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Yep, hammer-ons don't sound that impressive on an acoustic or a rhythmn electric guitar setup. You need a real loud amp setting - where every brush of the strings makes for screaming distortion noise, then hammer-ons have all the impact of a strum

The cheeky answer to this is to watch dealers as these replica editions are often discounted, you could pick it up for a mere $14,000!

However here's the nitty gritty from Harmony Central;

"The guitar that appears on the cover of Van Halen was Eddie's first "super guitar." He bought a factory-second guitar body for $50 and a neck for $80, made in 1975. This new guitar body came pre-routed for three single-coil pickups, so Van Halen took up a chisel and soldering iron to install a fat-sounding humbucking pickup from an older semi-hollow body guitar, rotating it slightly to accommodate the wider string spacing of the original Fender bridge.

In an unintentional stroke of genius borne out of necessity, Eddie conceived of the idea of dipping the humbucking pickup into an empty Yuban coffee can full of molten paraffin wax to reduce feedback once the wax cooled and solidified, a technique now known as "potting" a pickup. He also adjusted the vibrato bridge plate to lie flat against the body, preventing upward bends while increasing tuning stability. Also to his preference, the unfinished neck was wider and flatter; Eddie also replaced the original frets with larger fret wire.

It was this guitar body that first received the distinctive and soon-to-be-iconic striped paint job; Van Halen sprayed it with black and white Schwinn® acrylic lacquer bicycle paint. He cut out and mounted his own homemade black pickguard, covering the neck and middle pickup routings, and installed a single master volume knob (although the knob itself, famously, was a "Tone" knob), brass nut and an original Fender tremolo tailpiece.

Although it didn't take long to build, and although the whole shebang cost him less than $150, this was the guitar that would change the world. It became Van Halen's main instrument for the first several albums and tours, and he soon striped it one last time and added a top coat of red; with the addition of orange and red truck reflectors, Eddie was now complete in creating one of the most iconic guitars in rock 'n' roll history.

During Van Halen's second world tour, he replaced the original tremolo with an odd device—a prototype locking tremolo system built by Seattle designer Floyd Rose. To fill the gap between the top surface of the guitar body and the bottom side of the tremolo plate, Eddie's modest-but-efficient solution was to permanently mount a quarter under the unit's top-back side. A succession of replacement necks all maintained the use of Schaller® tuners after Van Halen broke the original neck."

"The maple fingerboard has a 12" to 16" compound radius, with 21 Dunlop® 6100 jumbo frets. The guitar features a Seymour Duncan® Custom Shop EVH® humbucking pickup, with a single master volume knob (that says "Tone") mounted on a single-ply partial black pickguard, identical to the original. Other features include Schaller® tuners, aged chrome hardware, and a limited edition, fully "relic-ed" EVH® road case. Leaving no stone unturned, the guitar is complete with a non-functional three-way switch and single-coil pickup that occupy two of the three pickup routs."

But wait, Eddie also tinkered with his amps and his sound has been emulated by amp modellers. For instance my Behringer Vamp2 has a model called 'Custom Hi-Gain' based on the 1969 50w Marshall Plexi modified by Jose Arrendondo for Van Halen, I think Marshall still have an amp in their range that comes close to this custom vintage amp.

The Edge's sound comes from the clean Vox AC30 amplifier and yet again the Vamp2 has several presets that allow you instant access to a U2 sound.

However to truly emulate your hero I guess you need to get into scratch building guitars and see what results. Bootlegger & guitardocphil should be able to give tips on hot-rodding etc.

First off, turn the volume and tone controls on the guitar up to full and adjust amp volume to reasonable level. Make the same chords you did on the acoustic, do they sound clangy (surf or garage punk style) or do they distort a bit? Set the tone control on the amp to mid if you want a rock sound.

Does the amp have a gain control or an overdrive button? You may find pushing the button in makes the gain control live, set it low then tweak up a bit. Do you get a fuzzy raunchy sound now? Still not happy? Try dropping the tone control on the guitar down and roll off the volume control on the guitar, raise the amp volume to compensate. You should be rockin' now... Let us know how it goes...

Look for pop/rock songs with rundowns or places you can introduce them, eg. G->Em and C->Am.

:0 Whoops, yep you're right, sorry, doing that from memory at the end of the day.

I've certainly found the amp reviews at Harmony Central are of the 'connoiseurs with unlimited budget' variety. My own little amp got rubbish review there. Yet because I annoyed the shop thoroughly by trying out every amp that was vaguely portable with my guitar I know that it sounds as good if not better than amps costing 4 times as much, at least to my humble ears.

It all depends on what you want from an amp. Fender tend to be mild-mannered giving clean sounds that are right for blues and country, you _can_ get them to growl just a bit but not much. Marshall on the other hand tend to be built with high-gain (distortion) in mind, making them for decades the choice of rock and metal bands. I'd hazard a guess that the reviewer at Ultimate Guitar want to shred and thrash.

Keep on trying amps out you'll learn far more than reviews can tell.

AC/DC's 'You shook me all night long' is a good starter piece as it is based around a G C D break. You can play this with standard open chords or introduce a folk G Dsus2 feel. It sounds good on acoustic even. There's lots more to it, I suspect AC/DC use powerchords  and all sorts to make it come alive but the basics are just fine.

Is that modern enough?

Getting the feel right is the hard bit John. You'll often find a lick are selected notes from a scale that sound dynamic together. So if you look at my post for 'Got To Hurry' you'll see the initial 5 note lick is selected notes from the Am pentatonic 'blues box' scale. Then the lick is played one down and then played back on the neck to correspond with a chord progression. I'm still struggling  to get the bouncy, driving, fun feel Clapton got with the Yardbirds, my version sounds leaden.

When you're doing your scales try stopping in the middle and repeat the last 2 or 3 notes, try to build up a musical sounding repetition, trios of notes (triplets) are often very effective. Listen to them and see if they sound like words or phrases or shouts, try and play them with expression to make them cry or moan. You should now be breaking out of simply walking through scales into solo playing. A real good player (like my tutor) can take a song they don't really know and build up a basic lick out of portions of the scale. So say the song's 'Sweet Home Chicago' (was practising this alot myself yesterday) then the expert player would pull out a lick, a portion of the scale, that echoes the melody 'sweet home' or 'chicago' or maybe 'baby do you wanna go' etc.

There's a site called Action Tab which uses animated run throughs to show classic song runs but these are particular to the big hits illustrated. A lick is more a monkey wrench it can be applied to a number of songs and still work, some lead guitarists just play the same lick for a whole set but their skill is in making it sound different and appropriate to each song.

Line 6 make the POD which is currently on the 2.0 and XT version. Behringer make the Vamp2 which is what I have. I understand what you are saying about ice-cream flavours. I'm sorta helped by the fact that most of the presets are for metal which isn't my thing. I tend to stick to a 3 or 4 basic workable presets but I can see there's a danger of getting tone-twiddling-itis.

As a beginner look to just do a basic down up down up rhythmn at first, concentrate on getting the chord changes right. Then as you progress you'll find you start to naturally vary the rythmn making some strokes stronger or lighter, like DOWN up down up. That'll give you an empthatic 1 beat which works on a few songs etc.

Beware players who hand out rythmns like they are magic keys to playing. There are some rhythmns that are really ear-catching but if you use them for every song your playing will lack variety. Hence some players who sound great but everything they do is the same kind of great.