Originally published at: A guitar tech explains Van Halen's most infamous tuning disaster | Boing Boing
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The only tech that needs to get blamed is the one who originally invented the Floyd Rose.
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Dave knew to follow the key of the synth. And ride the inflatable microphone to distract from that mess. The show must go on!
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This is how tone deaf I am that I don’t hear anything more unusual than the typical crappy quality of most live performances.
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way to make a simple, everyday problem for musicians sound overly complex. tl:dr - guitars can easily be retuned on the fly, keyboards can’t.
What baffles me is how a guitarist at this level could not know that this would be a problem. It is literally something that happens at nearly every live performance
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Really bummed I missed this tour, never saw Van Halen and Dave actually sounds pretty darn good! He opened for KISS in 2020 (who were amazing) , Dave unfortunately sounded like he forgot he used to be in the biggest band in the world, And I took a bathroom break after three songs , ah well. RIP Eddie
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Greensboro is where the massacre happened, right?
Is that right?
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No, that was Bowling Green KY 
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I’m surprised (and not surprised) that the synth tracks were pre-recorded. You’d think a huge band at a huge concert could afford to put a studio musician up there to play the iconic synth track live. (Not that it would have solved the tuning disaster.)
As for Mr. Van Halen not realizing things were out of tune, I wouldn’t be surprised if his in-ear monitors were mixed to minimize the synth track and maybe even the vocals. It’s a guitar band. It’s his guitar band. Everyone should follow him.
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It was the guitar tech’s fault. He should have run up on stage before ‘Jump’ and forced the properly-tuned guitar into Eddie’s hands!
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I was just coming here to say something along those lines. The tech explaining how it happened is diverting to why this was a real scandal at the time: The band (and most at the time) were insisting there were no pre-recorded tracks, no “sweetener”, etc. If I recall correctly Van Halen said they had a keyboardist offstage. The issue wasn’t that Van Halen had a mistake in the performance, but they couldn’t explain the mistake away and not admit to the lie.
I guess now recorded (and live offstage) accompaniment is so common now, no one remembers they it was at one time something to lie about.
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Judging from all of the folks who hang out at the guitar store, playing super fast flash-riffs and two handed arpeggios up and down the neck, actually tuning the fucking guitar beforehand is not important to the Guitar God lifestyle.
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In the interview, Weber confirmed that there was no keyboard in Van Halen’s monitor.
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Not very musicianly of him
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That reminds me…
There’s a great little British band called Thunder. They had some chart success in the late 80’s/early 90’s here. They’ve been playing on and off ever since. During one of the “off” times, Danny (vocals) and Ben (rhythm guitar, keyboards) did a short tour called “An evening with Danny & Ben”. It was basically the two of them on stage doing a selection of stripped back songs and telling stories about the band.
One of them was about the tour that they had a Hammond organ with them. Ben was, of course, very excited to be playing on a Hammond, as any rock musician with a healthy appreciation of Jon Lord should be. But it all went somehow terribly wrong.
For whatever technical reason, the Hammond was out of tune. He was playing the song in the wrong key, and everyone could tell - but the band bravely soldiered on. The rest of the band were all giving Ben nervous looks, he was giving them pleading ones back and gesturing with his shoulders to the organ in the hope they’d realise it had a fault. But above all Ben is a professional, so adjusted his playing to the correct key halfway through the song.
Unfortunately, the rest of the band are also professionals, and jumped to the key he had just been on at the exact same time he made his change. So the second half of the song sounded just as terrible as the first half of the song, but in a quite different way.
The band apologised to the audience and finished the gig without issues. But they’ve not used a Hammond much ever since. They know what the technical problem was, but it’s the cringeworthy memories that make them shy away from it…
(And probably the howls of protest from the roadies for lugging a Hammond around, but that’s a different matter.)
tl;dr - live gigs go wrong. Even when you can fix it, the fix can go wrong too… If you want perfection, stick to recordings.
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Really? I would have assumed otherwise, for most modern stuff. Am I oversimplifying it in my head, or couldn’t one just hold the pitch bend wheel at a consistent position, at least for one-handed parts? And since that capability is obviously present in the electronics, wouldn’t it be possible to surface that functionality in the controls? (Can you tell I don’t play keyboard?)
Okay, that’s just literally insane. I used to be the dude trying keep away from the Suck button, and spent years doing so for a fairly complex band that used IEMs. There’s no reason I can imagine to leave anything but percussion out of the monitor mix. And we did use some canned stuff for some songs (especially Pink Floyd), so that was the most important stuff in the monitor mix, as unlike the real instruments, it wasn’t also present in the back line (the combo amps and stacks behind each musician).
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I’ve heard stories, probably apocryphal, of a sound technician working at a road house who actually did have a suck button. If a band came in and were awful enough people to earn his wrath he’d press the suck button, which basically added a quarter-second delay to the lead guitarist’s monitor. The musicians would then try to adjust their tempo to match what they were hearing, and the whole thing would collapse in a few minutes.
Again, no idea if it’s true, but it’s the kind of story we pass around backstage.
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It is technically possible, but no one wants that kind of on-the-fly tuning on a keyboard. A lot of newer keyboards are fully reprogrammable, so you can tune any key to any frequency. Adam Neely uses to great effect this to skewer the 432hz goofballs.
Yeah. It’s totally insane. My post above was concise because I just didn’t have words.
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Finally a version of the song where the guitar sucks even harder than the keyboards.
That utterly disgusting “horn” patch on the Oberheim actually makes me feel sick when I hear it.
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