Eruption: Take 1. Live Studio 1. Unmixed - Van Halen (1977) Sunset Sound

[twonabomber]

Just now on Sunset Sound's YouTube

[Terry]

I do have a vivid memory of when I first heard that, which was probably 1980. I was ten years old and was at the house of a friend of the same age. The friend had an older sister, maybe 16 or 17 at the time. A very hot older sister (this was right around the age when I was fully arriving at the realization that girls weren't by default 'yucky'), and she was huge into Van Halen. She played the album and when I heard the track I remember hearing the latter half of the solo - the fingertapped or two-handed tapped part - and thinking that sounded like an alien ship from Mars or something.

A year or so on from that is when I first started taking guitar lessons, and at that point I was thinking the latter half was some kind of a trick using a synthesizer or something.

[Nitro Express]

I always liked the sound of the Univox echo at the end. It really was a guy playing through a bunch of shit daisy chained together. Ed`s rig looked like something dug out of the trash. Some people can turn shit to sugar.

[Terry]

Which, when I first started playing...back then, you didn't have the rack gear...I mean, the three or four of us in my age bracket who started playing at the same time...we were upper-middle class kids but none of us had, like, $500+ guitars as our first instruments or a hundred-watt Marshall as our first amplifier. Back then, it was all stomp boxes for effects and most of us had maybe one or two stomp boxes at the most. This was 1981 or so. Back when you might pick up a used Fender Reverb amp second hand at a local music store because in those days they were cheap as in affordable...before such things became 'vintage' and overvalued and something to be bought as an 'investment'.

Ed's gear when Van Halen recorded their first album by all accounts was cobbled together and stuff he could afford. He had modified that famous Frankenstrat guitar but it wasn't some expensive custom job. It struck me as weird in the early 2000s when that EVH line of gear was really being rolled out and whatever company it was began producing those $20k Frankenstrat replicas...around the same time I was looking to get a new electric and was looking at stuff in a Sam Ash music store and saw an EVH stomp box...it was...either a flanger or a phaser...I think it was an MXR EVH series pedal. Anyway, it had a button on it you could press and it would replicate the swoop from Unchained or some such thing. Going for a couple hundred bucks a pop. There were some EVH amps there as well, all going for a few hundred bucks per unit over whatever Marshalls and Peaveys were there.

All claiming they could give you Eddie's sound. Like, you could buy the Frankenstrat replica, the EVH amps and the entire EVH pedal series and literally spend $30k on the whole package - keep in mind this was 20 years ago - and I remember thinking it was totally bonkers when remembering initially Eddie didn't have a bunch of expensive gear when Van Halen did those first couple albums.

[Nitro Express]

There’s a Steve Rosin interview with Ed where Ed is demonstrating some riffs on an unplugged guitar. All the Tone, harmonics and vibe are there. Ed had really strong hands and his fingers would hit the strings like a hammer on a piano hits a string. Ed was an excellent piano player and he kind of played the guitar like how a piano works. A piano hammers the strings.

Anyways there was no magical amp or black box. Ed’s favorite Marshall was a stock 1968 Super Lead 100. He would run it on 89 volts and turn the bias all the way up and turn all the knobs to 10. He was trying to get all the gain he could at the lowest volume possible. At home ge would turn everything up on a Fender Bandmaster and plug into the extension speaker plug. This will blow up most amps but the Fenders at the time had really robust transformers.

Ed would go on the road with twelve Marshal Super Lead heads. Running amps hard can blow transformers and British transformers blow pretty easy. He had 12 amps because some would blow and need repair. He was playing live through various amps. Was there a huge change in his tone?

Ed’s sound is clipping tubes and having a circuit that compresses that sound. There’s certain mid frequencies that need to be there. I can tell if I have a good Ed sound dialed in if I hit the A string in the third position and I get a certain Karang! sound out of an amp and speaker. It has to resonate a certain way.

If you can’t get the basic sounds on your guitar then you are fucked. The amp won’t help you. You want the amp dialed in nice and tight. You don’t want some big flabby ass sounding amp or tinny or flabby sounding speakers.

[ZahZoo]

This recording is part of the unreleased materials/demos/alternate takes stuff that was set free several weeks ago and covered in the stickied thread here. It's the original track from the released version which included one mic tracked on Ed's speaker cabinet and this one captured from a room mic. The two are combined in the final mix with one track going to the right channel and this one sent to the left... Stereo in its raw form.

[Nitro Express]

Yeah and mic placement and all that creates more variables. It’s going to change the sound. I don’t even mic speakers anymore. I will use a Friedman Mic No More or a Rivera speaker emulator which is an EQ set to whatever frequency response I want.

[Nitro Express]

I’ve heard a lot of amatures get good Eddie tone using all sorts of things. One guy got a great classic EVH tone using a Strat with a Seymour Duncan 59 pickup into a Fulltone OCD pedal a analog delay with some slap back into a Epiphone ValVe Jr amp cranked and running into a Weber attenuator and a 2x12 MojoTone cab loaded with green backs.

It sounded great but he could unplug that guitar and get most the sound playing dry. My advice is play unplugged and try and sound like Eddie and then use what equipment you have to project that sound. Be creative.

[Nitro Express]

I like the MXR 5150 Overdrive pedal. I keep one in my gig bag and use it for all sorts of stuff. It really makes all sorts of amps sound better. I always have a 5150 overdrive and a FUCH’s Cream Extreme II pedal with me. I can get all my sound with those two with what amp is available. Sometimes you don’t want to haul an amp over if there is one you can use.

[Nitro Express]

The Friedman BE pedal is good too.

[Nitro Express]

I like the MXR because I don’t need a power supply. Having the battery option is still useful. Sometimes you just want to use individual pedals and not mess with a whole pedal board.

[Nitro Express]

Which, when I first started playing...back then, you didn't have the rack gear...I mean, the three or four of us in my age bracket who started playing at the same time...we were upper-middle class kids but none of us had, like, $500+ guitars as our first instruments or a hundred-watt Marshall as our first amplifier. Back then, it was all stomp boxes for effects and most of us had maybe one or two stomp boxes at the most. This was 1981 or so. Back when you might pick up a used Fender Reverb amp second hand at a local music store because in those days they were cheap as in affordable...before such things became 'vintage' and overvalued and something to be bought as an 'investment'.

Ed's gear when Van Halen recorded their first album by all accounts was cobbled together and stuff he could afford. He had modified that famous Frankenstrat guitar but it wasn't some expensive custom job. It struck me as weird in the early 2000s when that EVH line of gear was really being rolled out and whatever company it was began producing those $20k Frankenstrat replicas...around the same time I was looking to get a new electric and was looking at stuff in a Sam Ash music store and saw an EVH stomp box...it was...either a flanger or a phaser...I think it was an MXR EVH series pedal. Anyway, it had a button on it you could press and it would replicate the swoop from Unchained or some such thing. Going for a couple hundred bucks a pop. There were some EVH amps there as well, all going for a few hundred bucks per unit over whatever Marshalls and Peaveys were there.

All claiming they could give you Eddie's sound. Like, you could buy the Frankenstrat replica, the EVH amps and the entire EVH pedal series and literally spend $30k on the whole package - keep in mind this was 20 years ago - and I remember thinking it was totally bonkers when remembering initially Eddie didn't have a bunch of expensive gear when Van Halen did those first couple albums.

My bass rig is still in a rack. I’m never giving up my Alembic pre amp. Everything has gone back to the floor. Hardly any rack gear is being made anymore. We can make pedals smaller now. But my bass rig has saved the day a few times. I have an extra power amp and it’s ran the PA a few times when it went down. If I run my bass in mono there’s three 500watt channels available to use if needed. I could go DI and there’s four channels. My rig sounds great. I have no desire to upgrade it.

[Nitro Express]

The old stomp boxes were sometimes problematic because they were not true bypass. If you had too many or long cable runs it could get interesting. Now we have true bypass, low impedance buffers and clean signal boosters. I use a FUCHS pedal pusher and buffer what’s going in and out of my effects. I use the boost for solos. Makes a huge difference even with modern pedals.

[Nitro Express]

A few pedals, a silver face Fender Champ and an Ibanez or Memphis Gibson copy was the standard kid rig when I started playing in 1978.

One kid in our town had a Strat and a fawn 50 watt full Marshall stack. He never would let anyone else play through it. Another kid had a silver burst Les Paul. Most of us had our lawsuit guitars, Champs and Peavy bandits with the MXR or Boss pedals.

[Nitro Express]

I think it was Alembic that started the whole rack thing in the early 70’s. The Grateful Dead were using the preamp of a Fender and using a McIntosh power amp. It was a pain hauling all these Fender heads around and so the guys who started Alembic built a rack sized preamp with two Fender circuits. Racks were used for computer equipment and they figured just put all the amps in a rack and put the rack on wheels.