RIP Eddie Van Halen, Accomplished Technologist
The late rock god was also an unsung tech genius
Every rock song is the sound of advancing technology.
The electric guitar was maybe the first popular instrument that was an ongoing engineering project, a device whose sound was constantly refined, distorted, and modernized to the mold of the cultural moment by musicians themselves. The best rock guitarists knew this — that to truly advance the state of the art of rock music, they’d have to improve the available technology, too. Jimi Hendrix flipped the strings and the nut of his right-handed guitar to play lefty and used a pathbreaking array of pedals to mutate his sound; Queen’s Brian May invented a new kind of guitar he specifically designed to generate more feedback.
Eddie Van Halen, who passed away at the age of 65 this week, was certainly one of the best — he’s a big reason why I, like countless other teenagers in the ’80s and ’90s, was obsessed with the instrument — and one of the biggest contributors to the technology, too. And he has multiple patents to prove it. (He was also a legal innovator as his team was the brains behind the infamous M&M legal contract, which stipulated venues leave them a bowl of only brown ones as a means of ensuring they’d paid attention to the rest of the contract.)
