Piano Guidance
Piano Guidance
Photo: Laker
He glued in some jumbo Gibson frets, and he screwed on his Strat's vibrato and fitted a single control for volume.
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So in order to benefit the most out of that very first piano lesson, here's what to expect: Before Starting. ... Introduction and Getting to Know...
Read More »EVH’s playing was boundary-pushing and his unique approach to gear was equally revolutionary in the 1970s, but his “endless pursuit” of perfection kept him refining and pushing the envelope for the next 40 years, changing the industry along with it. Eddie Van Halen didn’t just amaze his fellow guitarists with the remarkable work he did using a rare combination of playing techniques. Ed’s attitude to his guitars and his amplification also influenced a multitude of musicians, instrument makers, and amp builders. “I hate store-bought, off-the-rack guitars,” he told Jas Obrecht at Guitar Player back in the late 70s, a few months after the first Van Halen album appeared. “They don’t do what I want them to do.” This summed up the approach Ed took to more or less all the gear he used during the years of his growing success. He’d started out on a cheap Teisco electric, and some of his mates in early pre-VH bands considered that a Strat he moved to sounded too thin and a 335 looked too un-rock. So he decided to take matters into his own hands and combine some of the qualities of Fender and Gibson into one home-assembled instrument. Enter Frankenstrat, Ed’s generic name for several lashed-up guitars that he put together from assorted parts.
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Read More »If you find Ed’s early guitar history confusing, wait till you get to the amps. If you’re after some facts, then you’d best look away now. About all we can say with a hint of certainty is that for those crucial early recordings he used a 60s Marshall Super Lead JTM100 Plexi, with one or two Marshall cabs. Live, he used more Marshalls. There is debate about whether or not the Marshalls were modified, and the short answer is that it depends what you call modified. At first, Ed used the services of a tech called Jose Arredondo, so if mods were done at that time—maybe a cascading gain here, or an external dummy load there—it was Arredondo who did the modding. Some techs who serviced later amps swear they were stock and un-modded. The legend shows no signs of becoming clearer, and it wasn’t helped by Ed’s own mischievous muddling when discussing his gear history. It seems safer to consider his earliest comments on the subject, in that interview with Jas Obrecht just after the first album in 1978. He spoke then about Arredondo, about the four “very old” Marshalls he had originally, and about the way Arredondo would “beef them up”. Ed reckoned Arredondo “put bigger transformers” in his Marshalls and that he used a Variac box to change the voltage going into his amps. Variac is a brandname that’s been applied generically to a transformer that will adjust the level of mains voltage going into an amplifier—and some have since noted the potential dangers of this practice. “The amp’s only supposed to take 100 volts,” Ed said of the American mains feed, “but you crank the thing above that, like to 130, 140 volts, and the tubes really glow.” In the ’78 interview, he said he’d lost those original Marshalls, reporting that on stage he used three 100-watt tops “of whatever make—right now I’m using Music Man, a couple of Laney amps, which are English, and a couple of new Marshalls,” along with two similar sets of backups. Then there’s Ed’s “brown sound”, his description of the results from his original setup of MXR Flanger, MXR Phaser, Echoplex tape echo, and Marshall amps (and the minor matter of Ed’s head, hands, and heart). He told Obrecht again in a later interview, in 1980: “There is a difference between being just loud, and having what I call a warm, brown sound—which is a rich, toney sound. … I can actually play so loud on stage that you won’t hear anything else, but I don’t really like to do that. I like to get a balanced sound.” Something of a cottage industry has grown in more recent years for boutique amps that celebrate the timeless attributes of the early Marshalls, and the mythology surrounding Ed’s brown sound has contributed to the trend. Dave Friedman at Friedman Amplification is one of the makers concerned with the modern interpretation of the classic British amp circuits and tones, and he’s been in the business long enough to have seen it all. “To me, the quintessential amp is an old Plexi Super Lead circuit with a Variac, on 10,” he told Dave Hunter in this publication earlier this year. “That’s where my amp head is, which is quite gain-y if it’s set up right—but old-school gain-y. You know, more the Van Halen school of Plexi, shall we say.” Ed, meanwhile, would continue his quest for the amp sound he was always chasing—brown or otherwise. In later years, he teamed up with Peavey for his first series of 5150 amps, starting in 1992, and more recently there were his various EVH amps, in collaboration with Fender, which kicked off in 2007 with the 5150 III. “What else do I have?” he wondered aloud in that ’78 chat. “I can’t even remember—I’ve got so many different heads! I just got to patch them all together and hope it sounds cool. It’s working out pretty good.”
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Read More »He switched to Peavey in the mid 90s as his deal with Music Man ended (although Music Man continued to produce a very similar guitar without the EVH association, the Axis). Jim DeCola was supervisor of guitar design engineering at Peavey, where he’d been since 1988, and Jim and Ed developed prototypes that moved on from the Music Man. The production Peavey Wolfgang introduced in 1996 added contouring for the maple top, pushed the neck a little deeper into the body, had carbon fibre reinforcement rods in the neck, recessed the truss rod wheel into the end of the neck, and had a new headstock with Ed’s idea for a ‘V’ element matched to Jim’s scooped tip in a recognisable Peavey shape. The pickups were based on a Frankenstrat unit, a tone control was added alongside the volume, and the vibrato was a Ping licensed Floyd Rose, with a D-Tuner on the low E-string. Ed split with Peavey in 2004, and another revised Wolfgang became part of the line of products for that Fender-related EVH brand, the deal following a run of Ed’s Art Series guitars around 2004 with the Fender-owned Charvel brand. The first sign of EVH guitars came with a limited-edition remake of Ed’s Frankenstrat, and then the brand’s new take of the Wolfgang appeared in 2009, developed with Chip Ellis at Fender. Agreeing to a set of pickups developed in-house at Fender, Ed was still unsure if the placement was exactly right. “I didn’t have a router with me to enlarge the pickup cavity on the day we decided to look into that,” Chip tells me. “So, Ed went into his garage and grabbed a crowbar and a hammer. We went out in the driveway, and basically he chiseled this huge pocket so we could move the pickup around in it. If you look at pictures of Number 4 prototype on Ed’s ’07/’08 tour, it looks like a dog chewed the pickup cavity. But it did the trick! I believe we ended up moving it a 32nd of an inch, and we found the sweet spot.” Since the first EVH Wolfgang in 2009, variations on the theme were added alongside, including set-neck and hardtail models, and cheaper guitars made offshore. “I seem to always be refining the design,” Ed told The Hub in 2017. “I’m constantly putzing around with it. You go on tour and you realise what works and what doesn’t work. It’s an endless pursuit.” Eddie Van Halen never stood still when it came to his guitars and amps. And more often than not, he did it all with a smile on his face. He rarely appeared to take himself too seriously. “I never really sit down and really practice,” he said in ’78, “Like shut myself in a little room and go, ‘All right, I’m serious now.’ You know, I just sit around and whenever I get bored, I play my guitar.”
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