7/1/2023 0 Comments Eddie van halen guitar![]() During the interview, he pulls out a Sixties Teisco Del Rey with four pickups and wistfully explains how it is exactly the same as his very first guitar. Spinal Tap made a joke about things going to 11, but I’ve spent my whole life pushing things to 11.”Įven though Van Halen is constantly tinkering with his guitars, his love affair with the instrument is undeniable. I just keep pushing to see what I can get out of something. We’re putting out the limited-edition 5150 III S with that mod, for anyone who wants what I am currently using. "For the 2012–13 tour, I modified my 5150 III amp heads because my taste had changed again a little and I wanted to continue the evolution of the amp. Before that, my main guitars all had maple fingerboards, but one day I tried a guitar with an ebony board and thought that it felt pretty good. ![]() I used a Wolfgang Stealth with an ebony fingerboard on our entire 2012 tour. “There is always something new for me around the corner,” Van Halen says. That attitude resulted in a treasure trove of innovations that Van Halen either invented or inspired, including the hybrid Super Strat design (with PAF humbuckers instead of single-coil pickups), customized high-gain amps, bold graphic finishes and other developments that most of today’s guitarists take for granted. Vintage purists may want to look away, but the various scars, marks, and modifications that he’s made even on valuable vintage instruments tell the tale of a man who is constantly looking for ways to improve the tools of his trade and who refuses to accept the commonly held belief that all progress in electric guitar design stopped in 1959. As the photos on the following pages show, he has no qualms about performing rather drastic surgery on instruments to achieve the sound or performance he desires. Other guitars wouldn’t do what I needed them to do, so I made my own.” That’s why I started building my own guitars. "I’m more concerned with a guitar’s functionality, sound and playability. People might think, How could you desecrate the Mona Lisa? But I really don’t care what something looks like. “I’ve bought a lot of vintage pieces over the years, but I’ve destroyed quite a few of them. “I’m not the typical guitar collector in the least,” Van Halen says as he goes through the stacks and pulls out a few of his personal favorites. Most of those instruments are still around, but even more fascinating are the guitars that we never knew Van Halen had. Boxes marked with the EVH brand logo are stacked neatly near the entrance, and row upon row of old, battered guitar cases line the walls, concealing their mysterious and alluring contents.Īs Matt Bruck, Van Halen’s business partner and our tour guide for the day, asks if there are any guitars we’d like to see, our minds are immediately flooded with recollections of rare or obscure guitars that Van Halen has mentioned in past interviews or that we caught fleeting glimpses of in old concert photos. Technical Description: Contoured ash Strat-style body and two-piece maple neck 25½ in.The storage space at 5150 studios, where Van Halen keeps his gear, makes Guitar Center’s Hollywood flagship location look like a humble mom and pop store. One of the most recognizable guitars of all time, it spawned legions of copies from other manufacturers and inspired generations of fans to design their own instruments. The unique guitar embodies not only his groundbreaking and unorthodox playing style but also his ingenuity in design and engineering. ![]() Van Halen was continually striving to achieve the ultimate guitar for tone, playability, dependability, and functionality. It represents an effort to combine some of the most desirable elements of Gibson and Fender guitars into a single instrument that was not commercially available at the time. Aptly nicknamed “Frankenstein,” this guitar was pieced together by Eddie Van Halen from modified factory seconds and mismatched odd-lot parts, then spray-painted.
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