“I’d see the soldering iron freaking smoking”: The time Eddie Van Halen “butchered” a Gibson because he “didn’t like the way it sounded”
Nothing could stand in the way of Eddie Van Halen when it came to chasing tone – not even a pristine Gibson.
Looking back on his late bandmate’s obsessive approach to tone in a recent interview with Get On The Bus, former Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony shares how Eddie’s famous “brown sound” didn’t come from factory settings, but rather from relentless and sometimes reckless experimentation.
READ MORE: “It was more like a whimper, the way everything ended”: Michael Anthony claims that before his death, Eddie Van Halen was planning a huge Van Halen reunion tour
“I’d go over to Eddie and Alex’s house in Pasadena,” Anthony recalls [via Ultimate Guitar]. “They had a little tiny garage out in the back, behind their house.”
“I’d go walking in there, and I’d see the soldering iron freaking smoking. That was just one thing about him – it wasn’t anything to do with looks, he was always looking for a different sound or whatever.”
That commitment to tone once led Eddie to destroy a guitar many would now consider a collector’s dream.
“I remember one time he had a beautiful Gibson ES-335, and frickin’ butchered it because he didn’t like the way it sounded,” says Anthony. “‘If I move this pickup here and do that there,’ whatever.”
“And at one point, when he had the Strat, which would become the Frankenstrat, his first one that he had was black and white. I remember when he did that, he just taped it up and painted it. He just wanted to do something crazy that didn’t look like anybody else’s guitar.”
As the bassist explains, all of it was done in the name of chasing the tone Eddie “heard in his head”.
“And somewhere along the way, he figured out that you just wire your pickup straight to the one freaking volume knob, and you don’t have a tone knob,” Anthony continues. “He goes, ‘That is all I need. I don’t need the selector switch or any of that stuff.’ And he was just chasing the sound that he heard in his head, that he wanted to get.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Michael Anthony also reveals that the guitar legend used to turn his back to the crowd while onstage in order to hide his tapping technique from the other bands.
“When Ed would play a solo, Dave would tell him, ‘Turn your back to the audience, dude, because you got this thing, and you don’t want everybody to see it,’” he says. “So Eddie would, literally, play solos, and he would turn his back to the audience when he would be tapping. Which was really, really interesting.”
The post “I’d see the soldering iron freaking smoking”: The time Eddie Van Halen “butchered” a Gibson because he “didn’t like the way it sounded” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
