How Eddie Van Halen Hacks a Guitar | Hacker News Reader

How Eddie Van Halen Hacks a Guitar

popularmechanics.com

145 pointskarl1146 comments

And the Queen's bass guitarist John Deacon designed and made his own electric guitar amplifier, already having a college degree in electronics before joining the Queen:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacy_Amp

"It was used along with Brian May's Red Special electric guitar and treble-booster to produce sounds reminiscent of various orchestral instruments, such as violin, cello, trombone, clarinet, or even vocals, starting from the songs "Procession" and "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke" from the 1974 album ‘’Queen II’’"

And interestingly, the lead guitarist of the Queen, Brian May "graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons) in both Physics and Mathematics and ARCS with Upper Second-Class Honours. His Ph.D studies, looking at reflected light from interplanetary dust and the velocity of dust in the plane of the Solar System, were interrupted by the success of Queen."

http://riaus.org.au/people/brian-may/

The Red Special of May is also made by himself and his father.

Brian May made his red guitar out of an oak tree which is an unusual wood for a guitar.

He also wound his own pickups.

Brian May has since finished his PhD[1]. He actually seems pretty serious about astrophysics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_May#Astrophysics

He was also the chancellor of my university in Liverpool. A vast improvement on his predecessor.

Just "Queen", not "the Queen".

good article, esp sticking his finger in a power cap (whatever stopped the current from going thru his heart, saved his life), and how his father adapted after losing a finger and some teeth, which for a reed player, is pretty bad.

There's many more stories in guitar magazines about how he hacked and ruined lots of guitars (tl;dr don't remove too much wood close to the bridge), and how Randy Rhoads and he would be checking each other out kind of warily, and the hundreds of prototype guitars that were made before he started selling the wolfgang guitars under the EVH label. The first time he met Les Paul, they pulled out their picks to jam and they both had sandpaper glued to them

His guitars are basswood (which is only used in the cheapest and most expensive guitars, oddly enough) but somebody substituted ash or alder and EVH noticed it instantly. Unfortunately most of those stories aren't available unless you subscribe to said magazines.

Basswood is very light. Anyone would notice a change to ash or alder.

Good practice when literally 'poking around' in an amp is to use a chopstick

Or discharging the filter caps using something other than your hand...

That would also be an option!

I know some amps supposedly discharge if you hit the standby and power switches at the same time, but I wouldn't like to trust that

I've heard you should take a crappy screwdriver, ground one part of the shaft and then touch the capacitor with the head. Something like that.

I have a (crappy) screwdriver with some bite marks on it from doing that to come 1000V caps in an old panasonic stereo amp. It can work. It's not a good idea, IMO.

What I believe is safe enough for me to do... but not so safe that I'd recommend anyone else do it... is to measure the voltage between the high voltage supply and the ground in the amp, and see what you'll be getting if you touch it. If it is more than a volt or so, then connect a 10K resistor between the HV and the ground.

That said, if you don't understand why you should do that (or why taking life and death electronics advice from strangers in a comment thread is a bad idea), then you might want to just not get around in there, because you can lose fingers or even die if you don't know what you're doing.

:D Go circuit bend a speak and spell or something, and leave tube amps to folks who want to know more whys before touching stuff. :D

don't use a korean one!

ONLY PLASTIC ONES!

Wood can be conductive depending upon its water content.

Even better, don't poke around in an amp unless you have at least a basic knowledge of electronics. The voltages in there are in the range of 500V, and electricity doesn't respond like you're used to at that level (DC switches, for example, need to be much bigger to resist the arcing at those voltages).

And, while its cool to see someone hack, the amount of damage EVH did to perfectly good guitars (some of them beyond that) is legendary. Learning even a little about what you are hacking goes a long way.

Interesting WRT water content; but now you mention it, I remember as a kid touching blades of grass on an electric fence and still feeling a shock.

My inside-an-amp tinkering only goes as far as pulling 2 of the el84s from a Classic 50 to half the output. It was still stupidly loud for home use though!

Tom Scholz from the band Boston has 34 patents to his name.

https://alum.mit.edu/news/AlumniProfiles/Archive/Tom_Scholz_...

Scholz is one of the most amazing people ever involved in rock music, in any capacity. He's just a brilliant dude. The stories of how he rewired cast-off movie theater amps, modified old-ish multi-track tape machines, and recorded Boston's first album in his basement, in his spare time, while working as an engineer for Kodak in their "instant video camera" department, well it's pretty amazing.

I've always liked Eddie and his brother. This clip has always amazed me on so many levels. Whenever I heard something negative about the guy, the more I looked into the rumor; Eddie did nothing wrong. He is a talented guy who grew up with a strong work ethic, and came from a family that valued a handshake over a contract! The more I have read about the guy, the more respect I have for him as a person. I do cringe when I see the amount of smoking that went on at the time, but it was a different era. I think we all thought we were going to die young, so let the party begin?

(https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A2I0a7EwWa8)

This is pretty damn cool. I haven't heard many stories of artists actually doing this work themselves.

One of my favorite things along these lines is this 1951 video of Les Paul explaining how he uses multitrack recording to produce his records. The first part of the video is great, mocking the idea of some sort of computer that generates the music itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rITJyZVTfy4

It's pretty unbelievable to think that this was almost considered voodoo at the time, yet now ANY recording is done in this way. Thanks for the link. Very cool as well.

It is indeed pretty cool, but you probably have lots of these stories.

Les Paul is probably one of the more famous stories.

Most really good music technology innovations are from musicians themselves.

EHV is a world-class player, but the only reason we're reading this kind of story is because of that virtuosity-- lots of folks mess around with their instruments like he was doing, though most aren't as dangerously bad at it.

The stories you hear about folks making new music stuff are usually because the folks are good at making stuff, so it seems more like engineers/tinkerers who happen to play music, when that description might be flipped if we looked at how folks think of themselves.

You'd probably like It Might Get Loud. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1229360/ It's a documentary of (and conversation among) the Edge, Jimmy Page, and Jack White. They show some of their methods for getting the sound they want from their instruments.

Only a couple minutes in, already in to it. Thanks for sharing.

Sonic Youth were also known for modifying their guitars to get different sounds. They said they couldn't afford lots of equipment when they started.

Brian May of Queen built his guitar with his father while he was a teenager and used it for most of his career:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Special

This is cool for an entirely different reason for me too. I've seen this cover band Queen Nation before that is shockingly good. They dress like Queen, act like them, and sound really good whilst doing it. I've often wondered what the guitar player was playing, it was unlike anything I've seen before. http://www.noozhawk.com/images/uploads/081413-QueenNation-63...

I appreciate that he is using a left handed clone as yet another tribute to the original.

The bass player from Rage Against The Machine is known for winding his own pickups. There's actually a substantial DIY guitar community out there; its awesome. I've been digging into guitar pedals building myself.

You can get kits like here: http://buildyourownclone.com/

Then you can just mix and match parts and build according to instructions to make your own unique sound. Very cool and fun.

Local H has always been a duo and so Scott Lucas has had some really cool setups in the past. At one point, he had replaced the two strings on his guitar with two strings of a bass and then ran different sets of pickups to different amps so that he could effectively play both traditional bass style parts and guitar parts at the same time.

Heres a video of him demoing his older setup: http://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/video-local-hs-scott-...

I saw them a few weeks ago and he no longer uses the same setup, but I've always thought it was inventive.

I love the idea of the need shaping the tool. For similar reasons, I designed a 30-inch scale guitar that could handle the E and A strings from a piccolo bass, and had my luthier make it. So it's tuned like a guitar but with the low strings at bass register. Had to have two tension rods to handle the difference in tension. Works well for finger-picking.

I'm not a virtuoso, but was inspired by some others trying to get more range, especially Charlie Hunter (whose fanned frets are nuts), various metal guys, and the Chapman Stick.

That sounds like a cool instrument, would be interested in hearing what it sounds like, do you have any clips of you playing it?

I like the idea of a guitar that can easily reach lower registers. Whilst 7-string (and in Charlie Hunter's case, 8-string) guitars are possibly more versatile, I'm quite partial to baritone guitars. This sounds beautiful to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_06O8XnJQo

Talking of unconventional instruments, you may be interested in hearing these microtonal guitars, I think the second one in particular sounds pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRsSjh5TTqI

Interesting, a month ago or so I watched this interview at the Smithsonian where he talks about a lot of the same subjects:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl59RPs7PiI

Apparently one of his iconic guitars was donated to the museum.

> I'm poking around, and all of a sudden I touch this huge blue thing and my God, it was like being punched in the chest by Mike Tyson. My whole body flexed stiff, and it must have thrown me five feet. I'd touched a capacitor. I didn't know they held voltage.

Yikes!

Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins switched from EL-34's to Soviet KT-88 tubes in his Marshall giving him that super creamy distortion used in Siamese Dream. I always appreciate stories of hacker culture in music.

Eddie Van Halen has always been an inspiration for me musically, arguably one of the greatest guitarists to ever live. Us modern guitarists don't realise how good we have it, we are living in a golden era of music technology.

I think for me one of the most influential and original ground-breaking guitarists would have to be Link Wray who was obsessed with fuzz/distortion and quite famously on his hit Rumble achieved distortion by puncturing his speaker with pencils to make it crackle. It is debatable who invented distortion, Wray was a pretty experimental guitarist.

Scroll to the bottom for the most awesome patent illustration of all time.

Without the facial expression, this patent would clearly be prior art.

I don't know, who did this before 1985?

Using the variac was cool. I stumbled on something similar by accident. The keyboard power cable would get unplugged sometimes when jamming in our tight quarters. When that happened it would revert to battery power and when the batteries were almost dead it would have a great distorted sound(it was plugged in to an amp) so we put a pot between the converter and the keyboard to dial in that crazy sound.

His explanations seemed like current thinking post dated to fit the story. For example, he explains he modified his guitar by adding a pickup because he couldn't afford a distortion pedal - a good pickup can easily cost as much as a distortion pedal. Hey, I'm all for modding, but just be realistic that you're doing it for the fun of it.

He probably used crappy pickups.

Crappy pickups, like a Chevy?

There weren't many options for aftermarket pickups in the 1970s. He was almost certainly installing secondhand pickups extracted from broken guitars. Those would have been significantly cheaper than a distortion pedal, especially considering that most amps and pedals were still hand-wired.

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