This Van Halen Riff is IMPOSSIBLE

[Nitro Express]

Play how you fuck. Some people fuck really fast.

[Nitro Express]

I bought tab books for the 6-pack stuff maybe...20 or 22 years ago. Fairly accurate and I was finally able to get a handle on the stuff I couldn't figure out by ear in the 1980's.

In the 1980's if I had those tab books I would have practiced the stuff to the point where I would have sounded as close to how Eddie did it as I was capable of.

By the time I actually got the tab books in 2000 I was content just to have the correct fingerings and be able to play the tunes correct in a general sense while throwing in licks of my own here and there, because why not? Come 2000 I wasn't going to be playing publicly in bands nor filming myself playing to put it up online thus it was purely for fun.

I found it interesting that with the Roth tours in the 2000's that Ed wasn't playing the CVH material exactly the way he had 20 + years prior.

Shit I’ve bought tabs that were off by half a neck.

[Seshmeister]

Some of those tab books back in the day were horrible.

I was laughing at this one the other day, the fact it's official the riffs are miles out and then sometimes you get to the solo and it just says Ad Lib. WTAF!

[Terry]

Shit I’ve bought tabs that were off by half a neck.

The CVH ones I bought were Authentic GUITAR-TAB Edition published by Warner Brothers Publications in 1997. 3 tab books, each book containing the music for 2 albums (VH1 and VH 2 for the first book, WACF and FW for the second book, DD and 1984 for the third book). All the books contain all the guitar parts including solos. And I must say they were pretty accurate and detailed including the tunings.

A lot of the major online tab sites over the last twenty years I HAVE found to be pretty inaccurate at times, where they contain multiple submissions for a single song by various people and THOSE are the ones I have found to be more along the lines of that shite official Ozzy Ultimate Sin tab book Sesh was talking about, where a submission will say "I haven't figured out the intro yet, but here's the main riff..."and the riff won't have been tabbed correctly and then it will say "for the guitar solo, just solo in the key of E" or whatever.

I've had good luck with the Hal Leonard Recorded Guitar Versions tab books I bought for Chuck Berry (Greatest Hits), KISS (Greatest Hits + Alive!), The Rolling Stones (Exile On Main Street + Tattoo You), Led Zeppelin (Physical Graffiti), Jeff Beck (Blow By Blow + Wired) and The Beatles (Abbey Road) in that the tabs for all those books were pretty accurate.

Guitar World as a magazine has had a lot of accurate tabs over the years, although I'd say in the last 15 years or so the actual tunes they tab...like, by the time 2005 or so rolled around the magazine had already done tabs for the stuff I wanted and had devolved down to tabs for, say, Green Day's Time Of Your Life and other such tunes I had no interest in learning.

[Nitro Express]

The problem with today's technology is musicians using click tracks to manage their timing and then analyzing it digitally and in many cases adjusting the recorded timing signature to fix tiny little fractions of a second in variations... That completely ruins the organic human timing which to my ears if much preferred than doctored up perfect digital timing...

Ed didn't use a click track... he used a fucking Schlitz track...

It’s a machine that fucks with one stroke. What makes rock and roll good is all the little mistakes and imperfections. Some freckles on the ass makes it more interesting.

[Nitro Express]

Shit. What’s this I don’t have a cabinet on stage. So what’s going to generate the feedback and add dynamics to your playing? I learned way back when with my Japanese Les Paul knock off and my Fender Champ amp feedback was part of the thing.

[Nitro Express]

Even on a big stage a 2x12 punching the font from the backline makes all the difference. You can run a line out to the front of house but mike that stage cab and run that line to the mixer as well. Then blend them both and put that through the PA. It works great. Even a little 20 watt Friedman Runt can sound huge if you do this.

[Nitro Express]

Nothing beats experience and common sense at the mixing console. Not only is technology making the musicians lazy it’s making the sound engineers lazy too.

[Seshmeister]

It’s a machine that fucks with one stroke. What makes rock and roll good is all the little mistakes and imperfections. Some freckles on the ass makes it more interesting.

Some of the new tech is pretty extreme...

[Nitro Express]

The whole band could have one up their ass.