and some slightly off-tuned strings to compensate for the guitar’s intonation issues.I’ll unpack this more in the sections below. Van Halen TuningsĮddie Van Halen is, without a doubt, one of the game-changing guitar players. ![]() There was no one like him when he appeared in the late 1970s. Generations of musicians owe a lot to him and his unique approach to the instrument and songwriting.īut what we’re interested in is the Van Halen tuning. In fact, there’s not only one but a few that Eddie used over the years. And, of course, there’s also a twist to some of them. So here are all of the tunings that the band used. Starting with their debut album, Van Halen used the E-flat standard tuning. It was around the late 1970s and the early 1980s that the tuning saw more use in rock music. I would call it the most common shredder tuning, but that’s debatable.Īnyhow, the E-flat standard tuning is one semitone below the E standard. All you need to do is downtune all strings by a half-step. The distribution of intervals is the same as with the E standard. It’s all perfect 4th intervals except for the 2nd and 3rd string where it’s the major 3rd. Of course, the E-flat standard is practically the same thing as the D-sharp standard. If we go with D-sharp, it looks like this:Īnd this is the standard tuning that everyone is used to. As for Van Halen, they began implementing it on the “1984” album and onwards. Either way, it’s the same tuning that most guitar players use. On some of the songs, Van Halen began implementing lower tunings. In particular, we’re looking at drop C-sharp tuning. The advantage of this one is that you get access to an extended range without detuning all strings. Additionally, you can play power chords much easier on the bottom two strings. ![]() The C-sharp standard tuning is often associated with the doom metal subgenre. This is what we can hear on a lot of Black Sabbath albums. But here, you get the extended range into these heavy territories without much effort.īut the best thing about it is that your strings don’t completely feel like rubber. And, what’s more, you don’t have to use thicker string gauges. You can add a thicker 6th string, while the rest are regular. One of the songs with such tuning is “Unchained” from the 1981 album “Fair Warning.” This one goes like this: If you were to use a C# standard tuning, you’d either need a longer-scale instrument or. Once again, we have a tuning that we can write with flats instead of sharps.
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