Did Dave Friedman find the josé mods behind Van Halen 1 ?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Amp_chaser
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Oh cool, this again (for like the 6895th time this last month)

I can't wait to hear the same tired ass old arguments about the same tired ass tone for the 6 trillionth time, this should be amazing and totally awesome and cool and fun
 
At this point discussing what type of headset mic Sammy Hagar used during his solo years would be more interesting


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Taka was relentless. He and I used to seek out the same amps on the used market in LA in the 90's and literally every time a Jose or a 100b came up, it was either he or I who was on it first. I never pulled a trigger on a Jose because even if I gt to it before Taka, they did not sound that great and were notoriously noisy, at least the couple I played.. 100b was another story, I bought every one I could get my hands on.. fun times. Glad to hear Taka is doing well and still has the passion. My tone chasing days are over. No amp is that special imo. especially nowday when there are so many options and varieties of the same basic sound.
 
Jdub said:
Taka was relentless. He and I used to seek out the same amps on the used market in LA in the 90's and literally every time a Jose or a 100b came up, it was either he or I who was on it first. I never pulled a trigger on a Jose because even if I gt to it before Taka, they did not sound that great and were notoriously noisy, at least the couple I played.. 100b was another story, I bought every one I could get my hands on.. fun times. Glad to hear Taka is doing well and still has the passion. My tone chasing days are over. No amp is that special imo. especially nowday when there are so many options and varieties of the same basic sound.
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Yeah i believe he had almost 30 josé modded amps in his life according to his blog.
 
Amp_chaser said:
i challenge you to get those 2 tones reproduced without eq and mixing after recording :





there is a reason why milions of guitar players are still chasing the brown sound... because with a stock plexi marsall it's almost impossible. I even built a 68 plexi on daves values taken from ed's plexi and it doesn't do it even the suhr sl68 lacks distortion and sustain compared to the original thing. What many don't know is that before soldano, friedman and suhr saw the amp it was probably brought back to stock with the mods removed. Mike soldano who is the first to have seen it only saw it in 1990 which means around 12 years after the first album.

the amp has only 3 tubes and an extra gain stage. Perhaps a fet/transistor used as an extra triode, It also has an extra power cable ?
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Literally take your pick of any Pete Thorn video. Timestamped 2:06
 
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Amp_chaser said:
Germino plexis if you ever saw their guts are not exactly stock. The filtering is very low and there are some subtle tricks done to them. I'm the one isn't a good example of this find me a germino playing running with the devil which has the same amount of sustain ed's got. The 2 stress test for van halen 1 brown sound are running with the devil and feel your love tonight those are the most difficult to emulate.
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Totally Stock 67/68 specs....Please point out the subtle tricks.....filtering does not make or break a good superlead or plexi. Plenty of killer superlead with 50/50uf filtering.
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I’m not going and looking for the soldano interview I’ve posted a million times that everyone blows off where he said Eddie gave him “the” Marshall used on the early Van Halen records and how excited he was to see the mods and it was the stockest plexi ever, I’m sure he’s lying and making it up lol
 
harddriver said:
Totally Stock 67/68 specs....Please point out the subtle tricks.....filtering does not make or break a good superlead or plexi. Plenty of killer superlead with 50/50uf filtering.
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I saw many germino lead using one electrolitic non double on the preamp on this one it's not the case. The filtering is quite low on those amps. Plus the ppimv on the top one is non stock. A ppimv can alter the sound quite a lot. It's not stock. Marshall never used any ppimv except the later master volumes on jcm amps and later models. Many brown sound amps use ppimv mods to get their tone.
 
RaceU4her said:
I’m not going and looking for the soldano interview I’ve posted a million times that everyone blows off where he said Eddie gave him “the” Marshall used on the early Van Halen records and how excited he was to see the mods and it was the stockest plexi ever, I’m sure he’s lying and making it up lol
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yeah he saw it in 1990 but between 1978 and 1990 there are 12 years. The amp was brought back to stock. Who did it and why i don't know. Another proof is those original pictures :

eddie had the fat cap mod plus every coupling capacitor is non stock and the cherry dye stock from marshall is missing all along the preamp board. Just take a look :

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lastly there this is the only picture were you can see eddie playing a josé modded amp in the very early days :
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josé used to put 2 knobs in the first two inputs a leave the other inputs for different levels of gain.
 
Amp_chaser said:
yeah he saw it in 1990 but between 1978 and 1990 there are 12 years. The amp was brought back to stock. Who did it and why i don't know. Another proof is those original pictures :

eddie had the fat cap mod plus every coupling capacitor is non stock and the cherry dye stock from marshall is missing all along the preamp board. Just take a look :

View attachment 379553View attachment 379556

lastly there this is the only picture were you can see eddie playing a josé modded amp in the very early days :
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josé used to put 2 knobs in the first two inputs a leave the other inputs for different levels of gain.
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Right, and I’m sure Mike wouldn’t be able to tell if someone had been in there before, and I’m sure Eddie would never tell Mike such a thing as it was returned to stock cause he probably thought he was dumb or some shit
 
Amp_chaser said:
Germino plexis if you ever saw their guts are not exactly stock. The filtering is very low and there are some subtle tricks done to them. I'm the one isn't a good example of this find me a germino playing running with the devil which has the same amount of sustain ed's got. The 2 stress test for van halen 1 brown sound are running with the devil and feel your love tonight those are the most difficult to emulate.
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I've always thought that I'm The One had some of the highest gain tone on VH1. It definitely sounds like it's boosted to me at least. RWTD seems like it could get pulled off by a stock plexi albeit with some out of spec components.
 
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