#yin

There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. ↗

— John B. S. Haldane

#fire #flying #god #great #hailed

A guitar is a very personal extension of the person playing it. You have to be emotionally and spiritually connected to your instrument. I'm very brutal on my instruments, but not all the time. ↗

— Eddie Van Halen

#connected #emotionally #extension #guitar #i

The stainless-steel frets were a major breakthrough, because of the amount of playing and bending that I do. I have to get my guitars refretted every couple of months. ↗

— Eddie Van Halen

#because #bending #breakthrough #couple #every

David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music. ↗

— Eddie Van Halen

#covered #dancing #david #doing #else

Everything I did is because I wanted to do it. If I weren't playing this arena, if I were playing a club, I'd still be doing it because that's what I want to do. I love playing the guitar. ↗

— Eddie Van Halen

#because #club #did #doing #everything

'For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge' took a year to record; that's why the playing on it might sound somewhat labored. 'Balance,' on the other hand, was written and recorded in only four months, so the whole process was quicker and more immediate. ↗

— Eddie Van Halen

#carnal #four #hand #immediate #knowledge

I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize - out of like 5,000 kids! The judges were like, 'Very interesting interpretation!' I thought I was playing it right. ↗

— Eddie Van Halen

#beach #city #college #contests #crazy

I started doing all kinds of weird stuff on the guitar, which became part of my playing. I started doing harmonics and tapping on the guitar and pulling off strings and doing all this weird stuff that no one had ever done before. ↗

— Eddie Van Halen

#before #doing #done #ever #guitar

I was trying to take the band in a direction that I thought was appropriate, and Roth was trying to take the band in more of a Las Vegas direction. And there he is. ↗

— Eddie Van Halen

#band #direction #i #las #las vegas

... life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it's out. Forever. ↗

— David Wong

#death