• • • HOW TO PLAY THIS MONTH’S SONGS• • •

Van Halen’s David Lee Roth [left] and Eddie Van Halen on stage during a 1981 show in Chicago

“I’M THE ONE” 

Van Halen

THIS UPTEMPO, HARD-ROCKING shuffle features some of EVH’s most brilliantly flashy and soulful lead playing and embodies several of the guitarist’s signature moves, offering a virtual “Rosetta Stone” of insights into his trailblazing style and some of the innovative techniques that he also employed in other songs.

For starters, check out Eddie’s deft use of the fret-hand tap, what he referred to as the “hammer-on from nowhere,” first appearing during the cascading-triplets lead fill in bars 6-8 of the intro, and again during his second solo, in bars 135-137. In each case, the first note on the G string is sounded by tapping it with the fret-hand ring finger, not by picking it. Another very clever and cool thing about both of these licks is the ways in which Eddie incorporated lightning-fast pull-offs to the open B string just before the G-string hammers, which lent each phrase a slinky, slippery quality, not to mention an interesting and unusual melodic contour, with wide intervals and notes “popping” in unexpected ways.