Even for a player as revolutionary as Eddie Van Halen, there were guitarists who left him completely awestruck, musicians whose tone, feel, and inventiveness made him step back and admit, “I didn’t know how to get his sound.”
Though Eddie redefined the electric guitar for a new generation, pioneering tapping, harmonics, and custom gear innovations that changed rock forever, he was also a lifelong student of the instrument. And in several interviews over the years, he was refreshingly humble about his influences, pointing to Eric Clapton and Allan Holdsworth as the two players he knew he could never quite match.
Eric Clapton: The Blueprint
Eddie often called Eric Clapton his first and biggest influence. Growing up in Pasadena, he would spend hours learning Cream solos note-for-note, long before Van Halen ever became a band.
“Clapton was it,” Eddie said in a 1981 Guitar World interview. “When I was a kid, I would sit there with the Fresh Cream album and try to figure out everything he played. I learned every solo he ever did in Cream.”
But as much as Eddie absorbed from Clapton, he admitted he could never fully be Clapton.
“I could never get his sound,” Eddie once confessed. “I didn’t know how he did it, that woman tone. I didn’t have the gear, and I didn’t have that touch. He was so smooth. Everything he played was melodic and had feeling. That’s something you can’t fake.”
While Eddie’s own playing became more aggressive, tapping-driven, and futuristic, Clapton’s phrasing and vibrato remained a lifelong lesson for him. Even after Van Halen’s global success, Eddie still spoke about Clapton with the same reverence he’d had as a teenager.
“People don’t realize how hard it is to play like Clapton. He makes it sound easy, that’s the genius,” Eddie said.
Allan Holdsworth: The Untouchable Technician
If Clapton was Eddie’s spiritual and emotional benchmark, jazz-fusion legend Allan Holdsworth represented the technical mountain he could never climb. Holdsworth’s impossibly fluid legato lines and complex harmonic ideas left even Van Halen, the man who reinvented guitar technique, in awe.
“Holdsworth is the best, in my book,” Eddie told Guitar Player in 1982. “He’s the only guy that scares me. I can’t do what he does. Nobody can.”
Eddie was so obsessed with Holdsworth’s playing that he reportedly tried to get Warner Bros. to sign him in the late ’70s. He even built a home studio rig to try and replicate Holdsworth’s unique, violin-like tone, with little success.
“I didn’t know how to get his sound,” Eddie said. “It was just so pure, so liquid. He used those weird chords and scales that I didn’t understand at the time. It was from another planet.”
Holdsworth’s influence subtly crept into Van Halen’s music, especially in Eddie’s fluid tapping and melodic approach to solos on albums like Fair Warning and 1984. But Eddie always acknowledged that Holdsworth’s grasp of theory and phrasing operated on a level beyond rock.
“He’s like Coltrane on guitar,” Eddie once said. “You listen and go, ‘How the hell is that possible?’”
Humbled But Inspired
For all his innovations, Eddie Van Halen’s respect for these two players shows how deeply he valued learning from others. His humility was part of his genius, the awareness that even the most gifted musicians have heroes of their own.
“I never thought I was the best,” Eddie said in one of his final interviews. “I just did what I loved. I learned from the people who moved me, Clapton for the feel, Holdsworth for the freedom. I took those things and tried to make them my own.”
In the end, Eddie didn’t need to “match” Clapton or Holdsworth, he became their natural successor, blending emotion and innovation into a style that no one has matched since.
“You don’t steal from your heroes,” Eddie once said. “You let them inspire you to find your own voice. That’s what Clapton and Holdsworth did for me.”
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