
How Eddie Van Halen Hacks a Guitar - karl11
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a15615/how-eddie-van-halen-hacks-a-guitar/
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acqq
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](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/](http://riaus.org.au/people/brian-may/)

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

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

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

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gtani
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.

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

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bsder
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.

~~~
arprocter
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!

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mvidal01
Tom Scholz from the band Boston has 34 patents to his name.

[https://alum.mit.edu/news/AlumniProfiles/Archive/Tom_Scholz_...](https://alum.mit.edu/news/AlumniProfiles/Archive/Tom_Scholz_-2769-2C_SM_-2770)

~~~
uptownJimmy
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.

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

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91bananas
This is pretty damn cool. I haven't heard many stories of artists actually
doing this work themselves.

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sp332
You'd probably like It Might Get Loud.
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1229360/](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.

~~~
91bananas
Only a couple minutes in, already in to it. Thanks for sharing.

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mixmastamyk
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl59RPs7PiI)

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

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jonknee
> 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!

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xacaxulu
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.

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DigitalSea
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.

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

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

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sp332
I don't know, who did this before 1985?

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happyscrappy
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.

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bwanab
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.

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vinceguidry
He probably used crappy pickups.

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twothamendment
Crappy pickups, like a Chevy?

