Vale
Rock God
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Inspire December 2020



Eddie Van Halen
& Inventor
In October 2020, the world mourned the passing of perhaps the greatest
guitar player of all time in Eddie Van Halen. As well as being a shred
machine in the band Van Halen (check out the song Eruption), Eddie
was also an innovator of some note with regard to the electric guitar.

Perhaps Eddie’s most famous axe
was a guitar he built himself in
the early 1970s which featured a
Fender Stratocaster style body and
hardware. He replaced the single
coil Stratocaster type pickups with
what is commonly known as a
Gibson PAF pickup. The acronym PAF
stands for Patent Applied For, and
identifies an early and sought after
model of a noise cancelling – or 60
cycle humbucking – guitar pickup
which was invented by Seth Lover of
Gibson in 1955 (US2896491). Today,
some of these early PAF pickups
can cost thousands of dollars. Eddie
also reportedly potted the pickup
in wax to avoid unwanted squeals
from the pickups at high volume.

If rock and roll folklore is to be
believed, Eddie also had a hand in
developing the fine tuners that appear
on the Floyd Rose (US4549461A).

In an early incarnation of the Floyd
Rose, Eddie also famously screwed
in a coin to assist with the correct
operation to the bridge of the guitar.

Eddie’s legacy lives on in a number
of signature guitars, the D-Tuna
drop D tuning system, low friction
potentiometers, pickups and strings
that bear his name – and a new
generation of young players are still
discovering him and likely playing way
too many notes in quick succession.

But this was not Eddie’s first foray
into guitar innovation. Eddie was
also the inventor on a humbucking
pickup (US10115383) and a drop
tuning mechanism (US7183475),
and was known for building his own
guitars and customising them by
way of sanding down necks for faster
playing, upgrading pickups, mixing up
different string gauges, and making
improvements to tremolo systems.

On a subsequent version of the
Frankenstrat, and another guitar he
used, known as the Bumblebee for
its back and yellow striped finish,
Eddie replaced the patented Fender
Stratocaster bridge/tremolo system
(US27441146) with a Floyd Rose
system, which is subject of a number
of patents from inventor Floyd D. Rose.

Mark Williams | Special Counsel
BCSE(Hons) MIP FIPTA
mark.williams@pof.com.au Inspire October 2020
The Frankenstrat
In 1987, Eddie was granted US Patent
US4656917 which allowed a player to
play an electric guitar perpendicular
to the body while standing up. As
everyone knows, the rules of rock
and roll state that you cannot rock
sitting down, and so this invention
opened the rock guitar player up
to many different techniques
while playing, including a tapping
technique popularised by Eddie, as
can be seen in the unintentionally
hilarious patent drawings.

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