The Best of All Worlds tour, which saw Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony, and Jason Bonham team up to deliver a celebration of Van Halen's repertoire, may have recruited one of the best veteran players on the scene, Joe Satriani, to fill Eddie Van Halen's shoes. However, the Surfing with the Alien virtuoso still found certain parts of Eddie's compositions – and their nuances – tricky to nail.
“Opening with Good Enough, Poundcake and Runaround is amazing,” he says in the new issue of Guitar World. “I quickly realized that the order of Eddie’s embellishments is really important to the fans.
“Even though Ed would move things around, this audience knows the studio versions and they will want the scream here, the harmonic cascades there and the finger tapping there.”
And as for the most challenging tracks? “The Poundcake drill is hard to nail. The beginning of Summer Nights is difficult because of the picking and gain structure. I don’t think I got the intro right until halfway into the tour. It felt so odd to my fingers.”
Elsewhere in the same interview, Satriani reveals the lengths he went to in order to ensure that his tone was as Van Halen-esque as possible for the tour, even designing a new amp, the 3rd Power Dragon 100.
“Going back some years, when David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen first called me about a tribute, I started this deep search into Ed's tone,” he explains.
“Ed had a millions sounds. He went from mono to mono with a little bit of stereo from the Eventide to widen the pitch, and then full stereo. He used Marshall, Soldano, Peavey and EVH. Those are huge changes in terms of preamp gain and compression.”
Taking all this into consideration, Satriani reached out to Dylana Scott at 3rd Power Amplification to create the perfect amp for this tour. “We went for the 1986 Live Without a Net tone, because it was all Marshalls but with the extra stereo-ness.”
In other Satriani-Van Halen news, Peavey CEO Courtland Gray has recently shed new light on Van Halen's split from the company in the early aughts, and suggested the Satriani endorsement could have led to the end of the partnership.
For more from Joe Satriani, plus new interviews with Norman Harris from Norman’s Rare Guitars, and John Mayer and Bob Weir, pick up issue 590 of Guitar World at Magazines Direct.
