Van Halen 1984 Trilogy Medley - If I played Eddie's parts!

This was a long-time labor of love I began when confined during the Pandemic.

Once in lock-down and my band dried up, to kill time and expend creativity I started making recordings of songs from my guitar heroes as a sort of tribute by replacing their tracks with my own playing. The first I did was a "What would the Blizzard of Oz sound like with Rob playing Randy's parts on Mr. Crowley?"

A little while later I took on a more ambitious project by trying to replicate a medley of songs from Van Halen's 1984 album that my band had put together consisting mainly of Panama, Jump (played exclusively on guitar) and closing with Hot for Teacher. I managed to find the source tracks for all instruments and off-and-on, over a period of over two years I chipped away at putting it all together to resemble what we used to play (before adding a note of my own!) Emulating the classic EVH "Brown Sound", tweaking tunings and EQ to match the different tracks (each track on 1984 is out of tune from each other!), and working on the transitions were hardest.

Then I set to work on the synthesizers. I was torn between playing the Jump parts on guitar as I had in my band, but I thought that would be too jarring to the spirit of this project, and set about figuring how to replace Ed on the synth. That was a pain in it's own right, since I don't play keyboards, I had to source plugins and modules to appropriately replicate the Jump sounds and make them faithful to the original Oberheim (remember - I set out to replace ALL of Ed's parts, not just the guitars). That Jump section took the most time on this overall, but once I managed to find that sound, I figured why not play the iconic 1984 self-titled opener. Once I had the tones dialed in it was pretty easy and I think it came out pretty well. Beyond this, the toughest part was playing long sections of Eddie's guitar playing in one take without flubbing too hard. In spite of playing these songs for decades, he can still be hard to nail down. You'll hear that I tried to stay pretty faithful to the originals, but did take a few gratuitous and shreddy liberties of my own later on in the tune.

So, if you have about eleven minutes to kill, I'd love for you to give a listen to what Van Halen may have sounded like if I had to play stand-in for Eddie as a labor of love and tribute to one of my guitar heroes. ...But please listen with a good stereo, earbuds, or headphones. This re-mix will bring out elements of the original recordings you may not have noticed before! Enjoy.