00:00eddie van halen arrived already speaking a language no one else knew existed
00:14at 22 the electric guitar's internal logic was quietly dismantled and rebuilt in his hands
00:21exposing expressive possibilities that made everything before him feel suddenly provisional
00:25his technique was a system two-handed tapping integrated into scalar and arpeggiated movement
00:33wide intervallic jumps executed with metronomic control harmonics articulated as pitched events
00:38rather than effects and a rhythmic feel that locked directly to the kick drum speed was a
00:43byproduct time and articulation were the point the hardware mattered his frankenstrat single paf style
00:50humbucker wired straight to the volume no tone circuit to soften the attack fed a dimed marshal
00:55through a variac producing compression sustain and harmonic bloom without sacrificing transient
01:01bite the signal path was stripped to essentials leaving nowhere for imprecision to hide
01:06what emerged was a tone that stayed percussive under gain allowing complex note groupings to remain
01:12intelligible even at absurd volume the guitar started functioning as a single responsive mechanism
01:18the classical comparisons inevitably surface mozart usually first with bach and beethoven hovering
01:25nearby like stern hall monitors nobody needs to break a mental sweat over this the analogy is
01:31about structural impact a new musical language appeared dense with harmonic implications and
01:37physical techniques that had not previously belonged to the electric guitar his appearance on the world
01:43stage was an explosion that permanently reset the margins of the instrument
01:48jimmy page's influence is audible in the phrasing and tonal ambition
01:52the use of open strings as harmonic anchors the embrace of controlled chaos
01:56the idea that texture and danger are expressive tools rather than liabilities
02:00he sits in that vanishingly small class of once in a lifetime figures who turn an instrument into a measuring device
02:08after which everything else gets judged by how clearly it registers the aftershock
02:12f
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