Van Halen 1 and 2 gear and racks in HD

  • Thread starter Thread starter Amp_chaser
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Cless357 said:
Indeed, he gets VH1 tone in spades with a stock 20w plexi, a Kramer with a JB and the Ox with the sunset sound type preset.

Amp_chaser, you should listen to the raw tracks and the studio iso tracks of VH1 on YouTube. You will ear the difference between the tone before and after studio processing. That's where the bright, gainy tone comes from. The raw tracks sound like a classic dime plexi, and what you hear on the album is just the result of what was done in the studio (compressor, reverb, etc...).
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YEP....... it's all there in the live videos.
 
May the mystery pot just be a Bias pot, as Eddie was using a variac at different settings according to the venues where he was playing ? And after having decided to stay at 90V, the pot was removed because there was no need to change the Bias as often ?
 
Opinions what do some of you think of the Seymour Duncan 78 pickup
 
Amp_chaser said:
This is my sv20 with a Jose master volume and a classic extra jose gain stage.

I think that classic ppimv are inferior to the Jose master volume when it comes to distorted sounds. I tried both the Jose master volume retains fullness and headroom at low volumes while the classic ppimv not.


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Looks like you are using Friedman’s jose design? So easy to see that 500pf snubber across the 220k resistor. That cap makes the high end weird to my ears.
 
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Lightning said:
Opinions what do some of you think of the Seymour Duncan 78 pickup
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I like it. Not more than I like the Pearly Gates or the Custom though.

A bit less than I like the Custom Custom and the JB (my favs)
 
jb44 said:
If that's you playing, sounds bad@zz. Clean, crisp with a bite.
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Btw there is a rich young guy in LA he almost got a perfect Vh tone I don’t know if his plex has only a master volume or is modded which I suspect but It could also be the the right speakers. He also is a good player which helps. His tone on some covers is dead on accurate:

 
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I just read some articles and testimonies 2 Marshall amps were used for the recording of vh1. The 68 and the other one is unknown apparently it was the wooden one. I was sure to hear 2 marshalls I believe one brown and at little bit flabby bassy and one very hot but articulated the mix of both is what gives us this sound. The 68 as the main the other as the amp distortion pedal.

Or it could have been another thing :

We can see in the pictures of early Van Halen that there was a 2203 too in the lot of amps.
Whatever they did in the first record they apparently did something described by people who were there and were under nda : They did something ridiculous. I wonder if they didn’t recorded two amps with the same input but threw the same cab. Or one cab with 2 outputs one right and one left. This wouldn’t even imply slaving or anything. Interestingly the 2203 has a master volume and the 68 has the Variac and thanks to this you can balance the decibels on both amps for the cab to blend the 2 amps.
 
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I went back to a alnico 8 magnet pickup(Ibanez Super 70 clone pickup that was made for me)and that pickup will never come out of that guitar again there’s no question in my mind(my opinion a lot of experimenting)that Edward used the stock Ibanez super 70 pickups that were in he’s Ibanez Destroyer, I took out the Mighty Mite1400 and put it on Craigslist…
 
Lightning said:
I went back to a alnico 8 magnet pickup(Ibanez Super 70 clone pickup that was made for me)and that pickup will never come out of that guitar again
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Amp_chaser said:
Whatever they did in the first record they apparently did something described by people who were there and were under nda : They did something ridiculous.
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Do you really think people were under an NDA at the time about his amp? Bunch of young punks that had been passed on by most everyone until Templeman came along, recording their debut, I highly doubt anyone was thinking NDA. I doubt a bunch guys drinking and recording even knew that existed then. C'mon.
 
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Up wayy too late last night after seeing a YT clip. I made a comment about the bandmaster last night and someone said it was slaved into the marshall, (not saying it wasn't) but for the amount of cascaded gain heard on the first album I imagine what may have inspired Jose was the way Ed used the bandmaster.

Don't jump ahead and say it was only slaved into the Marshall, like I said it may have been but the way the bandmaster was configured could have been analyzed by Jose and developed into the Marshall and optimized for slaving.

The bandmaster was not slaved when Ed played at home. I want a technical explanation of why the amp should have blown and Bandmaster to be the focus alone the way it was used. It could be what Jose himself used to look forward to his work on his Marshall mods.

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Van Halen stories #22 Kurt James stories "Pasadena nights"

NEED to watch this RT dogs.
 
Amp_chaser said:
We cannot be sure i know that Chris Gill apparently investigated he believes it's a 63 model but i believe you could be right too. With eddie almost everything is possible... He said so many bullshit too avoid getting copied.
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He was very protective, some reason why he started doing it, in late 77 Ed was friends with a local LA bands guitarist, he plays him the new You Really Got Me from the first album which is not released yet.

very soon afterwards EVH gets a call his buddy is in the studio, doing what exactly recording You Really Got Me to get it out as a single before VHs album has hit the racks

He learned not to trust everyone who acts like a friend.

I'm sure that happened to him alot in his career.

The other thing he became instantly massively popular with other guitar players and the world, shit 99.9% of us can only imagine.

For a long stretch EVH was almost untouchable to us mere mortals.

I get why he would BS about turning farts into fairydust while playing a tuba.
 
I just pulled out the alnico 8 magnet pickup I had in my guitar I said I would never take it out and I did I put in a Seymour Duncan 59 bridge(I like the brightness/edge) and that pickup takes the cake for the early Van Halen 1 sound for sure I like it better then the alnico 8 magnet pickup and the Seymour Duncan 78.I remember Edward saying he didn’t like the sound on Van Halen 1 because it was to bright I believe that after he recorded Van Halen 1 that when Seymour did the rewind for Eddie to make the pickup Less bright and warmer that’s where the alnico 2 magnet comes in vs a alnico 5 which would be in Eddie 1961 paf pickup he took out of his 1961 es335.
 
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