Van Halen's 'Summer Nights' Is Harder To Play Than I Thought, Here's Why

Leave it to Eddie Van Halen to make what sounds like an easy fun guitar riff, an overly complicated guitar riff using a guitar tech piece I’ve never even heard of, until today.

When Sammy Hagar was on the Howard Stern show recently with Joe Satriani, Michael Anthony, and Jason Bonham to promote the upcoming Best Of All Worlds Tour, Sammy was telling Howard how Summer Nights isn’t as easy of a song to play as it might seem.

A trans-trem? Never heard of it! So I looked it up. According to Wikipedia a trans-trem uses special strings and a specially built tremolo bar that will keep all the strings in tune to each other as you bend the notes. Normally you use a whammy (tremolo) bar to bend single notes because the different strings are different thicknesses, and bending them all the same amount results in them doing out of tune to each other. this set up fixes that problem. How Ed used it on Summer Nights, I still don’t know, but I’m determined to learn it on guitar somehow.

This instructional video shows one way to play it, with a capo, and then taking it off for the key change:

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