'He scared the hell out of a million guitarists'

Eddie Van Halen, who has died at the age of 65, opened up dozens of new possibilities for the electric guitar with his wildly inventive, and largely self-taught, techniques.

Combining lightning-quick two-handed picking techniques with hammer-ons, pull-offs, complex harmonics and an array of innovative devices he patented, the guitarist became a pole star for generations of musicians.

"Ed's a once- or twice-in-a-century kind of guy," his friend Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains said earlier this year. "There's Hendrix, and there's Eddie Van Halen. Those two guys tilted the world on its axis."