Van halen 1 choke wasn't a c1999 choke

[Rdodson]

Chokes make a difference in feel.

Holy grail hunting has romanced men since the dawn of time.

All that said, a stock ‘68 will get you there. One with the out-of-spec mids pot will really get you there. One with a variac-styled voltage lowering capability and a decent PPIMV will do it without killing small animals.

 

[Amp_chaser]

Chokes make a difference in feel.

Holy grail hunting has romanced men since the dawn of time.

All that said, a stock ‘68 will get you there. One with the out-of-spec mids pot will really get you there. One with a variac-styled voltage lowering capability and a decent PPIMV will do it without killing small animals.

I’d say completely true for everything after vh2 that involves the Marshall head. for vh1 and vh2 I would say that a stock plexi gets you there at 70%. In Van Halen 1 for example what shocks me is the sustain he gets from rwtd people usually use vibrato on the main riff but if you look the clip he doesn’t use vibrato at all. It sustains automatically and this is a characteristic of Jose modded Amps. Those who played a Jose know what I mean when you play a chord or a single string it sustains almost like if you had a sustainiac pickup. And if you listen to the isolated tracks you’ll see that it’s way off in terms of drive and gain compared to a stock sl.

Even if ed was being a big jerk, what makes me think that the amp was cascaded is that at some point Eddie claimed that Randy Rhoads even copied his way to get his tone. At some point Randy even used Variacs live there are even some pictures online of it. And we all know that the Randy Rhoads mod is a one wire mod or a variation of the cascade mod. There are multiple ways to cascade plexis and they all sound slightly differently. The one wire mod is slightly less aggressive than a classic cascade mod it’s the easy to do version of the mod.

At some point I know that Jackson Lee or Paul Rivera made him a custom modded amp just before he died.Apparently he already used hot rods too.

 

[DanTravis62]

It's not a cascaded amp.

It was put back to stock, likely by Jose himself, before the vh1 sessions.

Literally everyone in the universe can attest to this, as well as your own ears if youre honest with yourself and want the "in room" sound.

If you want the sound of the studio? I mean good luck getting it with a cascaded amp, I wish you the best of luck.

You are more than welcome to believe your conspiracy theory if you want, but this mystery is solved man

 

[Rdodson]

My old ‘68, my Metro 12000, and my Metro MPII all got/get there.

Remember the Pultec in the back end.

 

[Amp_chaser]

My old ‘68, my Metro 12000, and my Metro MPII all got/get there.

Remember the Pultec in the back end.

If you saw the tone talk with ossie ashen and Dave Friedman you’ll see that both say that a stock plexi couldn’t get this amount of drive for vh1 ossie ashen has been experimenting with the pultech and diverse rack units like the Urei and api and he says it’s impossible.

 

[Amp_chaser]

It's not a cascaded amp.

It was put back to stock, likely by Jose himself, before the vh1 sessions.

Literally everyone in the universe can attest to this, as well as your own ears if youre honest with yourself and want the "in room" sound.

If you want the sound of the studio? I mean good luck getting it with a cascaded amp, I wish you the best of luck.

You are more than welcome to believe your conspiracy theory if you want, but this mystery is solved man

There is no conspiracy theory you have one interview by a journalist of Michael’s Anthony bass tech who said Jose modded Anthony’s bass heads and Ed’s main head. He even said he dropped the amp at Jose’s.

You have Neil zlowzlower the official photograph of the band who interviewed Jose Arredondo some years before his death for a book about Eddie. Jose said he modded the amp with Eddie and it took multiple years to achieve the tone Eddie wanted. Eddie never asked Neil to remove this statement in the book so it has to be true.

Rudy Leiren also said the amp was modded and he was the first Van Halen rowdie and handyman to swap transformers and adjust bias.

Finally you have Chris Merren who saw the amp during the 80’s. He leaked the cerrem mod and he is the one to give enough infos to Mark to make the mod V which is a cascade mod for a plexi. Chris Merren said he leaked enough clues for us to get the original genuine tone. Many on the metro forums were trying to interpret merren’s leaks. The closest achievement was the mod 5. However no one tried to combine it with the Jose master volume and the cerrem mod.



If your stock plexi sounds like this, this isn’t normal.

The leaked picture of sl12301 by Dave Friedman even proves that the mustards were removed.

 

[Lightning]

You also forgot Edwards second tech Zeke Clark also said Edwards marshall were modded by Jose also Bob Bradshaw said the samething

 

[RaceU4her]

You also forgot Edwards second tech Zeke Clark also said Edwards marshall were modded by Jose also Bob Bradshaw said the samething

So they say it was modded.. soldano says Eddie himself gave him the amp and it’s bone stock.. someone be lying

 

[harddriver]

This is what the amp sounded like without the Pultec, EQ and other studio tweaks. You can hear the echo coming from the 4x12 cabinets so Ed was running his full pedal board in including the echoplexes in front of the amp in the studio.

Ed did not have any of his regular amps at this show(they were still lost from the Japan tour) or the Selland arena show, these were all newer Superleads as they were touring I highly doubt Ed had time for jose to mod a bunch of new amps for him. If you can listen to these live clips and think it's an uber Jose cascade modded Marshall then we agree to disagree that the tones cannot be gotten from a non modded Marshall Superlead.



Also you keep referring to RWTD as your litmus test for how the amp sustains on the held chords, Jim compares his guitar non Jose amp track directly to the album track. I rest my case.

 

[japetus]

So they say it was modded.. soldano says Eddie himself gave him the amp and it’s bone stock.. someone be lying

I subscribe to the "2nd amp on the grassy knoll" theory

 

[Amp_chaser]

So they say it was modded.. soldano says Eddie himself gave him the amp and it’s bone stock.. someone be lying

You are just unaware of the chronology Mike soldano saw the amp in 1990... Rudy Leiren Clearly said the amp was retired before Eddie brought it to soldano :

Here is what happened :

1972 to 1978 : José and eddie got the sound they wanted.
1978 to 1979 : José stopped to mod eddies plexi and eddie stuck with a new variation of the mod less bright (yeah apparently he hated the bright tone of vh1). in 1979 José was diagnosed with cancer so he stopped modding but continued to do a maintenance job for eddie. Because eddie asked josé if he wanted to come tour with him so he could just do maintenance work. The mod was also changed because rudy leiren said it ate output transformers and tubes like crazy. Eddie's amp has a world record in ot transformers eaten in a short period of time.
1980 : During the early 80's chris merren says he saw the guts of the amp.
1985 : While josé was cured of cancer he went back to modding and did the VAI DLR Head which made eddie and josé relationship to go tense. Remember David lee Roth went solo with Steve vai.
1985 : Rudy Leiren states that eddies original amp was retired and that they had to use a substitute which they probably modded. Eddie main amp was then only used for recordings.
1985-1990 : They probably put back to stock the original one at that moment who knows why ? Perhaps conflicts with josé.
1990 : Eddie goes to mike soldano with the original head in a stock condition perhaps wanted that Mike mods the amp but he probably prefered to go with a soldano.
Since then every tech who saw the amp saw it stock.

but the stock condition was with weird non stock capacitors and many parts without the red dye but the values were stock : (top is eddie's bottom is stock sl12000 series)

Between 1978 and 1987 only josé, Rudy and Chris Merren saw the guts of the amp. In 1990 when Mike soldano saw it the amp was already retired and replaced by another marshall which means that they probably transposed the mods made by josé and brought back the original to stock...

there is probably another marshall head in ed's studio with all the mods we are looking for.

i think that at some point eddie and josé wanted to make a brand of amps in collaboration with ampeg and to share eddies tone but it failed. Perhaps that eddie didn't want to finally share it with the entire world. Or perhaps they thought that marshall would sue them who knows what happened there.

https://www.guitarworld.com/news/dave-friedman-jose-arredondo-eddie-van-halen-mystery-amp

even Pete Frampton testimonies that eddie told him in 1978 before getting famous that josé modded his amps :

http://www.woodytone.com/2010/10/28/evh-frampton-and-jose-modded-amps/

it's not a hazard that josé mods are getting disclosed one by one after eddie's death. More and more guitar techs or experts talk about it. The issue is that josé had a lot of mods and those he did for prodigious kids or famous guitar players are probably not the same he did for random guitar players.

In the opposite side some things will stay hidden from us : You will never see Dave Friedman leaking what was inside the Steve Vai DLR era Marshall Head and he will probably never do it...



this is the brown sound in a box...

 

[Amp_chaser]

to add to this theory here is the Steve Vai dlr amp played by pete with some delay and reverb



it sounds very van halesque in my opinion...

that power and drive when playing chords and spitting sound seems to be the same that you hear on some VH1 and VH2 songs.

I'm sorry but no stock marshall in the market can sound like this even jcm or silver jubilee included. This tone is insane.

 

[Greazygeo]

to add to this theory here is the Steve Vai dlr amp played by pete with some delay and reverb



it sounds very van halesque in my opinion...

that power and drive when playing chords and spitting sound seems to be the same that you hear on some VH1 and VH2 songs.

I'm sorry but no stock marshall in the market can sound like this even jcm or silver jubilee included. This tone is insane.

That sounds awful. Screech city. Mine is all stock and has alot more gain than that.

 

[Amp_chaser]

That sounds awful. Screech city. Mine is all stock and has alot more gain than that.

It’s not about gain it’s about the quality and coloring of the overdrive. The spongy and powerful overdrive are unique. Van Halen 1 has more gain than a classical plexi but less than te modern amps and modern Marshall amps.

 

[SQUAREHEAD]

to add to this theory here is the Steve Vai dlr amp played by pete with some delay and reverb



it sounds very van halesque in my opinion...

that power and drive when playing chords and spitting sound seems to be the same that you hear on some VH1 and VH2 songs.

I'm sorry but no stock marshall in the market can sound like this even jcm or silver jubilee included. This tone is insane.

What do ya think of the tone Pete gets playing VH riffs thru his Suhr SL68?

 

[Greazygeo]

It’s not about gain it’s about the quality and coloring of the overdrive. The spongy and powerful overdrive are unique. Van Halen 1 has more gain than a classical plexi but less than te modern amps and modern Marshall amps.

The quality and color of that overdrive sounds terrible….screech city. Mine is a classic plexi and is stock ( cept for power supply filtering ). It has as much and more gain than the Jamies Crying vid above ( which sounds like a typical Marshall ). No screech thankfully.

 

[Racerxrated]

It's not a cascaded amp.

It was put back to stock, likely by Jose himself, before the vh1 sessions.

Literally everyone in the universe can attest to this, as well as your own ears if youre honest with yourself and want the "in room" sound.

If you want the sound of the studio? I mean good luck getting it with a cascaded amp, I wish you the best of luck.

You are more than welcome to believe your conspiracy theory if you want, but this mystery is solved man

Yep.

I was always a believer in the '68 had to be modded!' take....I mean, that's a shitload of gain on VHI. But, last year I grabbed a 72 50w lead and dug into the VH 68 spec rabbit hole. After adding the fat cap, lowering the V1B cathode resistor from 1.2k to 820 ohm the amp suddenly had WAY more gain than the stock circuit. Easily enough for VHI, II and Fair Warning.
I didn't even variac it, nor change the NFB or mid pot...it was a 2204 level of gain + a little bit more.
Played through GBs it was more than enough to cover any early VH gain wise.
After that, I'm a believer in a stock circuit with some 'off' values from the norm, which sometimes happened at Marshall.

 

[Racerxrated]

The quality and color of that overdrive sounds terrible….screech city. Mine is a classic plexi and is stock ( cept for power supply filtering ). It has as much and more gain than the Jamies Crying vid above ( which sounds like a typical Marshall ). No screech thankfully.

Absolutely, your clip reflects a great stock Marshall with a bunch of gain, that could easily do any of the early VH stuff.

 

[DanTravis62]

Absolutely, your clip reflects a great stock Marshall with a bunch of gain, that could easily do any of the early VH stuff.

I cannot imagine playing a cranked stock plexi in the room, and then playing a good Jose mod, and then thinking the Jose mod is the sound of those records

That is fucking baffling to me.

They're completely different sounds.

It must be a psycho-somatic thing after you convince yourself that it "must" be

 

[Amp_chaser]

I cannot imagine playing a cranked stock plexi in the room, and then playing a good Jose mod, and then thinking the Jose mod is the sound of those records

That is fucking baffling to me.

They're completely different sounds.

It must be a psycho-somatic thing after you convince yourself that it "must" be

I mean why does almost every tech who worked for VH during those glory days and even David Lee Roth say that Ed’s amp was modded ?

Michael Anthony bass tech
Rudy Leiren which is the first rowdie of vh
Jose Arredondo
Chris Merren
Peter Frampton
David Lee Roth

They all say the amp was modded. The sl12301 board show big signs of mods.

Finally to all those who say they can get this tone with a stock plexi let’s do a test record yourself and post it and let’s compare it to this







At 1:30 on the second video it’s live sound you can clearly hear that’s it’s no ordinary plexi

Finally on the third one you have vh1 records that didn’t make it so they are unmixed. Just listen to somebody get me a doctor and tell me a stock plexi can make this sound…

To backup this idea that it was modded even Dave Friedman admitted on tone talk with Ossie ashen (an amp builder which is a maniac about the brown sound he tests everything api pultech, etc) they don’t know what’s going on with Ed’s amp during vh1 and they think it was perhaps modded.