will add more ones to the zeros. When digital first started, I swear I could hear the gap between the ones and the zeros. "

Eddie Van Halen

" I'll always leave the same set of strings on my guitars when I'm recording. If I break one I'll just replace it instead of putting on a whole new set of strings. "

Eddie Van Halen

" I don't feel a day older when it comes to my approach to music or what gets me off than when I was a teenager. I've always been into different kinds of stuff and when I play I like to play loud. I like my arm hairs to move and I like my body to vibrate 'cause I like the feel of it; I'm still a teenager at heart. "

Eddie Van Halen

" We make music for a living. Like I've always said, if you like what you're doing, you're halfway there; if someone else likes it, that's even better. If they don't like it, at least you like it. Not to be selfish, but you kind of have to be. "

Eddie Van Halen