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💡 Newskategorie: IT Security Nachrichten
🔗 Quelle: entertainment.slashdot.org
In honor of legendary guitarist Eddie Van Halen, who tragically passed away today from throat cancer at the age of 65, we wanted to resurface an article Eddie wrote in 2015 for Popular Mechanics. While many know him as the guitar god, Eddie Van Halen was also an inventor and patent holder who has spent the better part of 35 years in his shop, rebuilding guitars and amps, searching for his signature sound. Here's an excerpt from the article: I've always been a tinkerer. It comes from my dad. Growing up, we lived in a house in Pasadena that had no driveway. You used an alley that ran through the middle of the block, behind all the houses, to get to your backyard or the garage. Well, the neighbor behind us had a U-Haul trailer up on car jacks and loaded with cinder block. One night my dad came home from a gig at three in the morning. He had a little heat going, he'd had a few drinks, so he says, "This thing is blocking me from getting in again." So he got out of the car and tried to move it. As soon as he lifted the trailer, the jack fell over, and it chopped his finger off. This was a problem. Besides the obvious reasons, he played clarinet and saxophone. On a sax, you don't need to seal the hole with your finger. A valve closes over it. But with a clarinet, you have to seal the hole, so he took a saxophone valve cover and adapted it to work on his clarinet. Another funny thing was later in his life, when he started losing his teeth. You need your bottom teeth to play a reed instrument. Instead of going to the dentist, he made himself a perfectly shaped prosthesis out of white Teflon that filled the gap where his teeth were missing. He slipped that in when he had to play. Watching him do that kind of stuff instilled a curiosity in me. If something doesn't do what you want it to, there's always a way to fix it... Van Halen was an inventor on three patents related to guitars: A folding prop to support a guitar in a flat position, a tension-adjusting tailpiece, and an ornamental design for a headstock. Two of the three remain today. Slashdot reader nicolaiplum shares the following news about his passing: Rock legend Eddie van Halen has died, aged 65, after a long battle with cancer. "In a band known for its instability -- due in part to a rotating cast of lead singers that most notably includes David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar -- Eddie Van Halen and his brother Alex remained constants, appearing on 12 studio albums that reached across five decades and sold tens of millions of copies," reports NPR. The New York Times adds: "His outpouring of riffs, runs and solos was hyperactive and athletic, making deeper or darker emotions feel irrelevant. The band he led was one of the most popular of all time." This story is part of a new occasional article series we're calling Slashback. We'll be covering a topic that may not be breaking news, but is interesting to us.
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