Wolfgang Van Halen has proved himself a phenomenal guitar talent – but he didn’t learn it from his dad, who he has previously called a “great guitarist but a terrible guitar teacher”.
So much so, in fact, that Eddie once phoned fellow virtuoso Paul Gilbert to ask if he could give Wolfgang lessons – but they never took place.
In a new interview with Guitar World, Gilbert has revealed what caused him to pass on teaching the young Van Halen.
“I would have loved to get together with Wolfgang, but we were just getting ready to go on a really long tour,” he says.
“[I said,] ‘Ed, that would be great. But you know, the flight’s tomorrow and I won’t be back for three months.’ By that time, I think whatever Wolfgang needed to know he had figured out.”
Ultimately, the lessons never came to pass. But were Gilbert to approach them today, he would likely take a different tack, as his teaching style has changed over the years.
“I realized not everybody should play like me,” he reflects. “So I try to listen to them. My goal is, I want to make things easier, see what they're doing and go, ‘There's an easier way to get that done.’
“I always have a plan B, like, ‘Well, if it doesn't work for you, that's OK.’ If I took a lesson from a Nashville guy on hybrid picking, I'd be like, ‘That's impossible for me.’ I'm never going to do that technique ever, for whatever reason. It just doesn't match my physiology.”
Gilbert isn’t going to force anyone to learn a technique that won’t help with what they want to play. But he isn’t adverse to showing them abilities they may never be able attain, either.
He admits he has developed a certain nostalgia for his early VHS instructionals – and is thinking of reviving the kind of woodshedding that changed the game for many aspiring shredders.
“The original way I taught was I wanted to show off a lot… and everybody loved it! I was very popular. Then I was also like, ‘Well, you shouldn’t do that, because you're just showing people stuff that is out of reach.’
“Lately, I've been thinking I should probably get back to that. I think it's inspiring, and [students] will still get something from it.”
In fact, Gilbert has found the urge to burn up the fretboard hard to resist of late, as evidenced on new album WROC (Washington’s Rules of Civility).
“There’s this athletic element where you want to prove that you can still swim – like you’re [23x Olympic medalist] Michael Phelps, ‘I can still swim just as fast as I did when I was 22!’” he said.
“That’s a hard thing to resist. And obviously, there are a lot of places where I didn’t resist and went crazy.”
