Slash Explains Why Nobody Cannot Touch Eddie Van Halen As A Guitarist

Slash recently sat down with Guitar World and shared his admiration for Eddie Van Halen.

The Guns N’ Roses guitarist shared his admiration for EVH and said using blues to explore new and innovative guitar techniques was one of the coolest things about him:

“That was the coolest thing about Eddie for me. All the great ideas he had that were uniquely his own, all these left-field kind of things, underneath all that was a really tasty blues guitar player.”

The guitarist also explained why no one could touch the Van Halen guitarist:

“He just added all these other ways to branch out his expression on top of that. And that’s why nobody could ever touch him.”

‘Nobody Else Can Get Close’ To EVH

Slash wasn’t into classical guitar, but he was amazed when he first heard Van Halen’s debut album. Like Slash, Eddie focused on creating catchy melodies rather than showing off.

Comparing Eddie to other guitarists, Slash thought no one could match him. He said of Eddie during another interview:

“When I started getting into guitar playing, everybody was trying to emulate Eddie, and they were all sort of focusing on the obvious techniques and the fucking finger tapping and the harmonics and the tremolo bar stuff. But the way that he did it was such a part of his personality, and it was such a part of his melodic sensibility that it had this sort of musical fluidity that nobody after that really ever came close to playing that style of guitar playing.”