Richie Kotzen analyzes Eddie Van Halen guitar playing style

The guitarist and singer Richie Kotzen was interviewed on The Mighty VH Podcast and talked about the late legendary guitarist, who was also a major inspiration to him. During the conversation with Tommy London and Tor, he analyzed Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing style.

Richie Kotzen analyzes Eddie Van Halen guitar playing style

“I think you touched on it a second ago when you talked about that R&B kind of feel and that thing. For me, it’s a crazy thing to say, but any genre of music that doesn’t have something of that in it kind of goes over my head. That’s why certain genres, it doesn’t even engage me if it doesn’t have some sort of swing to it. And so that, I think, is the massive appeal about (Eddie’s) guitar playing.”

“Yeah, there’s the innovation of the technical side and that creativity, but the feel of it is this kind of swagger and swing that you find, really, a lot of time in sax players. And I get a lot of that in my playing from that. But I think, as a rock guy, Van Halen influenced a lot of us, guys, like I said, that love the R&B sound but wanna play rock can gravitate towards the way Eddie played because he had that in his general feel. It was very natural.”

He continued:

“When I was learning an Eddie lick, or if I listened to Yngwie (Malmsteen) and tried to learn an Yngwie lick, I would listen and get the gist of it, but I would never go down the rabbit hole far enough to really emulate it to the point where someone would say, ‘Wow, that sounds just like so-and-so. And I think for me personally, I think that’s what gave me a creative direction and a creative voice — on the instrument, in the writing, in the singing — is the fact that, ‘Okay, well, I’m gonna figure out the idea that someone’s playing,’ but for me, in my mind, it’s a waste of time to try to emulate it perfectly.”

“For what reason? Why would I do that? It already exists. It’s already there by the person that created it. I’d like to know how they did it, but once I get an idea of how they did it, that’s enough. I wanna do my own thing, and let me develop my own stuff. Maybe one day I’ll do something, and someone’ll wonder how did I do it, and try to figure it out. That, to me, is way more interesting,” Richie Kotzen said (Transcribed by Blabbermouth).

Besides being a solo artist, Richie Kotzen has been a member of Vertú, Poison, and Mr. Big. In recent years, he has been focused on Smith/Kotzen, a duo formed with Iron Maiden guitarist Adrian Smith.