“The Led Zeppelin Song That Unlocked Eddie Van Halen’s Genius: ‘What If I Use My Finger?’”

The Led Zeppelin Riff That Gave Birth to Eddie Van Halen’s Signature Technique

In the pantheon of rock’s greatest guitarists, few shine as brightly—or as distinctively—as Eddie Van Halen. Among the countless virtuosos who’ve made their mark on rock history, Van Halen didn’t just join the conversation; he transformed it. Central to his enduring legacy is a single technique: tapping.Tapping, for the uninitiated, involves using the fingers of both hands on the fretboard, creating rapid-fire note sequences with a fluidity and speed that defy traditional playing. While not wholly unheard of prior to Van Halen’s rise—Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett had toyed with it in the early 1970s—Eddie took it to unprecedented heights, embedding it deep into the DNA of rock and metal for generations to come.Yet, the origin story of this now-iconic move isn’t as straightforward as one might expect. For years, speculation has swirled around where and how Eddie first encountered the technique. Guitarist George Lynch once claimed that both he and Van Halen witnessed Harvey Mandel perform a rudimentary form of tapping at the Starwood club in West Hollywood during the 1970s. Hackett, too, has gently hinted at influencing Eddie’s evolution. But Van Halen himself had a very different—and much more personal—recollection.In an interview with Guitar World, Eddie Van Halen traced his ‘eureka moment’ back to a live performance by another titan of the guitar world: Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. Specifically, it was during a blistering rendition of ‘Heartbreaker’ in the early 1970s that something clicked.“I think I got the idea of tapping watching Jimmy Page do his ‘Heartbreaker’ solo back in 1971,” Van Halen recalled. “He was doing a pull-off to an open string, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, open string… pull-off. I can do that, but what if I use my finger as the nut and move it around?’ I just kind of took it and ran with it.”This wasn’t about imitation. Eddie wasn’t copying Page, nor was he borrowing from any single source. It was, as many of the great innovations are, an act of reinvention. Van Halen saw a flash of potential in a small part of Page’s technique and built something entirely his own from it.Crucially, the brilliance of Eddie Van Halen lay in how he made the extraordinary seem instinctive. He famously built his own guitar, developed his sound through experimentation rather than instruction, and played entirely by ear. His adoption of tapping wasn’t a studied decision—it was intuitive, personal, and utterly revolutionary.Though tapping existed before Eddie, no one made it roar quite like he did. And it all might have started in the audience of a Zeppelin gig, watching Jimmy Page bend the rules just enough to spark the imagination of a future legend.