How Eddie Van Halen Hacks a Guitar

And the Queen&#x27;s bass guitarist John Deacon designed and made his own electric guitar amplifier, already having a college degree in electronics before joining the Queen:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Deacy_Amp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Deacy_Amp</a><p>&quot;It was used along with Brian May&#x27;s Red Special electric guitar and treble-booster to produce sounds reminiscent of various orchestral instruments, such as violin, cello, trombone, clarinet, or even vocals, starting from the songs &quot;Procession&quot; and &quot;The Fairy Feller&#x27;s Master-Stroke&quot; from the 1974 album ‘’Queen II’’&quot;<p>And interestingly, the lead guitarist of the Queen, Brian May &quot;graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons) in both Physics and Mathematics and ARCS with Upper Second-Class Honours. His Ph.D studies, looking at reflected light from interplanetary dust and the velocity of dust in the plane of the Solar System, were interrupted by the success of Queen.&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;riaus.org.au&#x2F;people&#x2F;brian-may&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;riaus.org.au&#x2F;people&#x2F;brian-may&#x2F;</a>

good article, esp sticking his finger in a power cap (whatever stopped the current from going thru his heart, saved his life), and how his father adapted after losing a finger and some teeth, which for a reed player, is pretty bad.<p>There&#x27;s many more stories in guitar magazines about how he hacked and ruined lots of guitars (tl;dr don&#x27;t remove too much wood close to the bridge), and how Randy Rhoads and he would be checking each other out kind of warily, and the hundreds of prototype guitars that were made before he started selling the wolfgang guitars under the EVH label. The first time he met Les Paul, they pulled out their picks to jam and they both had sandpaper glued to them<p>His guitars are basswood (which is only used in the cheapest and most expensive guitars, oddly enough) but somebody substituted ash or alder and EVH noticed it instantly. Unfortunately most of those stories aren&#x27;t available unless you subscribe to said magazines.

Tom Scholz from the band Boston has 34 patents to his name.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alum.mit.edu&#x2F;news&#x2F;AlumniProfiles&#x2F;Archive&#x2F;Tom_Scholz_-2769-2C_SM_-2770" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alum.mit.edu&#x2F;news&#x2F;AlumniProfiles&#x2F;Archive&#x2F;Tom_Scholz_...</a>

I&#x27;ve always liked Eddie and his brother. This clip has always amazed me on so many levels. Whenever I heard something negative about the guy, the more I looked into the rumor; Eddie did nothing wrong. He is a talented guy who grew up with a strong work ethic, and came from a family that valued a handshake over a contract! The more I have read about the guy, the more respect I have for him as a person. I do cringe when I see the amount of smoking that went on at the time, but it was a different era. I think we all thought we were going to die young, so let the party begin?<p>(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=A2I0a7EwWa8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=A2I0a7EwWa8</a>)

This is pretty damn cool. I haven&#x27;t heard many stories of artists actually doing this work themselves.

Interesting, a month ago or so I watched this interview at the Smithsonian where he talks about a lot of the same subjects:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Sl59RPs7PiI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Sl59RPs7PiI</a><p>Apparently one of his iconic guitars was donated to the museum.

&gt; I&#x27;m poking around, and all of a sudden I touch this huge blue thing and my God, it was like being punched in the chest by Mike Tyson. My whole body flexed stiff, and it must have thrown me five feet. I&#x27;d touched a capacitor. I didn&#x27;t know they held voltage.<p>Yikes!

Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins switched from EL-34&#x27;s to Soviet KT-88 tubes in his Marshall giving him that super creamy distortion used in Siamese Dream. I always appreciate stories of hacker culture in music.

Eddie Van Halen has always been an inspiration for me musically, arguably one of the greatest guitarists to ever live. Us modern guitarists don&#x27;t realise how good we have it, we are living in a golden era of music technology.<p>I think for me one of the most influential and original ground-breaking guitarists would have to be Link Wray who was obsessed with fuzz&#x2F;distortion and quite famously on his hit Rumble achieved distortion by puncturing his speaker with pencils to make it crackle. It is debatable who invented distortion, Wray was a pretty experimental guitarist.

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

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

His explanations seemed like current thinking post dated to fit the story. For example, he explains he modified his guitar by adding a pickup because he couldn&#x27;t afford a distortion pedal - a good pickup can easily cost as much as a distortion pedal. Hey, I&#x27;m all for modding, but just be realistic that you&#x27;re doing it for the fun of it.