The words of EVH: "I used to work at a music store delivering pianos and organs and one day a Marshall amp comes in and I’d only seen pictures of these, only Eric Clapton and God’s play these! I said I gotta have that amp, and so I worked all summer to buy that amp and we were already too loud as it was and now I had a 100-watt Marshall! It was so dam loud I did everything from facing it backwards to facing it down to the floor … I was just too damn loud! So I saw an ad in the paper for another Marshall amp and thought “maybe this one will be different”, well it certainly was cuz when it showed up I plugged it in and it didn’t work … but, I left it on and what I didn’t realize was this thing was from England and it was 220-volt, and I plugged it in and I didn’t look at the back and see it was set on 220; it took a long time for it to warm up at half voltage, and when I picked up my guitar I was like “it sounds incredible!” … but incredibly quiet. It dawned on me “I could control the volume of the amp with the voltage, so I proceeded to hook it onto the light dimmer of the house, and blew it out and so on. So finally I went to this place called Dial Radio and asked “do you have any kind of like an industrial variable voltage transformer that I can use like a light dimmer” and he said “yea I got this thing called a Variac”, I said “ok cool”, and I take it home and plug the amp into it and I’d lower the voltage from like 110 slowly down to 100 and ... the lowest I ever went was like 60. Depending on the room we were playing I’d set it anywhere between 60 and 100 because the only way the amp sounded good was with everything all the way up, so that became my volume knob. If we were playing little bars I’d set it to like 60 volts; somewhere a little bit bigger I’d crank it to 80 and for recording the sweet spot seemed to be 89-volts."
@@matthewguarna2975 Sure he did. The British Marshall was unusable because 110V or so won't power a 220 British Marshall very well. The amp he used the Variac with was the USA 100W which Ed said was too loud.
I had Heard EVH used to burn up Marshalls by ni-amping them also,that they would sound awesome up to the point where they would melt down. Don't know how true this was
“That’s funny, because people took that whole ‘brown sound’ thing totally out of context,” he said. “I was never talking about my guitar tone. I was talking about Alex’s snare drum. I’ve always thought Alex’s snare drum sounds like he’s beating on a log. It’s very organic. So it wasn’t my brown sound. It was Alex’s.” Klosterman then asked how the confusion originally occurred. “It happened years ago. People would ask me about his drumming, and the only way I could explain it was that it had a very brown sound,” Van Halen noted. “I’m glad you brought this up, actually, so people can finally understand what I was talking about.”
I'm not saying that the quote (from an interview) is ACCURATE... but it's something that I had heard about and there are confirmations of it - be it true or not.
@@hsfinlayson - Yeah, I read a similar thing in an interview a while ago, but with Eddie saying in the end that he wanted to match Alex' sound with his guitar, that he too wanted a 'brown sound'.
@@mightyV444 Aaahhh... so then the moniker would still "fit" the legend if he said that *HE* was trying to achieve a similar "Brown Sound"... so both are true... it WAS about Alex's drum sound... AND about Eddie's (never-ending) tone-quest. Thanks.
@@hsfinlayson - I was confused when Rick was referring to Alex' snare sound as the 'brown sound', in the sound-matching video he'd made a while ago, as I'd always only known Eddie's sound termed that way; That's when I did some online research and came across the interview I mentioned before :-)
To ME, the secret to Eddie's tone was lack of money ! So he had to invent ways of doing things from the variac to the Frankenstrat. He was very curious and his insticts were always right. Sometimes NOT having money is the mother of invention.
The secret to Eddie's tone, was Eddie! :) I also bet he made a fair amount of mistakes in trying new stuff. But he was smart enough to know when he probably had something useful.
Reminds me when Steve Vai said that he met with Eddie at his house and gave him his Ibanez to try it. Eddie started to play and it sounded like Eddie not Steve Vai.
Now THAT I can believe !!! Lemmy would still sound pretty much Lemmy with a Fender Bass and a 'normal' bass amp Hendrix like Hendrix etc.. It's fun to try these tone hacks - but its pretty subtle compared to what YOU wanna say with YOUR instrument!
The RG was the guitar EVH was trying to create in the first place. Only the RG had 3 functioning pickups and a WAY better neck on it. Nothing touches a nice RG.
I don't see the fire extinguisher in the picture! I think Dave Friedman said the amp re-biased to run properly under the lower voltage. There's part 2, where the amp tech comes in and does that, and you can leave Rhett at home because you captured the DI to reamp it, right? ;) Great job on the overall tone in general.
I definitely heard the difference in “runnin with the devil” when it hit 89. I have no idea why I enjoy these tech videos...I don’t play, so most of it goes over my head, but somehow I like it anyway 🤔
@@RhettShull - I just answered my own question... I instantly recognized that sound and was hearing Angel, but not as I remember it... but I can't remember much anymore. I would love to hear you play more of that, Rhett. It truly is such a sweet, sweet ballad.
Thank you for just being someone else who knew, I’ve always loved the song and feel it’s undervalued. I’ve never heard anyone use it as a tone/voltage test😂
Ed was referring to AL's snare drum tone when he first spoke of this "Brown sound" He described it as a warm, woody tone like a really old big red wood tree type of thing. For me the "Brown sound" is when i hear anything on VH II guitar tone wise. That record is pure Brown sound!
It's the only album where he played his Marshall into the cabinet with no doohickies attached to it. Other than that album, he used a special "load box" to bring the speaker output down to line level and he cascaded it into another Marshall, then to the cab. This was especially evident on Fair Warning. No way can you get a late 60's plexi to grind like that with a variac alone.
As a guitar player for some 35 years .... i can't hear the difference with any of this. The Marshall sounded like a Marshall, and the Fender like a fender, i could hear absolutely no difference in sound, at all. but that's just me :)
I assume this might be something you'd hear better in person. Really nice speakers probably help too. I agree with you, but at the end of the day even the most obvious differences to guitarists are not going to be noticeable to regular people.
89v sounds quite a bit more saturated and compressed to my ears. Like the headroom on the power section was reduced. It's nice though because it doesn't really change the character of the amp, like a very clean boost in to the power section. Definitely noticeable with headphones in the back to back test.
As An electrical engineer having designed many amplifiers i could hear many things go "wrong" e.g. not as designed with the internal power of the amps and the amplifier reacting to that. For a hifi amplifier you do nog want that but here it becomes a sound. Nevertheless the ampliers are siill nest their normale operatitng range so it's true their fundamtal sound remains
I could only hear the difference between 120 and 88, slightly less attack and more “swirly” in the remainder of the chord. I once heard that Ed said the “Brown” part of the sound was how he got the guitar to sound like the “word” brown, with a growl as the note faded. Ive looked all over for that clip, wish I could find it.
I could hear differences albeit, slight. I didn't listen to the core guitar sound, I sought to find if clarity, decay, texture, volume, feel etc would be affected. 120V Marshall sounds more wild and loud compared to 89V Marshall, which is more clearer and decays faster, for example
Well, maybe that is the reason , because 40 years of loud guitar amps will blow your ears! Just kidding, man...I also heard minimal difference......Wait ...been playing exactly 40 years too (born in 1966), hmmm..nevermind...
@@docdeens4030 It is largely "heard" in the feel (if that makes any sense). I can definitely hear a graduated change as he cranks it on down. But please, there is sooooo much going on to get that "authentic first album sound" that was specific to the year 1978 and the studio, production, and moment in time. It would also help a lot to be Eddie Van Halen - that's always the last missing ingredient that is often overlooked. =)
Yeah, my electronics teacher in college, back in 1971, liked to use the word "negligible" a lot. That's the first word that came into my mind while watching this video. I can imagine a smaller envelope if we were able to see the waveform on a good oscilloscope, but otherwise, a negligible difference as a result of voltage changes. I will say this, I'm pretty impressed with Rick's equipment
I could hear a difference, but I wouldn't call it night and day. Particularly if it was live sound you were working with. The audience wouldn't notice.
Couldn't hear any difference but then I was listening with my crapped laptop speakers. Might hook it up to my floor standing HiFi speakers and Denon amp....
I looked and absolutely couldn't find the original on YT (or even Google). Just a lot of low skill covers posing as Hendrix. Sad. I'd highly recommend South Saturn Delta, Electric Ladyland, Axis Bold as Love and Band of Gypsies (live album) to any young people who aren't yet "Experienced"
I'm living for all the videos people are making about Eddie at the moment. It's so great to see he had the same impact on other people as he had on me. He made us all brothers in that way.
Eddie is by far the most influential guitarist of ALL TIME and that includes Hendrix. It has very little to do with his amazing tapping techniques either . Eddie was always on a completely different level than everybody else especially his mind boggling rhythm playing . Nobody to this day has come even remotely close to mastering rhythm like Eddie has, his flow and effortless control is truly insane.
First VH album I bought when I moved to London from Ireland back in 1983 The shopping centre where I bought it (The Elephant & Castle) closed for the last time a few days before Eddie died ...so I'm having a bit of an existential crisis at the moment
All the EVH purist will come out of the wood works and I'm one of them ;) So you almost had it right. 89 on the variac but its well documented that Ed used the bright input only, not jumped and every knob was on 10. Then from the board, he adjusted the channels 3 band EQ for each mic with a slight dip in the mids. Also his Echoplex that was in front of his amp gave him a slight boost to the front end. Dunlop EP101 Echoplex preamp simulates this.
Another recording trick he used was to triplicate his tracks - one was used to cut everything but bass, another everything but mids, and the last everything but highs. Sub them together, and adjust accordingly. I've tried it, and the harmonics really jump out, especially on muted chords.
Man this channel is just amazing. I started off on the wrong video, and honestly would love to spend 30 minutes with Rick and just talk about drum n' bass sound design and engineering, but with every single video I realize this guy is a window to real music business, but without the money. God's work.
Yeah! My backgrounds kinda indusltrial noise punk - so though i design some quite funky electronics I sure dont have melody dripping thru my veins - and it's not so much this dude knows about engineering (which he surely does) but this guy knows about SONGS !
Eddie went on to say “the brown sound” was not even his thing, his tone was his tone but that the “brown sound” was actually a drum sound that Alex was after...
I remember a Guitar Player story about Eddie from around 1981 and Eddie said he was after the Brown sound and he used a Variac to turn it up all the way and he would watch the tubes melt. He may have been doing some misinformation there. I wonder how many guitar players blew up there amps trying to get that Brown sound.
Agreed. Edward’s playing changed, I believe, when those Earnie Balls, PV Wolfs and EVH’s got in his hands. They’re so engineered for ease of playing. The earlier guitars he used I assume required more work to play where you here the honest effort a lil more. Same concept SRV adopted with his guitars that required hard work to play.
Totally agree that Ed would sound Amazing! However, he wouldn't have had the 'brown sound'... Above and beyond the virtuosity of Ed's playing, I'm *strongly* of the view that his amp sound had just as much, if not way more bearing on their success.. The rock-record-buying public then cast it's vote for the mighty Van Halen. A fantastic thing! Especially in the midst of a disco/punk torn music industry that plagued' '78.. I remember thinking "Let the disco whores and punk weenies compete with this!! VH gave us rockers a fighting chance for the future once again..
The thing you missed about using the variac with the plexi, per Dave Friedman - the voltage is lowered, but EVH had his tubes biased so hot they would have popped at 120v in an instant. I feel like this is probably the most important thing in making that amp sound so on fire all the time
Charlie Bryant I recorded a record at Sound City studios, and the engineer had taken a Pro Junior and put a bass speaker in it. It was the best sounding rock bass tone I’ve ever gotten. He wouldn’t tell me what else he had done to it, but I suspect he had swapped and rebiased the tubes. Point being; you can do some great stuff with those little fenders :)
Absolutely true. Lower primary voltage = lower plate voltage = power supply sag. But the power tubes have to be rebiased hotter to get “the sound”. Now whether or not you want to over bias them is up to you, Eddie would buy Sylvania 6CA7s by the case!
Can't you see me sitting here I've got my back against the porcelain latrine A never-ending stream Looks like it's starting to steam Look at this dump (dump!) Look at this dump
I still think 95% of Eddie's sound was in his hands.. Steve Vai said when Ed played through his gear it sounded like Eddie..Ted Nugent played through Ed's gear one time and he said it just sounded like him playing someone else's rig. He was surprised he thought Ed's sound came from his gear.
Holds true for almost all instruments and studio gear. A great player sound great no matter what they're playing, and a great performance sounds great no matter what gear it's passing through, providing the gear isn't total crap. And of course the opposite is also true. Some people put so much money and effort into trying to bottle the lightning of their heroes via hardware, but the primary ingredient will always be missing: their hero.
Yup, i agree. The guys that do the best with the tone chasing have the fingers for it. I went down the VH gear rabbit hole and had fun doing it, but it sure never made me sound like VH.
John Mayer opened Crossroads DVD 2004 stating of all the player one the tour know that a guitar is a 6 string instrument and it all in how you touch it!
There is another video of Ed playing backstage on a cheap single coil strat, a kids guitar. Still sounds like Eddie, so it is eddie and not the equipment, for the most part, obviously.
One thing that should be mentioned Rick is that EVH, while he would variac his voltage to 89 he would also have his tubes rebiased back to where they should be. When I'm playing live I also tend to rebias my tubes based on wall voltage to get optimal sound. Mind you I am using Two-Rock amps which make biasing quite simple along with a blackface super that i had bias test points added so that can be biased on the fly as well.
Just between us geeks, in 1982 my best friend a guitar player and holder of a 1st class radio-telephone engineer license made a voltage regulator that he placed between a tube preamp that he also constructed and a Fender Twin. I had the Telecaster and he was experimenting. The amp was head/cab . We were trying to find the Tom Sholz tone and smoked the 2 JBL speakers. Thank you for the memory. You both rock!🎸🔥
To get it even closer; Ed's Plexiglas was a transitional 12xxx series with lower value filtering caps of the earlier Marshall super leads. . Replace the 32x32's with 16x16's UF caps and the amp gets even sweeter and more loose at 90 volts. You guys nailed it, the EVH sound revolves around the sag and spongy character that responds to the player the harder you dig into it. The amp is its own instrument. Awesome stuff!
Using a variac is very important in so many electronic applications. Always check the output of the variac with a Fluke DVM. Just because the variac dial says 115 VAC doesn't guarantee that is the VAC output. I always check output VAC at all the companies I have worked at. When you need to calibrate sensitive electronic devices, having the correct voltages are crucial. I have seen 95 VAC up to 128 VAC all over the USA. In Florida the VAC power is always going up and down do to lightning storms knocking out transformers and power lines. Also check the Hertz.. Should be running at 60 Hz.. I have seen 48 Hz to 64 Hz...!!! YIKES
If the frequency varies that much, there is something SERIOUSLY wrong with the power distribution system in your area. I’m in the uk and voltage can vary +10%/-6% Frequency should only vary 1hz either side of 50Hz over here. If frequency drops then BAD things happen!!
Your best bet is to measure the heater voltage. Most amps I’ve messed with sound better when it’s right at 6.3v. You’re gonna get the most tube life too. I built a high power buck converter out of a 12A filament transformer to run my Tweed/Brown/Black amps on. It’s a bit safer than a VariAC because it’s got two safe settings, not a wide range of severe under and over voltage.
A Variac. is a Variable transformer I am an Engineer come on guys, that was the only way he could use the English made Marshall head or amp he just bought which is rated at @240Volts, and he had to plug it in to !20Volts U.S.
@@eroldcroft3045 the amp Eddie got was set to 240. Most of those amps have the switch on the back. So it starved the plates of the power tubes. But it didnt work reliably, so Eddie figured he could set the voltage properly for US and still dip the voltage with a stage light dimmer which is a variac. Same theory.
Eddie received is Marshall head from the U.K and did know that the head was setup on the 240 switch and when he tried it he thought that it was defective because the volume was very low, but the sound he had was the sound he was looking for so he then thought of that idea to use the variac by asking an electrician.
@@sundogaudio851 To not blow a tube during the concerts, for what i remember, the amp tech was used to change all the power tubes to Eddie amps and this was for every single show.
Them Tubes will act funny and there is more than putting frosting on the cake, so they are a number of other factors that makes this not as cut and dry
On the 1st album his tone is a doctored up mirage. In the studio, it doesn't even sound like that. Just a old Marshall dimed. Go to the Sunset Sound YT page and listen for yourself.
@@dustinevans2895 The original Thumbnail only had a Rick photo and the "The Brown Sound" as title.... and I was like "wait, what?" Then they started talking about voltages, I swear to God I sincerely thought they were gonna say something like " do not plug 220 V amps on 117 outlets or you will crap your pants" or something 😂
I’m guessing Eddie’s Humbucker in his Franken strat would’ve been hotter than a typical Les Paul bridge pickup. That extra push would take it further into the brown zone.
@@OxaudioPhilly Correct but he's also right b/c EVH's PAF was overwound by Seymour Duncan so likely a touch hotter than stock. The S-type scale and bolt-on construction (arguably) adds to a punchier and brighter tone. At any rate this is so darn close with the LP.
I've read that you should re-bias after lowering the voltage. That might also effect the tone if the tubes are running at the correct bias at each voltage.
Dave Friedman stated that when the wall voltage was lowered,the bias current to the output tubes was increased on Eddie's Marshall...As you turn down the wall voltage via the variac it can also thin out the overall tone.
Changing the line voltage downward does two things: 1) It runs a lower voltage on the heaters saving the life of the tube, but that is not where the greatest savings are. 2) It lowers the voltage at the plate...which does two things a) reduces the total power across the tube, making the largest savings in life, and b) reduces the sensitivity and gain of the tube, generating a less responsive tube, thus giving it the classical "mellow" sound you cannot get from transistor devices. Transistors simply don't have the inconsistent behaviours at various voltages. Transistors are more like switches, full on or full off until they reach their cutoff point so they don't "brown out" like a tube will. Tubes are far more flexible and tolerant of voltage changes. Transistors just don't care as long as it's enough voltage to keep working.
Fricking Cool UA-cams experment with EVH Brown Sound Theory! All you boys were missing were a white lab coat, cig in guitar and some pounder beers laying all over studio! Nice JOB! SO COOL THAT LES AND EDDIE WERE SOUND/GUITAR MAD SCIENTESTS BEYOND THE TIMES! RIP BOYS!!!!
I am not a musician, but I can't stop looking at your videos and watching your explanations and techniques. You are a master at your craft and make music even more enjoyable, showing all the technique and hard work that goes into it. I love your channel and videos.
Turns out what the "secret" was not the variac alone. Ed, according to Jose Arrendando, used a sort of "load box" to bring the speaker output all the way down to 64ish ohms so it basically became a preamp at line level to send into whatever he wanted, be it a power amp or another Marshall. This allowed him a variety of different tone possibilities. Every early VH album had a different sound with the same head but different amp he was sending it into. So when we say "Brown Sound" or we're trying to condense his early tones into one thing, it really can't be done. You'd have to focus on a particular album.
I read in an interview with Ed that David Lee Roth told Ed to tell folks that he was turning up ( increasing the voltage ) of the Variac instead of what he was really doing which was turning it down. This was to throw people of his trail. However, in hindsight he was giving you a hint by calling it his "brown sound". Like a "brown out" when the voltage drops.
@@ornleifs - Yes, I believe the differences must've been more obvious when being in that room; I didn't hear any difference between the 'Running With The Devil' takes at all, despite using good headphones.
Dear Rick, I swear there's very little to no audible difference in any of the comparisons. Please make a follow up vid, where you include images of the soundwaves of each recording, also a proper blind test. Cheers
There's a pretty clear difference if you are using quality studio headphones in terms of the attack and warmth/roundness of the sound. Please don't listen on laptop or iPhone speakers and then critique
get your hearing checked,I played drums for 20 years and still heard a difference. the fender was super obvious,but the Park was incredibly obvious. or get new monitors,ect . I was listening on a crap set of tascam th-02 headphones,heard all differences plain as day. helps if you close your eyes whenswitching comparisons. also, im not at all trying to be a d!^&,Im just shocked theres ppl with worst hearing than me, im pretty deaf,but always had an ear for indifference,and suble stuff. its why I love recording so much. anyways I do appoligize if I was harsh,i hope all are safe and heathy. my best wishes to all ,in this great big family. _COREY BTW ,THAT PARK AMP IS THEEE MOST KILLERRR OMG!!
@@easchit absolutely. what you see here is just a bunch of people who are willing themselves into hearing 'a huge difference' so they can be part of the good ears club
I have always heard that Eddie primarily used the lower voltage just to reduce the volume slightly. Honestly, I preferred the original tone. The Plexi seemed to lose bite as the lower plate voltage reduced the headroom. FWIW - My Mesa Boogie has a "Tweed Power" switch which drops the plate voltage by reducing the incoming current to 90 volts.
I have a Mesa Boogie Mark IV and run it at tweed power, around 30 watts. I have track effects through the loop and the input and output volumes are set over halfway. That gain structure works great, but it is a bit loud. I get yelled at all the time. After 49 years of playing, I'm used to it.
Its subtle this is the stuff that keeps us guitarists buying crap instead of playing. (completely quilty myself) Played live infront of fans, they wouldn't notice anything. Only a person in thier studio/room would, obsessing.
I believe I heard Dave Friedman mention the output tube bias on Edward Van Halen's Plexi was compensated to produce a specific current flow in the output tubes at the 89 VAC line voltage
@@pcollenyt3683 Probably not. Keep in mind that the bias isn't to picky here. This is not an ABii push-pull amp for "reproducing" sound with perfect clarity. If your bias is optimized for an input AC of 90V then you won't hear a difference from bias from 80V to 100V. You may hear a difference, but it won't be from tube bias. The difference will come from B+ sag and from cooler filaments that limit tube current.
@@SparyZWanTuhNayHoa small change in Line voltage creates a huge difference in the high voltage DC on the plates of the tubes. We are talking about extremes of operating voltages and if the grid or cathode isn't biased for those plate voltages, the thing will either under-perform of burn up quickly.
People that worked at the clubs he played at complained about his volume being too loud. So the variac was used to lower the volume to please his clients. A lot of comments correctly mentioned that the bias setting is much different than normal voltage. This must be done. Another big part of his brown sound is his unmodded 1967 Marshall plexi. I've owned many Marshalls and that particular year 100 watt plexi is often outstanding in brown warm tone. The tubes make a difference too of course. The pickup output strength. Pickup height setup. Speakers. So many variables. Eddie was a tone chaser who always amazed me with his playing skills and great sing writing. Rhett was right about feeling a little sag in the attack at 89 volts. Volume wise, I don't hear a huge difference which does surprise me since that was the intention
"Eddie did not start using a Variac to make his amp sound better, he did it because the amp was too darn loud! ... Depending on the room we were playing I'd set it anywhere between 60 and 100 because the only way the amp sounded good was with everything all the way up, so that became my volume knob." From " The TRUE Story of Eddie Van Halen Using A Variac" If you turned the amp UP as you turned the Variac DOWN, it would be a better test!
That's a strange quote because it contradicts itself. Maybe this is why people can live with epic levels of cognitive dissonance. Eddie did obviously use the variac to make the amp sound better, because it sounded better with the voltage lower, but the volume still cranked up.
No that would not be a better test. Turning the amp volume down will reduce the amount of distortion. The power amp is heavily distorting and that is only achieved through volume. These amps don't have a high gain preamp, nor do they have a gain knob. The reason EVH (and everyone for that matter) turns the amp all the way up is because every part of the amp (preamp, phase inverter and power amp) are distorting and it sounds glorious. That is the sound. Turn the amp down, and that goes away. If you turn the amp down as you raise the voltage that has achieved nothing.
You're both wrong! I would correct you both and put you in your places, but, alas...I am but a troll. I am jelly you guys can play anything, my son and daughter play guitar. My Dad was a Drummer in the Mid/Late 60's (borderline famous, Gold Record, Ed Sullivan Show, Monterey Pop Festival) Keep Playing! Music makes so many people like me happy and I couldn't imagine life without it!
I'd say amp sag is more of a "feel" thing for the player than an actual sound difference. In a blind test you would be hard pressed to tell which one is which. They all sounded excellent to me which is to be expected from any recording by Rick.
It only works if the tubes are biased for the plate voltage after the variac is set to whatever input voltage is written on the amp compared to the line voltage in the room or building, you are in, initially EVH bought the Variac because he had bought a European /English Marshall Amp,s Head rated@249Volts Ohms Law V=IxR(ohms),when he plugged in the amplifier took 1/2 hour to warm up because US. volts are running at 110-120V rms.
7:12 Jimi Hendrix angel. If nobody else recognized that song then I have lost my faith in humanity. One of the best songs ever written and Rhett did a killer job with it.
Impossible to tell the subtle differences considering how youtube compresses & screws up the audio after an upload. We need to hear to the audio in its original rendered quality to tell the differences. That said, awesome content as always.
Nicola Tesla invented a vibrating platform that he could adjust the frequency of oscillation. He noticed that at a certain low frequency it would cause one to lose bowel control. Of his circle of aquaintences the writer Mark Twain wanted to have a go on this machine and insisted on trying the 'brown' frequency. Despite Tesla's warning he went ahead and crapped himself on the machine. I don't recall the frequency but believe it was single digit and below human hearing. Perhaps that's what South Park was refering to. Brown out is a term used in some electrical circles to describe low voltage occurence - it's not a black out complete loss of power so it's brown out
Riffs, beards and gear had Mike Soldano on 3 weeks ago. Soldano retubed the 'brown sound'-Marshall himself, Eddie asked him to do so, so he had the chance to test it out himself and he explains how the brown sound comes to life... also worth checking out.
Rick, I've seen a few of your vids now, and I just wanted to say that I think it's very magnanimous of someone with your resources to take the time and effort to exposit upon subjects musical for the benefit of so many others as you have...thank you very much.
Excellent video! Bedroom guitarist here, so the alchemical science of amp modding continues, always searching for that elusive tone is like turning lead into gold when you find the sweet spot.
You are right a hundred watt Marshall turned up to ten would kill some ears in the front row also Eddie used this voltage regulator so he could turn his volume knob down and not lose that full on 10 tone 🤫🤫
This is genuinely one of the best videos you’ve ever done. This sharing of insight and experience on how to obtain “tones” is really useful. I hope you do many more.
That's funny - how many people are trying to catch the difference after UA-cam has compressed the audio with a lossy codec? Why not to show the spectrum analysis?
Now we're talking. I don't even know what codec UA-cam uses but from general experience it's noticeable, and that's really bad, you can have compression that's indistinguishable from lossless. I distinctly remember youtube forcing lousy audio compression, I don't know if they do that anymore.
@@genericnamethingy normally you upload the video with H.264 or H.265 compression anyway: so either 192kbps or 360kbps on the audio (many more options eg VBR too) even before it hits whatever You Tube does to it (e.g. convert to lower rate streams).
@@doctorscoot I personally cannot distinguish between lossless and v0 360 kb/s. You hit on a good point. What I wonder about is if max quality on youtube implies they don't do any extra processing on the audio. That is, if you upload it lossless it stays as is. I remember it used to have a cap and I think it was 256 kb/s, I wonder if it still imposes a cap and what processing is done, and how it varies with the video option. I should be able to have low video quality and high audio quality, for example if I'm on a music video or podcast and want to minimize data use and have good audio. I don't know why they haven't implemented such a simple thing.
@@genericnamethingy yes, i find 360kbps to be indistinguishable too. but its always dependent on how well its encoded in the video export AND whatever it is that you tube does to it to process it.
I heard an interview with Eddie where he said that in his early interviews, when asked about his sound, he would tell the interviewer about the Variac. He said he use to laugh about how many people followed his advice, & blew up their amps. He would say he turned UP the wall voltage, but he really turned it down. Har har har.
It’s just a volume control - not shifting the tone at all. He said the Marshall only sounded good with the levels turned all the way up, so using the Variac preserved the tone he liked while allowing him to turn the volume down. I suppose the EVH amps must have this feature built in - ?
On the other hand, I read an interview with one of VH's producers back in the 1980s. He said that if any other guitar player walked into the studio while VH was on break and picked up Eddie's guitar, it wouldn't sound like Eddie. Eddie's tone comes from Eddie more than from any particular gear. That idea was reinforced for me about 20 years ago when was working as a freelance engineer in Nashville. A semi-retired A-string guitar player was hired to lay down whatever part he felt would help a somewhat genre-bending track. He asked me why I had put both a 421 and 57 on his amp, and I said because I didn't know whether to expect to capture a rock tone or more of a R&B tone. He held out his palm toward me, fingers spread, and said very sternly, "The tone don't come from the mic, it comes from the fingers!" That said, it is cool how voltage can shape the tone of tube gear. I was recording a male rock vocal once through a very old UA tube compressor (no model was designated but it had serial number 0001, so it may have been a prototype). It's PSU slowly began to fail, and the singer's voice got cooler and cooler sounding. He kept doing take after take because it just kept sounding cooler. Then suddenly, it stopped working altogether. I sent it to two different shops to get it fixed, but it never really worked right after that. I had the opposite experience with transistor gear once. I was tracking Paul Overstreet at his home studio outside Nashville. It was late on a hot afternoon. His vocal tone was getting worse with each take, until we stopped to check for the problem. All seemed OK, until I noticed that the incandescent bulbs weren't burning as brightly as usual. Sure enough, the line voltage was down in the 90s. Apparently, everyone between him and the substation was getting home from work and turning down the AC and such, and the grid couldn't keep up.
I wish they played a riff over and over WHILE dialing the variac down and up. I never trust my ear memory and feel it may have given a better sense of what it's actually doing to the sound.
Hey Rick - I have always thought "I'll Wait" was a great "hidden gem" on 1984 - have always wondered what that would have been like if it was a guitar driven song instead of keyboards - would be fun to hear that one re-imagined. Also another video idea "Top 20 Hidden Gems on great albums"
over the years I have brought many different guitars and amps to Europe, which meant bringing many different voltage regulators also. There is no mistaking that there is a difference in tone with different voltages, plus sixty cycle turned to fifty cycles.
Same here….. buy 110v to use a “transformer” that drops the German voltage of 220v down to 100v….. then with my 220v Marshall JVM in the US with taking 110v up to 220v…… I have a JCM 800 50 watt head that has its own voltage selector built in….
Rick in the Smithsonian interview Eddie says he bought a Marshall from Europe which turned out to be 220V. He put all the controls to 10 and discovered a noce sound but the amp wasn't loud enough to be usable. That's when he bought the variac, to actually control the volume of the amp... Could you try that?
It's one thing to reduce the plate voltage of the power tubes (and also preamp tubes) and a totally different thing to reduce ALL the voltages inside the amp. The voltage at the tube heaters need to be very close to 6.3 volts regardless of everything else or the tubes will fail in no time. This is why I would never recommend running the whole amp at an incorrect voltage for an extended period of time. Luckily modern power scaling methods (VVR, 65 Amps' Master Voltage etc.) have been designed: they keep the heaters at the right voltage while you can mess with the plate voltages - and most importantly, your tubes will be safe.
Rick don't wanna push his amps or burn one up lol ur right though eddie used it like a volume knob he said this because a marshall turned up to 10 would kill the person's ears that was in the front row so u he used it better answer is you can roll back the volume knob on the guitar and still have all the balls you need that's the real reason
If anything, 89V sounds a lil rougher around the edges, so to speak compared to 120V. But honestly, without blind testing and a wave analysis, there's really no foundation for any conclusions.
Regarding not "screwing your amps up": The old-school repair technique of slowly increasing line voltage after repairs from zero volts AC to 115-120 volts AC by using a Variac transformer should NEVER be used with an amplifier that includes digital electronics circuits. (Most newer guitar amps have sophisticated fused circuitry, so the Variac 0 volts to 120 volts in slow steps technique isn't necessary, anyway.) Slowly increasing line voltage in an amplifier that includes digital electronic channel-switching or inline digital effects can potentially damage the master power supply circuitry, the +5 V DC line, and 5 or 15 VDC associated circuitry. Having lower than normal DC voltages on a D.C. line can raise current on the line (see Ohm's Law), which, in turn, drives some digital components into self-frying mode. I had a friend attempt to bias new tubes in my Marshall 6100 30th Aniiversay Head using old-school testing with a Variac, and he cooked both the 5 V D.C. power supply and a "J-K flip flop" digital chip associated with MIDI channel-switching. (In most cases, if the MIDI section of the Marshall 6100 goes dead, so does the whole amplifier: It's, effectively, a body without a brain.) Since that incident, even though I used to work as an electronics technician at a very high level, I always let the local Authorized Marshall Service Center repair my 6100 and replace and bias the EL34 power tubes. He has the official Marhall Service Manual for post-repair verification, and it's better to be safe than sorry with a rare or a beloved amplifier. :) When going for a Brown Sound, I would adjust the voltage to be above 100 volts before plugging-in a valuable or rare amplifier. You can tweak for the "Brown Sound" from there. Digital electronics are damaged by the zero-to-115 volts in slow steps procedure--which is pretty much useless these days, anyway. :)
Glad you mentioned this. Also, the variac method reduces both the filament and B+ voltages. Ultimately you don't want to change the filament voltages. I have not used power scaling, but that is a safer alternative.
Well, to power the digital part of an amp there will always be a DCDC converter to regulate the 5v or 3.3v or whatever the digital supply domain is. If the voltage at the output of the transformer is lower than expected from the DCDC converter, it will simply not turn on. So in general you will not damage anything but it will simply not work at all...Those tricks with the Variac can be done only with with all analog old style stuff :)
@@metalgarri4194 Thanks for the update on recent DC circuitry design. (We knew it had to come some day. lol) (My Marshall Joe Satrirani Signature Head has a whole load of breakers and fuses to protect against shorted tubes and other mishaps.) In the Marshall 6100, which was designed in 1992, the filament voltage (6.3 volts AC) and the regulated 5 volts DC derive from a separate leg of the Mains Transformer which leads to the main power supply board--a faulty, short-sighted design. The 6.3 Volts AC is not fused well enough at the point that it leads to the series filament circuit. Marshall no longer uses that design for heads that have both 6.3 Volt AC and 5 volts DC regulated. The DC lines of the main power supply board are now completely isolated from 6.3 volts AC filament (series circuit.) The problem with the 6100 design is that if the filament of a tube shorts to the cathode, the main programmable IC in the MIDI section often gets fried from the current surge, or a J-K flip-flop in the MIDI ciruit (5 volts DC) gets fried, disabling the MIDI function, which, therefore, disables channel-switching, which, in turn, causes the head to go braindead and not produce sound. Since the Marshall MIDI Programmed chips for the 6100 are no longer available from Marshall, to avert tagedy, my Marshall tech wired a quick-trip circuit breaker into the 6.3 volts AC series filament circuit, to protect against future damage to the MIDI section as a consequence of a short between tube cathode and filament. It's a push-button jobby, so it is easily reset. :) I'm happy to hear that newer DC guitar amplifier power supplies are isolated, with better design, and with space-age current protection. Those amplifier design engineers are crafty rogues. :)
@@thomassmith7608 yeah it is a trivial and very foreseeable problem. I mean, in a tube amp with digital circuits you are interfacing a 300v analog circuit with a 5v digital, and valves are not the most robust devices in the world. That is a call for trouble! A good design should have, besides fuses, galvanic insulation like capacitive or with a transformer, to avoid all those problem. Or at least that's how I would have designed it if I was working for Marshall 😄
It's absolutely not the "secret of the van halen guitar tone". The guitar sounds different on almost every song, when you listen to isolated tracks. The differences between the sound examples in this video are so small, that slight variations in mic-placement on the speaker would make MUCH more of a difference than the difference that the variac makes. It's ludicrous to assume that a variac will make any difference keeping in mind that parts (capacitors, tubes, resistors) used in amplifiers have tolerances of ~10-20%. Even two "dimed" amps will NOT sound the same. Everybody who ever worked on analog audio equipment will tell you this. I'm not even mentioning that the voltages you were running OUT of the variac were not tested with a volt/multi-meter. The cheaper variacs (such as the one in this video) are so imprecise that you cannot even claim you set the "right" voltage. All in all, stuff like this feels like snake oil and glorification of gear-myths.
Really for the life of me, could'nt tell the difference, nice playing,, ok, so i go ringing in my ears & had the volume up, still could not hear what you were picking up, thumbs up for the video.
Howard Kaplan, one of the Fender EVH Amp engineers said that what they discovered with lowering the line voltage was the biggest change in tone / feel wasn't caused by the lower plate voltage on the tubes. It was caused by the tubes' heater voltage being lower. I believe one of the Fender EVH models was designed with only 9 volts instead of the normal 12.6 volts on the heaters.
Guys, look at that old pic of Eddie in front of his amps , there’s a Vox head. I’m not sure of the wattage but with my AC30 and a alnico 2 pickup in my guitar I can nail all the Van Halen sound before 1984. Go figure.?
Beautiful Les Paul, Really like that blue color and sounds really close with plex and variac at a lower voltage. Your Park has a different tone but nice warm big-sounding; would like to hear the same Les Paul with your Park! Thanks for sharing the video! Ciao, ALDO
@@gaukarmadhouse as far as I know you're right, Eddie was referring to Alex's snare tone which he apparently described as woody and as a "brown sound" and over the years the wires got crossed and that's how people came to call his tone
@@JoeGator23 yea I've heard of this. Brown out is where the Voltage dips but doesn't completely 'black out'. So yea I think that's where the term comes from
To me, EVH's recorded sound always sounded like it was coming out of a backyard band party...slightly muffled, 'cause it was coming from a few doors down, and the reverb was the sound bouncing around the neighborhood....made me feel like I was partying. ...Kind of thought that maybe was kind of the idea.
Racist Parties. Bet you didn't wear masks and get vaxxed either. Retroactive LAWS will get yoi for that!!! HAHHAH "America" "Freedom". yeah right. U gunna do nuthin about it and will turn in yer shootin irons we KNOW it!!111
I would be interesting to run the waveforms through a spectrum analyser to see if these subjective differences can be matched to changes in the spectrum 🙂🤷♂️
The words of EVH:
"I used to work at a music store delivering pianos and organs and one day a Marshall amp comes in and I’d only seen pictures of these, only Eric Clapton and God’s play these! I said I gotta have that amp, and so I worked all summer to buy that amp and we were already too loud as it was and now I had a 100-watt Marshall! It was so dam loud I did everything from facing it backwards to facing it down to the floor … I was just too damn loud! So I saw an ad in the paper for another Marshall amp and thought “maybe this one will be different”, well it certainly was cuz when it showed up I plugged it in and it didn’t work … but, I left it on and what I didn’t realize was this thing was from England and it was 220-volt, and I plugged it in and I didn’t look at the back and see it was set on 220; it took a long time for it to warm up at half voltage, and when I picked up my guitar I was like “it sounds incredible!” … but incredibly quiet. It dawned on me “I could control the volume of the amp with the voltage, so I proceeded to hook it onto the light dimmer of the house, and blew it out and so on. So finally I went to this place called Dial Radio and asked “do you have any kind of like an industrial variable voltage transformer that I can use like a light dimmer” and he said “yea I got this thing called a Variac”, I said “ok cool”, and I take it home and plug the amp into it and I’d lower the voltage from like 110 slowly down to 100 and ... the lowest I ever went was like 60. Depending on the room we were playing I’d set it anywhere between 60 and 100 because the only way the amp sounded good was with everything all the way up, so that became my volume knob. If we were playing little bars I’d set it to like 60 volts; somewhere a little bit bigger I’d crank it to 80 and for recording the sweet spot seemed to be 89-volts."
Mickey Falappi thanks for spending the time to write this memory. I'm familiar with this story.
Wow, brilliant
Yes, the Smithsonian interview... Sorry to say Rick didn't get the video right... I'd really love to see it done on a 220V marshall
@@matthewguarna2975 Sure he did. The British Marshall was unusable because 110V or so won't power a 220 British Marshall very well. The amp he used the Variac with was the USA 100W which Ed said was too loud.
I had Heard EVH used to burn up Marshalls by ni-amping them also,that they would sound awesome up to the point where they would melt down. Don't know how true this was
“That’s funny, because people took that whole ‘brown sound’ thing totally out of context,” he said. “I was never talking about my guitar tone. I was talking about Alex’s snare drum. I’ve always thought Alex’s snare drum sounds like he’s beating on a log. It’s very organic. So it wasn’t my brown sound. It was Alex’s.”
Klosterman then asked how the confusion originally occurred.
“It happened years ago. People would ask me about his drumming, and the only way I could explain it was that it had a very brown sound,” Van Halen noted. “I’m glad you brought this up, actually, so people can finally understand what I was talking about.”
I'm not saying that the quote (from an interview) is ACCURATE... but it's something that I had heard about and there are confirmations of it - be it true or not.
@@hsfinlayson - Yeah, I read a similar thing in an interview a while ago, but with Eddie saying in the end that he wanted to match Alex' sound with his guitar, that he too wanted a 'brown sound'.
@@mightyV444 Aaahhh... so then the moniker would still "fit" the legend if he said that *HE* was trying to achieve a similar "Brown Sound"... so both are true... it WAS about Alex's drum sound... AND about Eddie's (never-ending) tone-quest. Thanks.
@@hsfinlayson - I was confused when Rick was referring to Alex' snare sound as the 'brown sound', in the sound-matching video he'd made a while ago, as I'd always only known Eddie's sound termed that way; That's when I did some online research and came across the interview I mentioned before :-)
Yup!
To ME, the secret to Eddie's tone was lack of money ! So he had to invent ways of doing things from the variac to the Frankenstrat. He was very curious and his insticts were always right. Sometimes NOT having money is the mother of invention.
lack of money?
Do think the cost of the variac some how made that very expensive Marshall stack cheaper?
Limitations breed creativity
The secret to Eddie's tone, was Eddie! :) I also bet he made a fair amount of mistakes in trying new stuff. But he was smart enough to know when he probably had something useful.
Absolutely! It forces you to get in the habit of creative problem solving. You can see possibilities everywhere.
Reminds me when Steve Vai said that he met with Eddie at his house and gave him his Ibanez to try it.
Eddie started to play and it sounded like Eddie not Steve Vai.
All in the fingers
Now THAT I can believe !!!
Lemmy would still sound pretty much Lemmy with a Fender Bass and a 'normal' bass amp
Hendrix like Hendrix etc..
It's fun to try these tone hacks - but its pretty subtle compared to what YOU wanna say with YOUR instrument!
Reminds me of this video where you can see Satriani playing Surfing with the Alien on a cheap strat and a practice amp. Still sounds like Satriani.
The RG was the guitar EVH was trying to create in the first place. Only the RG had 3 functioning pickups and a WAY better neck on it. Nothing touches a nice RG.
I'm still me on any kit.🤔🤔
"The first thing we are going to do is try to recreate the Brown Sound..." said every guitarist since 1978
Me in my basement without a brutish amp
I said the same thing back in 1999. I'm still trying to do it. 😎
Guitarists messing with electricity. What could go wrong?
Turning a simple rheostat with resistive load is hardly "messing with electricity"
@@eyedunno8462 no, but messing with old transformers (that are really hard to find) is.. LOL.
Throw a little alcohol into the mix too while you're at it. LOL
@OverLord Opps Drummer, actually.
I don't see the fire extinguisher in the picture! I think Dave Friedman said the amp re-biased to run properly under the lower voltage. There's part 2, where the amp tech comes in and does that, and you can leave Rhett at home because you captured the DI to reamp it, right? ;) Great job on the overall tone in general.
I shut my eyes and listened to them back to back, for the life of me I can't tell a single difference. Oh well.
Correct!
Pour yourself an adult beverage. Look up Eddie VanHalen isolated guitar tracks. Turn off the lights, turn up the volume and....your welcome!
@@milesaway3699 Way ahead of you brother...I've probably listened to all of them a dozen times...so awesome!
Yup, same here. More “audiophile mumbo jumbo.” The audio world seems to be the most absolutely riddled with placebo.
You know UA-cam compresses everything. Probably sounds different in the room
I definitely heard the difference in “runnin with the devil” when it hit 89. I have no idea why I enjoy these tech videos...I don’t play, so most of it goes over my head, but somehow I like it anyway 🤔
That Hendrix "Angel" riff was soooo good
Thanks! One of my favorite Hendrix songs.
@@RhettShull - I just answered my own question... I instantly recognized that sound and was hearing Angel, but not as I remember it... but I can't remember much anymore.
I would love to hear you play more of that, Rhett. It truly is such a sweet, sweet ballad.
@@roderickwhitehead I've seen him play it in at least one of his videos when checking out guitars at Righteous and such.
Killed it
Thank you for just being someone else who knew, I’ve always loved the song and feel it’s undervalued. I’ve never heard anyone use it as a tone/voltage test😂
Now we know exactly that the Variac accounted for just 1% of EVH's tone
hahahahaha and even that!
ROFL
0% actually
I hear WAY more than 1% difference; it sounds much better with the voltage dialed down! Perhaps try earwax remover? LOL!
It was Eddie...the sound came from him ...always
Now I need a Variac sim for my Amp sim 🤘😜
Axe FX has it!
I have a Variac (I think I have the same one as you Rick)... I use it on my Bugera BC-30 (Matchless clone)... you get some swankin tone.
Most do. It’s the “sag” control on the amps settings.
Thank you Rick and Rhett! Highly enlightening to hear it this way.
Overloud TH-U has it.
Ed was referring to AL's snare drum tone when he first spoke of this "Brown sound"
He described it as a warm, woody tone like a really old big red wood tree type of thing.
For me the "Brown sound" is when i hear anything on VH II guitar tone wise.
That record is pure Brown sound!
It's the only album where he played his Marshall into the cabinet with no doohickies attached to it. Other than that album, he used a special "load box" to bring the speaker output down to line level and he cascaded it into another Marshall, then to the cab. This was especially evident on Fair Warning. No way can you get a late 60's plexi to grind like that with a variac alone.
Because Alex's snare tone is indistinguishably, Alex!
EVH is a legend that changed guitar for the better. One of the all time greats!
Guitar,amps,effects,strings and everything else in the chain.
As a guitar player for some 35 years .... i can't hear the difference with any of this. The Marshall sounded like a Marshall, and the Fender like a fender, i could hear absolutely no difference in sound, at all. but that's just me :)
The 89 seems less " in your face" i think...
I assume this might be something you'd hear better in person. Really nice speakers probably help too. I agree with you, but at the end of the day even the most obvious differences to guitarists are not going to be noticeable to regular people.
Use ear phones.
89v sounds quite a bit more saturated and compressed to my ears. Like the headroom on the power section was reduced. It's nice though because it doesn't really change the character of the amp, like a very clean boost in to the power section. Definitely noticeable with headphones in the back to back test.
As An electrical engineer having designed many amplifiers i could hear many things go "wrong" e.g. not as designed with the internal power of the amps and the amplifier reacting to that. For a hifi amplifier you do nog want that but here it becomes a sound. Nevertheless the ampliers are siill nest their normale operatitng range so it's true their fundamtal sound remains
Me: same thing every time, right?
Them: definitely more saggy, sweeter, tighter, compressed...
Me: erm... sure, sure!
yeah, it all sounds the same to me LOL!
I tried with my studio headphones, and I still can't tell a difference.
I could only hear the difference between 120 and 88, slightly less attack and more “swirly” in the remainder of the chord. I once heard that Ed said the “Brown” part of the sound was how he got the guitar to sound like the “word” brown, with a growl as the note faded. Ive looked all over for that clip, wish I could find it.
I could hear differences albeit, slight. I didn't listen to the core guitar sound, I sought to find if clarity, decay, texture, volume, feel etc would be affected.
120V Marshall sounds more wild and loud compared to 89V Marshall, which is more clearer and decays faster, for example
Confirmation bias.. i guess you might hear a difference in studio, but through this video, nothing.
As a guitar player of 40 years ,I heard minimal difference
it's all about subtlety. the difference is there.
My guess is that it does more to the feel than the sound...dynamics and compression and attack
Well, maybe that is the reason , because 40 years of loud guitar amps will blow your ears! Just kidding, man...I also heard minimal difference......Wait ...been playing exactly 40 years too (born in 1966), hmmm..nevermind...
As a guitar player of 42 years I hardly hear anything... *lol* ;-)
@@docdeens4030 It is largely "heard" in the feel (if that makes any sense). I can definitely hear a graduated change as he cranks it on down. But please, there is sooooo much going on to get that "authentic first album sound" that was specific to the year 1978 and the studio, production, and moment in time. It would also help a lot to be Eddie Van Halen - that's always the last missing ingredient that is often overlooked. =)
*literally can't hear a difference*.
*watches anyway*
I think UA-cam compresses the he** out of everything so we might not be able to hear any difference out in the real (real?) world.
Yeah, my electronics teacher in college, back in 1971, liked to use the word "negligible" a lot. That's the first word that came into my mind while watching this video. I can imagine a smaller envelope if we were able to see the waveform on a good oscilloscope, but otherwise, a negligible difference as a result of voltage changes. I will say this, I'm pretty impressed with Rick's equipment
I could hear a difference, but I wouldn't call it night and day. Particularly if it was live sound you were working with. The audience wouldn't notice.
Couldn't hear any difference but then I was listening with my crapped laptop speakers.
Might hook it up to my floor standing HiFi speakers and Denon amp....
Lmao now I don't feel bad as I sat here thinking exactly that. Guess that is why I am not a professional sound engineer
7:10 Hendrix "Angel" in case anyone's wondering. Doubt many are as we're likely all deep lovers of great guitar music.
This is exactly why I came to the comments. Cheers!
I was wondering what song was.. thanks man!!!!
That was my favorite part of this video! Hendrix really shone on those softer melodic compositions.
I looked and absolutely couldn't find the original on YT (or even Google). Just a lot of low skill covers posing as Hendrix. Sad.
I'd highly recommend South Saturn Delta, Electric Ladyland, Axis Bold as Love and Band of Gypsies (live album) to any young people who aren't yet "Experienced"
That’s what I thought it was. Thank you for confirming my suspicions. No mistaking Jimi.
I'm living for all the videos people are making about Eddie at the moment. It's so great to see he had the same impact on other people as he had on me. He made us all brothers in that way.
Eddie is by far the most influential guitarist of ALL TIME and that includes Hendrix. It has very little to do with his amazing tapping techniques either . Eddie was always on a completely different level than everybody else especially his mind boggling rhythm playing . Nobody to this day has come even remotely close to mastering rhythm like Eddie has, his flow and effortless control is truly insane.
Who else has been waiting FOREVER for Rick to do this video!!
👇
Me 🤘😎
Me!!!!!😂👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
ThatsRaidillonActually You’ve been waiting a whole 12 minutes? Wow that’s a very long time. Impressive. 👏
My favorite VH album is Women and Children First. The energy is incredible
First VH album I bought when I moved to London from Ireland back in 1983
The shopping centre where I bought it (The Elephant & Castle) closed for the last time a few days before Eddie died ...so I'm having a bit of an existential crisis at the moment
I have that vinyl still somewhere at my parent's house. Killer album.
I've known VH for 40 years and prefer the original line-up with DLR - but I still haven't heard 'Women...' and also 'VH II' in their entirety! :-O
@@mightyV444 ok, stop what you are doing and go listen to WACF right now. Seriously, that is THE album in my opinion.
@The Bored AF Guitarist I’d say Fair Warning is heavier.
All the EVH purist will come out of the wood works and I'm one of them ;) So you almost had it right. 89 on the variac but its well documented that Ed used the bright input only, not jumped and every knob was on 10. Then from the board, he adjusted the channels 3 band EQ for each mic with a slight dip in the mids. Also his Echoplex that was in front of his amp gave him a slight boost to the front end. Dunlop EP101 Echoplex preamp simulates this.
Another recording trick he used was to triplicate his tracks - one was used to cut everything but bass, another everything but mids, and the last everything but highs. Sub them together, and adjust accordingly. I've tried it, and the harmonics really jump out, especially on muted chords.
You are spot on, I would have like to see it done this way and rick definitly has the studio to be able to do it, just do it damit
Man this channel is just amazing. I started off on the wrong video, and honestly would love to spend 30 minutes with Rick and just talk about drum n' bass sound design and engineering, but with every single video I realize this guy is a window to real music business, but without the money. God's work.
Yeah! My backgrounds kinda indusltrial noise punk - so though i design some quite funky electronics I sure dont have melody dripping thru my veins - and it's not so much this dude knows about engineering (which he surely does) but this guy knows about SONGS !
Eddie went on to say “the brown sound” was not even his thing, his tone was his tone but that the “brown sound” was actually a drum sound that Alex was after...
I remember a Guitar Player story about Eddie from around 1981 and Eddie said he was after the Brown sound and he used a Variac to turn it up all the way and he would watch the tubes melt. He may have been doing some misinformation there. I wonder how many guitar players blew up there amps trying to get that Brown sound.
Apparently you, me and HR Puff n Stuff are the only people in the world who knew this.
Eddie said " Brown sound ? I wasn't going for that..
alex' snare was like hitting a log - hence the brown sound. it was not eddies tone at all
I’ve heard that the term ”Brown sound” originally was used to describe Alex’s snare sound!
Eddie could play a squire through a champ and sound Amazing
Agreed. Edward’s playing changed, I believe, when those Earnie Balls, PV Wolfs and EVH’s got in his hands. They’re so engineered for ease of playing. The earlier guitars he used I assume required more work to play where you here the honest effort a lil more. Same concept SRV adopted with his guitars that required hard work to play.
@@msw812 I never considered this.. good point.
Ask Ted Nugent played Ed's rig and sounded like Ted not Ed .
@@MarkAnthony5150 i saw eddie van halen and ritchie sambora on tv once and evh made sambora look like a beginner
Totally agree that Ed would sound Amazing! However, he wouldn't have had the 'brown sound'...
Above and beyond the virtuosity of Ed's playing, I'm *strongly* of the view that his amp sound had just as much, if not way more bearing on their success..
The rock-record-buying public then cast it's vote for the mighty Van Halen. A fantastic thing! Especially in the midst of a disco/punk torn music industry that plagued' '78..
I remember thinking "Let the disco whores and punk weenies compete with this!! VH gave us rockers a fighting chance for the future once again..
The thing you missed about using the variac with the plexi, per Dave Friedman - the voltage is lowered, but EVH had his tubes biased so hot they would have popped at 120v in an instant. I feel like this is probably the most important thing in making that amp sound so on fire all the time
Hi Rick, an interview Dave Friedman would fill out the story, he serviced Eddies amp and has some inter-mate knowledge of what Eddie was doing.
.....a spilling mistook
....or a tipping errop
Charlie Bryant I recorded a record at Sound City studios, and the engineer had taken a Pro Junior and put a bass speaker in it. It was the best sounding rock bass tone I’ve ever gotten. He wouldn’t tell me what else he had done to it, but I suspect he had swapped and rebiased the tubes. Point being; you can do some great stuff with those little fenders :)
Absolutely true. Lower primary voltage = lower plate voltage = power supply sag. But the power tubes have to be rebiased hotter to get “the sound”. Now whether or not you want to over bias them is up to you, Eddie would buy Sylvania 6CA7s by the case!
Whew, thought for a second you were trying to achieve the brown note...... *wipes forehead*
Lucky that's all you had to wipe.
That's what I thought as well
Van Halen V: Mean Streaks
@@eyedunno8462 lol, good one.
Can't you see me sitting here
I've got my back against the porcelain latrine
A never-ending stream
Looks like it's starting to steam
Look at this dump (dump!)
Look at this dump
I still think 95% of Eddie's sound was in his hands.. Steve Vai said when Ed played through his gear it sounded like Eddie..Ted Nugent played through Ed's gear one time and he said it just sounded like him playing someone else's rig. He was surprised he thought Ed's sound came from his gear.
This. A thousand times this.
Holds true for almost all instruments and studio gear. A great player sound great no matter what they're playing, and a great performance sounds great no matter what gear it's passing through, providing the gear isn't total crap. And of course the opposite is also true.
Some people put so much money and effort into trying to bottle the lightning of their heroes via hardware, but the primary ingredient will always be missing: their hero.
Yup, i agree. The guys that do the best with the tone chasing have the fingers for it. I went down the VH gear rabbit hole and had fun doing it, but it sure never made me sound like VH.
John Mayer opened Crossroads DVD 2004 stating of all the player one the tour know that a guitar is a 6 string instrument and it all in how you touch it!
There is another video of Ed playing backstage on a cheap single coil strat, a kids guitar. Still sounds like Eddie, so it is eddie and not the equipment, for the most part, obviously.
One thing that should be mentioned Rick is that EVH, while he would variac his voltage to 89 he would also have his tubes rebiased back to where they should be. When I'm playing live I also tend to rebias my tubes based on wall voltage to get optimal sound. Mind you I am using Two-Rock amps which make biasing quite simple along with a blackface super that i had bias test points added so that can be biased on the fly as well.
Just between us geeks, in 1982 my best friend a guitar player and holder of a 1st class radio-telephone engineer license made a voltage regulator that he placed between a tube preamp that he also constructed and a Fender Twin. I had the Telecaster and he was experimenting. The amp was head/cab . We were trying to find the Tom Sholz tone and smoked the 2 JBL speakers. Thank you for the memory. You both rock!🎸🔥
I know it's probably been brought up before, but Eddie has said the "Brown Sound" was the sound of Alex's snare. Like he was beating on a brown log.
Referring to Janies Crying I think, that chug chug with the snare
Eddie said he had everything on 10 on the first record.
Including the number of engineers who quit during the process
To get it even closer; Ed's Plexiglas was a transitional 12xxx series with lower value filtering caps of the earlier Marshall super leads. . Replace the 32x32's with 16x16's UF caps and the amp gets even sweeter and more loose at 90 volts. You guys nailed it, the EVH sound revolves around the sag and spongy character that responds to the player the harder you dig into it. The amp is its own instrument. Awesome stuff!
Using a variac is very important in so many electronic applications. Always check the output of the variac with a Fluke DVM. Just because the variac dial says 115 VAC doesn't guarantee that is the VAC output. I always check output VAC at all the companies I have worked at. When you need to calibrate sensitive electronic devices, having the correct voltages are crucial. I have seen 95 VAC up to 128 VAC all over the USA. In Florida the VAC power is always going up and down do to lightning storms knocking out transformers and power lines. Also check the Hertz.. Should be running at 60 Hz.. I have seen 48 Hz to 64 Hz...!!! YIKES
Absolute truth.
Thanks Nerd
: )
What’s the best thing to keep all that cleaned?
Asking for a friend that has fried more than his share of gear...ahem
@@notacommie5415 monitor the VAC with a system with alarms, use an AC Power Conditioner, Surge protection also
If the frequency varies that much, there is something SERIOUSLY wrong with the power distribution system in your area. I’m in the uk and voltage can vary +10%/-6%
Frequency should only vary 1hz either side of 50Hz over here.
If frequency drops then BAD things happen!!
Your best bet is to measure the heater voltage. Most amps I’ve messed with sound better when it’s right at 6.3v. You’re gonna get the most tube life too.
I built a high power buck converter out of a 12A filament transformer to run my Tweed/Brown/Black amps on. It’s a bit safer than a VariAC because it’s got two safe settings, not a wide range of severe under and over voltage.
A Variac. is a Variable transformer I am an Engineer come on guys, that was the only way he could use the English made Marshall head or amp he just bought which is rated at @240Volts, and he had to plug it in to !20Volts U.S.
That is why he bought it but started messing with it
I hear you but elaborate further. Or did Rick nail it?
@@eroldcroft3045 the amp Eddie got was set to 240. Most of those amps have the switch on the back. So it starved the plates of the power tubes. But it didnt work reliably, so Eddie figured he could set the voltage properly for US and still dip the voltage with a stage light dimmer which is a variac. Same theory.
Eddie received is Marshall head from the U.K and did know that the head was setup on the 240 switch and when he tried it he thought that it was defective because the volume was very low, but the sound he had was the sound he was looking for so he then thought of that idea to use the variac by asking an electrician.
@@sundogaudio851 To not blow a tube during the concerts, for what i remember, the amp tech was used to change all the power tubes to Eddie amps and this was for every single show.
After lowering the voltage, you need to rebias the amp. That's the mod.
This!
Them Tubes will act funny and there is more than putting frosting on the cake, so they are a number of other factors that makes this not as cut and dry
And change the midrange pot to 500k like Eddie's.
On the 1st album his tone is a doctored up mirage. In the studio, it doesn't even sound like that. Just a old Marshall dimed. Go to the Sunset Sound YT page and listen for yourself.
Yep. Up the bias to compensate for the lover voltage. Otherwise tubes are running too cool.
Eddie's mom: Edward, why do you have to make that 'high crying noise'?
Eddie: Because it bought you a house, Mom!
Eddie I like that high stuff you do , Beat it Michael Jackson biggest hit .. Legend
Please tell me I wasn't the only one who thought Rick was going to talk about the "brown note" 😂
You are not the only one
Me too, thought they were talking about the SouthPark episode.
Please be respectful, this is UA-cam after all
Our bass player plays through an Ampeg SVT300 and an 8/10 cabinet. I can't begin to tell you how many brown notes I've heard/experienced. LOL
@@dustinevans2895 The original Thumbnail only had a Rick photo and the "The Brown Sound" as title.... and I was like "wait, what?" Then they started talking about voltages, I swear to God I sincerely thought they were gonna say something like " do not plug 220 V amps on 117 outlets or you will crap your pants" or something 😂
7:11 "Angel", nice!
yeah. :)
I’m guessing Eddie’s Humbucker in his Franken strat would’ve been hotter than a typical Les Paul bridge pickup. That extra push would take it further into the brown zone.
It was a paf out of a gibson es-335
@@OxaudioPhilly Correct but he's also right b/c EVH's PAF was overwound by Seymour Duncan so likely a touch hotter than stock. The S-type scale and bolt-on construction (arguably) adds to a punchier and brighter tone. At any rate this is so darn close with the LP.
I've read that you should re-bias after lowering the voltage. That might also effect the tone if the tubes are running at the correct bias at each voltage.
Dave Friedman stated that when the wall voltage was lowered,the bias current to the output tubes was increased on Eddie's Marshall...As you turn down the wall voltage via the variac it can also thin out the overall tone.
Changing the line voltage downward does two things: 1) It runs a lower voltage on the heaters saving the life of the tube, but that is not where the greatest savings are. 2) It lowers the voltage at the plate...which does two things a) reduces the total power across the tube, making the largest savings in life, and b) reduces the sensitivity and gain of the tube, generating a less responsive tube, thus giving it the classical "mellow" sound you cannot get from transistor devices. Transistors simply don't have the inconsistent behaviours at various voltages. Transistors are more like switches, full on or full off until they reach their cutoff point so they don't "brown out" like a tube will. Tubes are far more flexible and tolerant of voltage changes. Transistors just don't care as long as it's enough voltage to keep working.
“That brown sound sure do get around.” - Larry Underwood
Fantastic comment! I just thought of that quote the other day, hahaha
I can dig him. He's a righteous man!
Just finished that book last week. Larry was the best dude.
@@BCTTV_DTJ but he ain't no nice guy, Larry
you ain't no nice guy
Fricking Cool UA-cams experment with EVH Brown Sound Theory! All you boys were missing were a white lab coat, cig in guitar and some pounder beers laying all over studio!
Nice JOB! SO COOL THAT LES AND EDDIE WERE SOUND/GUITAR MAD SCIENTESTS BEYOND THE TIMES! RIP BOYS!!!!
I am not a musician, but I can't stop looking at your videos and watching your explanations and techniques. You are a master at your craft and make music even more enjoyable, showing all the technique and hard work that goes into it. I love your channel and videos.
Turns out what the "secret" was not the variac alone. Ed, according to Jose Arrendando, used a sort of "load box" to bring the speaker output all the way down to 64ish ohms so it basically became a preamp at line level to send into whatever he wanted, be it a power amp or another Marshall. This allowed him a variety of different tone possibilities. Every early VH album had a different sound with the same head but different amp he was sending it into. So when we say "Brown Sound" or we're trying to condense his early tones into one thing, it really can't be done. You'd have to focus on a particular album.
I read in an interview with Ed that David Lee Roth told Ed to tell folks that he was turning up ( increasing the voltage ) of the Variac instead of what he was really doing which was turning it down. This was to throw people of his trail. However, in hindsight he was giving you a hint by calling it his "brown sound". Like a "brown out" when the voltage drops.
In _most_ of these comparisons, I don't hear diddly squat of a difference. 🤷♂️
Yeah the same here - of course youtube compresses the sound but I'm pretty sure that we are talking about slight nuances and nothing more.
@@ornleifs - Yes, I believe the differences must've been more obvious when being in that room; I didn't hear any difference between the 'Running With The Devil' takes at all, despite using good headphones.
Me two, but would we hear better if standing in the studio? They seem to be hearing it, and I think we all trust Rick.
HEADPHONES ARE NEEDED
There was more string noise at 120v vs 89v during the Running With The Devil comparison. Just seemed more overdriven and maybe a little brighter.
Dear Rick, I swear there's very little to no audible difference in any of the comparisons. Please make a follow up vid, where you include images of the soundwaves of each recording, also a proper blind test. Cheers
Agreed. For the average musician, they’d get more tonal variation simply by using a different pick. Or practicing more lol. Don’t need a damn variac.
Hmm: the difference is in the tone..and I do not need soundwaves to listen to the differences...they are clear!
There's a pretty clear difference if you are using quality studio headphones in terms of the attack and warmth/roundness of the sound. Please don't listen on laptop or iPhone speakers and then critique
get your hearing checked,I played drums for 20 years and still heard a difference. the fender was super obvious,but the Park was incredibly obvious. or get new monitors,ect . I was listening on a crap set of tascam th-02 headphones,heard all differences plain as day. helps if you close your eyes whenswitching comparisons. also, im not at all trying to be a d!^&,Im just shocked theres ppl with worst hearing than me, im pretty deaf,but always had an ear for indifference,and suble stuff. its why I love recording so much. anyways I do appoligize if I was harsh,i hope all are safe and heathy. my best wishes to all ,in this great big family. _COREY BTW ,THAT PARK AMP IS THEEE MOST KILLERRR OMG!!
@@easchit absolutely. what you see here is just a bunch of people who are willing themselves into hearing 'a huge difference' so they can be part of the good ears club
I have always heard that Eddie primarily used the lower voltage just to reduce the volume slightly. Honestly, I preferred the original tone. The Plexi seemed to lose bite as the lower plate voltage reduced the headroom. FWIW - My Mesa Boogie has a "Tweed Power" switch which drops the plate voltage by reducing the incoming current to 90 volts.
I have a Mesa Boogie Mark IV and run it at tweed power, around 30 watts. I have track effects through the loop and the input and output volumes are set over halfway. That gain structure works great, but it is a bit loud. I get yelled at all the time. After 49 years of playing, I'm used to it.
Its subtle this is the stuff that keeps us guitarists buying crap instead of playing. (completely quilty myself) Played live infront of fans, they wouldn't notice anything. Only a person in thier studio/room would, obsessing.
I believe I heard Dave Friedman mention the output tube bias on Edward Van Halen's Plexi was compensated to produce a specific current flow in the output tubes at the 89 VAC line voltage
In that case the amp would have to be re-biased each time the variac setting was changed, within acceptable tolerance limits.
This make sense ---something to do with tube saturation in the output stage. This no doubt would help create a whole spectrum of unique harmonics.
@@pcollenyt3683 pretty sure these days you could design an auto-bias circuit to do just that.
@@pcollenyt3683 Probably not. Keep in mind that the bias isn't to picky here. This is not an ABii push-pull amp for "reproducing" sound with perfect clarity. If your bias is optimized for an input AC of 90V then you won't hear a difference from bias from 80V to 100V. You may hear a difference, but it won't be from tube bias. The difference will come from B+ sag and from cooler filaments that limit tube current.
@@SparyZWanTuhNayHoa small change in Line voltage creates a huge difference in the high voltage DC on the plates of the tubes. We are talking about extremes of operating voltages and if the grid or cathode isn't biased for those plate voltages, the thing will either under-perform of burn up quickly.
People that worked at the clubs he played at complained about his volume being too loud. So the variac was used to lower the volume to please his clients. A lot of comments correctly mentioned that the bias setting is much different than normal voltage. This must be done. Another big part of his brown sound is his unmodded 1967 Marshall plexi. I've owned many Marshalls and that particular year 100 watt plexi is often outstanding in brown warm tone. The tubes make a difference too of course. The pickup output strength. Pickup height setup. Speakers. So many variables. Eddie was a tone chaser who always amazed me with his playing skills and great sing writing. Rhett was right about feeling a little sag in the attack at 89 volts. Volume wise, I don't hear a huge difference which does surprise me since that was the intention
"Eddie did not start using a Variac to make his amp sound better, he did it because the amp was too darn loud! ... Depending on the room we were playing I'd set it anywhere between 60 and 100 because the only way the amp sounded good was with everything all the way up, so that became my volume knob." From "
The TRUE Story of Eddie Van Halen Using A Variac"
If you turned the amp UP as you turned the Variac DOWN, it would be a better test!
Yeah, heard him in an interview tell this story.
That's a strange quote because it contradicts itself. Maybe this is why people can live with epic levels of cognitive dissonance. Eddie did obviously use the variac to make the amp sound better, because it sounded better with the voltage lower, but the volume still cranked up.
No that would not be a better test. Turning the amp volume down will reduce the amount of distortion. The power amp is heavily distorting and that is only achieved through volume. These amps don't have a high gain preamp, nor do they have a gain knob. The reason EVH (and everyone for that matter) turns the amp all the way up is because every part of the amp (preamp, phase inverter and power amp) are distorting and it sounds glorious. That is the sound. Turn the amp down, and that goes away. If you turn the amp down as you raise the voltage that has achieved nothing.
@@adamr8878 I agree ! what he said was amp settings all the way up, and lower the voltage as needed, to play at the level required for smaller venues
You're both wrong!
I would correct you both and put you in your places, but, alas...I am but a troll.
I am jelly you guys can play anything, my son and daughter play guitar. My Dad was a Drummer in the Mid/Late 60's (borderline famous, Gold Record, Ed Sullivan Show, Monterey Pop Festival)
Keep Playing! Music makes so many people like me happy and I couldn't imagine life without it!
That Park Amp & Head sounds killer!!! It's amazing how a change in voltage changes the sound. Keep up the great videos.
I'd say amp sag is more of a "feel" thing for the player than an actual sound difference.
In a blind test you would be hard pressed to tell which one is which. They all sounded excellent to me which is to be expected from any recording by Rick.
Agreed!
I could feel it through my earbuds
It only works if the tubes are biased for the plate voltage after the variac is set to whatever input voltage is written on the amp compared to the line voltage in the room or building, you are in, initially EVH bought the Variac because he had bought a European /English Marshall Amp,s Head rated@249Volts Ohms Law V=IxR(ohms),when he plugged in the amplifier took 1/2 hour to warm up because US. volts are running at 110-120V rms.
You nailed it.
7:12 Jimi Hendrix angel. If nobody else recognized that song then I have lost my faith in humanity. One of the best songs ever written and Rhett did a killer job with it.
I recognized it and I'm only in highschool but I love hendrix
Impossible to tell the subtle differences considering how youtube compresses & screws up the audio after an upload. We need to hear to the audio in its original rendered quality to tell the differences. That said, awesome content as always.
I was thinking about the “Brown Note” from South Park that makes you poop
I did, too. I was expecting to hear some serious low tones 🤣
Nicola Tesla invented a vibrating platform that he could adjust the frequency of oscillation.
He noticed that at a certain low frequency it would cause one to lose bowel control.
Of his circle of aquaintences the writer Mark Twain wanted to have a go on this machine and insisted on trying the 'brown' frequency. Despite Tesla's warning he went ahead and crapped himself on the machine.
I don't recall the frequency but believe it was single digit and below human hearing.
Perhaps that's what South Park was refering to.
Brown out is a term used in some electrical circles to describe low voltage occurence - it's not a black out complete loss of power so it's brown out
Came here looking for this comment! ...lol...
Also Archer.
and eating some S***ty Shrimp from City Wok
Riffs, beards and gear had Mike Soldano on 3 weeks ago. Soldano retubed the 'brown sound'-Marshall himself, Eddie asked him to do so, so he had the chance to test it out himself and he explains how the brown sound comes to life... also worth checking out.
Rick,
I've seen a few of your vids now, and I just wanted to say that I think it's very magnanimous of someone with your resources to take the time and effort to exposit upon subjects musical for the benefit of so many others as you have...thank you very much.
Excellent video! Bedroom guitarist here, so the alchemical science of amp modding continues, always searching for that elusive tone is like turning lead into gold when you find the sweet spot.
I used a Bugera 1960 with a Variac at 90 volts ac and it was awesome used it with my Marshall Vintage Modern cab
It's my understanding that Edward got his sound by diming all the controls and that he used the variac to tame the volume in the clubs.
You are right a hundred watt Marshall turned up to ten would kill some ears in the front row also Eddie used this voltage regulator so he could turn his volume knob down and not lose that full on 10 tone 🤫🤫
This is genuinely one of the best videos you’ve ever done. This sharing of insight and experience on how to obtain “tones” is really useful. I hope you do many more.
That's funny - how many people are trying to catch the difference after UA-cam has compressed the audio with a lossy codec? Why not to show the spectrum analysis?
Very True!
Now we're talking. I don't even know what codec UA-cam uses but from general experience it's noticeable, and that's really bad, you can have compression that's indistinguishable from lossless. I distinctly remember youtube forcing lousy audio compression, I don't know if they do that anymore.
@@genericnamethingy normally you upload the video with H.264 or H.265 compression anyway: so either 192kbps or 360kbps on the audio (many more options eg VBR too) even before it hits whatever You Tube does to it (e.g. convert to lower rate streams).
@@doctorscoot I personally cannot distinguish between lossless and v0 360 kb/s.
You hit on a good point. What I wonder about is if max quality on youtube implies they don't do any extra processing on the audio. That is, if you upload it lossless it stays as is. I remember it used to have a cap and I think it was 256 kb/s, I wonder if it still imposes a cap and what processing is done, and how it varies with the video option.
I should be able to have low video quality and high audio quality, for example if I'm on a music video or podcast and want to minimize data use and have good audio. I don't know why they haven't implemented such a simple thing.
@@genericnamethingy yes, i find 360kbps to be indistinguishable too. but its always dependent on how well its encoded in the video export AND whatever it is that you tube does to it to process it.
Even with headphones, I can't tell the difference.
Sounds like the sound gets warmer and fuller as you dial down the voltage. I like how the lower voltage sounded better in all set ups.
I heard an interview with Eddie where he said that in his early interviews, when asked about his sound, he would tell the interviewer about the Variac. He said he use to laugh about how many people followed his advice, & blew up their amps. He would say he turned UP the wall voltage, but he really turned it down. Har har har.
Couple things you missed along with the Plexi and Variac: MXR 12 Band EQ and Echoplex Delay. Eddie used the EQ to boost the front of the amp
It’s just a volume control - not shifting the tone at all. He said the Marshall only sounded good with the levels turned all the way up, so using the Variac preserved the tone he liked while allowing him to turn the volume down. I suppose the EVH amps must have this feature built in - ?
On the other hand, I read an interview with one of VH's producers back in the 1980s. He said that if any other guitar player walked into the studio while VH was on break and picked up Eddie's guitar, it wouldn't sound like Eddie. Eddie's tone comes from Eddie more than from any particular gear.
That idea was reinforced for me about 20 years ago when was working as a freelance engineer in Nashville. A semi-retired A-string guitar player was hired to lay down whatever part he felt would help a somewhat genre-bending track. He asked me why I had put both a 421 and 57 on his amp, and I said because I didn't know whether to expect to capture a rock tone or more of a R&B tone. He held out his palm toward me, fingers spread, and said very sternly, "The tone don't come from the mic, it comes from the fingers!"
That said, it is cool how voltage can shape the tone of tube gear. I was recording a male rock vocal once through a very old UA tube compressor (no model was designated but it had serial number 0001, so it may have been a prototype). It's PSU slowly began to fail, and the singer's voice got cooler and cooler sounding. He kept doing take after take because it just kept sounding cooler. Then suddenly, it stopped working altogether. I sent it to two different shops to get it fixed, but it never really worked right after that.
I had the opposite experience with transistor gear once. I was tracking Paul Overstreet at his home studio outside Nashville. It was late on a hot afternoon. His vocal tone was getting worse with each take, until we stopped to check for the problem. All seemed OK, until I noticed that the incandescent bulbs weren't burning as brightly as usual. Sure enough, the line voltage was down in the 90s. Apparently, everyone between him and the substation was getting home from work and turning down the AC and such, and the grid couldn't keep up.
I wish they played a riff over and over WHILE dialing the variac down and up. I never trust my ear memory and feel it may have given a better sense of what it's actually doing to the sound.
Hey Rick - I have always thought "I'll Wait" was a great "hidden gem" on 1984 - have always wondered what that would have been like if it was a guitar driven song instead of keyboards - would be fun to hear that one re-imagined. Also another video idea "Top 20 Hidden Gems on great albums"
One of his best solos.
Park amp had nice Hendrix sound to it
over the years I have brought many different guitars and amps to Europe, which meant bringing many different voltage regulators also. There is no mistaking that there is a difference in tone with different voltages, plus sixty cycle turned to fifty cycles.
Same here….. buy 110v to use a “transformer” that drops the German voltage of 220v down to 100v….. then with my 220v Marshall JVM in the US with taking 110v up to 220v…… I have a JCM 800 50 watt head that has its own voltage selector built in….
Rest in Peace
I did the variac thing years ago with a Marshall Plexi. Down to 90Volts. Sounds just like EVH first album!
I’d love to hangout in this studio.
I adjusted the voltage on my hearing aid and damn, you're right. Big difference. Brilliant work fellas. Simply fun to watch y'all nerd out.
Rick in the Smithsonian interview Eddie says he bought a Marshall from Europe which turned out to be 220V. He put all the controls to 10 and discovered a noce sound but the amp wasn't loud enough to be usable. That's when he bought the variac, to actually control the volume of the amp... Could you try that?
Oh yes, like a Main Volume knob! I remember watching that, too! :-)
Gain knob goes to 20!
It's one thing to reduce the plate voltage of the power tubes (and also preamp tubes) and a totally different thing to reduce ALL the voltages inside the amp. The voltage at the tube heaters need to be very close to 6.3 volts regardless of everything else or the tubes will fail in no time. This is why I would never recommend running the whole amp at an incorrect voltage for an extended period of time. Luckily modern power scaling methods (VVR, 65 Amps' Master Voltage etc.) have been designed: they keep the heaters at the right voltage while you can mess with the plate voltages - and most importantly, your tubes will be safe.
@@ziccuj that's why even eddie had his variaced amps biased properly to the lower voltage.
Rick don't wanna push his amps or burn one up lol ur right though eddie used it like a volume knob he said this because a marshall turned up to 10 would kill the person's ears that was in the front row so u he used it better answer is you can roll back the volume knob on the guitar and still have all the balls you need that's the real reason
If anything, 89V sounds a lil rougher around the edges, so to speak compared to 120V. But honestly, without blind testing and a wave analysis, there's really no foundation for any conclusions.
Regarding not "screwing your amps up": The old-school repair technique of slowly increasing line voltage after repairs from zero volts AC to 115-120 volts AC by using a Variac transformer should NEVER be used with an amplifier that includes digital electronics circuits. (Most newer guitar amps have sophisticated fused circuitry, so the Variac 0 volts to 120 volts in slow steps technique isn't necessary, anyway.) Slowly increasing line voltage in an amplifier that includes digital electronic channel-switching or inline digital effects can potentially damage the master power supply circuitry, the +5 V DC line, and 5 or 15 VDC associated circuitry. Having lower than normal DC voltages on a D.C. line can raise current on the line (see Ohm's Law), which, in turn, drives some digital components into self-frying mode. I had a friend attempt to bias new tubes in my Marshall 6100 30th Aniiversay Head using old-school testing with a Variac, and he cooked both the 5 V D.C. power supply and a "J-K flip flop" digital chip associated with MIDI channel-switching. (In most cases, if the MIDI section of the Marshall 6100 goes dead, so does the whole amplifier: It's, effectively, a body without a brain.) Since that incident, even though I used to work as an electronics technician at a very high level, I always let the local Authorized Marshall Service Center repair my 6100 and replace and bias the EL34 power tubes. He has the official Marhall Service Manual for post-repair verification, and it's better to be safe than sorry with a rare or a beloved amplifier. :) When going for a Brown Sound, I would adjust the voltage to be above 100 volts before plugging-in a valuable or rare amplifier. You can tweak for the "Brown Sound" from there. Digital electronics are damaged by the zero-to-115 volts in slow steps procedure--which is pretty much useless these days, anyway. :)
Glad you mentioned this. Also, the variac method reduces both the filament and B+ voltages. Ultimately you don't want to change the filament voltages. I have not used power scaling, but that is a safer alternative.
Well, to power the digital part of an amp there will always be a DCDC converter to regulate the 5v or 3.3v or whatever the digital supply domain is. If the voltage at the output of the transformer is lower than expected from the DCDC converter, it will simply not turn on. So in general you will not damage anything but it will simply not work at all...Those tricks with the Variac can be done only with with all analog old style stuff :)
@@metalgarri4194 Thanks for the update on recent DC circuitry design. (We knew it had to come some day. lol) (My Marshall Joe Satrirani Signature Head has a whole load of breakers and fuses to protect against shorted tubes and other mishaps.) In the Marshall 6100, which was designed in 1992, the filament voltage (6.3 volts AC) and the regulated 5 volts DC derive from a separate leg of the Mains Transformer which leads to the main power supply board--a faulty, short-sighted design. The 6.3 Volts AC is not fused well enough at the point that it leads to the series filament circuit. Marshall no longer uses that design for heads that have both 6.3 Volt AC and 5 volts DC regulated. The DC lines of the main power supply board are now completely isolated from 6.3 volts AC filament (series circuit.) The problem with the 6100 design is that if the filament of a tube shorts to the cathode, the main programmable IC in the MIDI section often gets fried from the current surge, or a J-K flip-flop in the MIDI ciruit (5 volts DC) gets fried, disabling the MIDI function, which, therefore, disables channel-switching, which, in turn, causes the head to go braindead and not produce sound. Since the Marshall MIDI Programmed chips for the 6100 are no longer available from Marshall, to avert tagedy, my Marshall tech wired a quick-trip circuit breaker into the 6.3 volts AC series filament circuit, to protect against future damage to the MIDI section as a consequence of a short between tube cathode and filament. It's a push-button jobby, so it is easily reset. :) I'm happy to hear that newer DC guitar amplifier power supplies are isolated, with better design, and with space-age current protection. Those amplifier design engineers are crafty rogues. :)
@@thomassmith7608 yeah it is a trivial and very foreseeable problem. I mean, in a tube amp with digital circuits you are interfacing a 300v analog circuit with a 5v digital, and valves are not the most robust devices in the world. That is a call for trouble! A good design should have, besides fuses, galvanic insulation like capacitive or with a transformer, to avoid all those problem. Or at least that's how I would have designed it if I was working for Marshall 😄
It's absolutely not the "secret of the van halen guitar tone". The guitar sounds different on almost every song, when you listen to isolated tracks. The differences between the sound examples in this video are so small, that slight variations in mic-placement on the speaker would make MUCH more of a difference than the difference that the variac makes. It's ludicrous to assume that a variac will make any difference keeping in mind that parts (capacitors, tubes, resistors) used in amplifiers have tolerances of ~10-20%. Even two "dimed" amps will NOT sound the same. Everybody who ever worked on analog audio equipment will tell you this. I'm not even mentioning that the voltages you were running OUT of the variac were not tested with a volt/multi-meter. The cheaper variacs (such as the one in this video) are so imprecise that you cannot even claim you set the "right" voltage. All in all, stuff like this feels like snake oil and glorification of gear-myths.
Really for the life of me, could'nt tell the difference, nice playing,, ok, so i go ringing in my ears & had the volume up, still could not hear what you were picking up, thumbs up for the video.
I like how they play "Angel" by Hendrix without announcing it.
Howard Kaplan, one of the Fender EVH Amp engineers said that what they discovered with lowering the line voltage was the biggest change in tone / feel wasn't caused by the lower plate voltage on the tubes. It was caused by the tubes' heater voltage being lower. I believe one of the Fender EVH models was designed with only 9 volts instead of the normal 12.6 volts on the heaters.
Guys, look at that old pic of Eddie in front of his amps , there’s a Vox head. I’m not sure of the wattage but with my AC30 and a alnico 2 pickup in my guitar I can nail all the Van Halen sound before 1984. Go figure.?
Beautiful Les Paul, Really like that blue color and sounds really close with plex and variac at a lower voltage. Your Park has a different tone but nice warm big-sounding; would like to hear the same Les Paul with your Park! Thanks for sharing the video! Ciao, ALDO
I dunno why but his sound never sounded brown to me. Brown should be something smoother and fuzzier to me. EVH sounds more like silver.
I had the same thought since years. Blistering silver...brighter that a thousand suns.
I think the phrase actually came from Eddie talking about Alex's snare.
I think it comes from the term, "brown-out" in the electrical industry... does anyone know?
RIP Ed, what a jammer.
@@gaukarmadhouse as far as I know you're right, Eddie was referring to Alex's snare tone which he apparently described as woody and as a "brown sound" and over the years the wires got crossed and that's how people came to call his tone
@@JoeGator23 yea I've heard of this. Brown out is where the Voltage dips but doesn't completely 'black out'. So yea I think that's where the term comes from
That variac knob reminds me off back to the future when Marty tries to crank up the professors gear but gets blown up lol
And from this the Flux Capacitor was born!!!
Great scott!
To me, EVH's recorded sound always sounded like it was coming out of a backyard band party...slightly muffled, 'cause it was coming from a few doors down, and the reverb was the sound bouncing around the neighborhood....made me feel like I was partying. ...Kind of thought that maybe was kind of the idea.
Racist Parties. Bet you didn't wear masks and get vaxxed either. Retroactive LAWS will get yoi for that!!! HAHHAH "America" "Freedom". yeah right. U gunna do nuthin about it and will turn in yer shootin irons we KNOW it!!111
I would be interesting to run the waveforms through a spectrum analyser to see if these subjective differences can be matched to changes in the spectrum 🙂🤷♂️
I'm so impressed with the topics you guys come up with
careful, janie H is gonna copyright for that rendition of angel!