Joe Satriani Called Alex Van Halen While Learning Eddie’s Parts

Joe Satriani admits he needed some help when it came to figuring out Eddie Van Halen’s distinctive guitar riffs.

Across 2024 and into 2025, Satriani has teamed with Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony for shows dubbed the Best of All Worlds, focussing on material from throughout Van Halen’s catalog. During a recent appearance on the Wong Notes podcast, Satriani detailed the unique challenge of playing Eddie’s material.

“This is a gig that I turned down multiple times,” the guitarist confessed. “Tail between my legs and saying, ‘Oh man, this is like, I can’t do this.’… There are so many people who’ve studied Eddie’s technique and they really nailed it. And I’m not one of those guys. I’m over here being Joe all the time. And we don’t play the same.”

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Satriani further noted that Eddie approached songs like he had “an orchestra on his fretboard.” “When you get into learning the parts, you go like, ‘Oh my God, everything is beautiful. Everything’s impeccable. Everything is perfect.”

Joe Satriani Questioned Whether He Was the Right Man for the Job

As Satriani went about learning the parts, he discovered there were things he simply wasn’t able to replicate. “My hand doesn’t do that. I just can’t do that. And suddenly you realize, okay, this is going to be embarrassing when that part comes and I can’t do it.”

His solution was to create “workarounds” to reproduce Eddie’s sound. Even then, Satriani wasn’t convinced he was the right man for the job, which led to a phone call with another Van Halen veteran: Alex Van Halen.

“Early on when I came up with one too many workarounds, I remember calling Alex and saying, ‘Hey, Alex. Man, I got this list of workarounds. It’s getting kind of embarrassing. You sure you don’t want to call Nuno [Bettencourt] or someone who nails this stuff in their sleep?’”

Though Satriani didn’t detail his conversation with Alex, he implied that it helped him find a level of comfort with the material.

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“Eventually I warmed up to the idea of channeling myself through the composition,” he explained, “and that’s what helped me a lot was just trying to understand the song and what Ed was trying to accomplish and not worry so much about whether I could pick as fast or tap with my middle finger or this finger while holding the pick this way, which I can’t do.”

The Best of All Worlds Las Vegas residency ended on May 17. Satriani will next turn his attention towards his Surfing With the Hydra tour alongside Steve Vai, which kicks off June 13 in the UK.