GFR gfr@fund.cepel.br 8/20/98 6:32 AM Here are excerpts from some EVH interviews. There's not too much consistency from one to another, so it's hard to know what's true or not. I have some later interviews where the setup is the one explained before at this forum (5150, Palmer speaker simulator, rack, 800W Mosfet amp). I have some other interviews for Guitar World that are pure nonsense like he says he hooks a light dimmer to the output of the amp, so I didn't include them. One more thing: these are EVH interviews, so there are a lot of words in french, like f**k, s**t, etc. GFR GUITAR PLAYER November 1978 On a recent. return flight from Japan, Eddie's original 100-watt Marshall amps were lost in air freight, and he's replaced them with Music Mans, Laneys, and new Marshalls. "I like three 100-watt amps for the main setup," he says. "After I do my guitar solo I change guitars and amps to the second setup. The third setup, also three amps, is for back-up. I have each guitar plugged into a different setup so that if anything goes wrong. all I have to do is grab another guitar. This saves my worrying about triying to fix the amp. I use voltage generators, which can crank my amps up to 130 or 140 volts. Amps sound like nothing else to me when they are cranked so high, but you have got to keep a fan on them because they blow so often. You have to retube them every day, and they usually don't work for more than ten hours of playing." GUITAR PLAYER April 1980 Do you usually use an amp? When I'm at home I use a little old white Fender Bandmaster I plug into the extension speaker so I can crank it all the way up and it fuzzes Out. It's actually like at full volume. You get tube distortion and it sounds real good. Like a Marshall has two outputs, and you can use either one and get a full output. With the Fender, you have a main speaker jack and if you want the extension one to work, the first one has to be plugged in. If you bypass the first one and just plug into the extension speaker, you get a real low signal, but you get the same sound as if you plugged into the main one. You blow a transformer every eight months, but it's worth it. It sounds great. That's what I use at home. What kind of amps are you now using? Well, in the studio I use my old Marshall, my precious baby. It gets a slightly different sound. Live I use new Marshalls. I made the mistake of taking my main one out on the road in 1980 and I lost it on the way back from Japan. It was flying around India somewhere and six months later, thank God. I got it back. This is the one I bought when I was a kid. I didn't even know what I had until now. It's very old; it has a Plexiglas front. It used to be the house amp at the Pasadena Rose Palace; whoever played there has played through it. It's a real good amp-unbelievable balls! How do you modify your amps? Okay, I use a combination of two different kinds of amps. They're both Marshalls, but one kind actually has less power than the other, which is boosted. I use them together. The ones that have less power have a giant capacitor in conjunction with the fuse, if anything happens, the fuse blows first. The capacitor has something to do with the computerized ignition system of a car. I can't give you the exact specs, but it looks like a stick of dynamite, only fatter. What it does is suck juice. I hook it up to the fuse holder and the mains, and it lowers the voltage about ten volts so the amp lasts a little bit longer. It doesn't really change the sound, but whatever I use, I use to the max. I just turn it all the way up. So this capacitor lowers the voltage and the amp lasts a little longer. I still have to retube them once a week. [Ed. Note: This is not a recommended procedure for modifying amps, and should not be attempted by anyone inexperienced in the field of electronics and amp modification.] What is done to the other kind of amps? I use a Variac, which is like a dimmer on a lighting system. It's an autotransformer which goes all the way from 0 volts to 160. In the studio I crank it up to 140 and watch the tubes melt! [Ed. Note: Again, this is not a recommended procedure for modifying amps, as Paul Rivera of Rivera Research And Development points out: "You can cause severe damage to the amp besides melting tubes. Since a Variac is an exposed fransformer, by hooking it up incorrectly you could get the hot of the AC line on the chassis of the amp and electrocute yourself. Anyone wishing to attempt this sort of modification should go to a knowledgeable repairman."] Do you lose many amps during your shows? Yeah, but I have so many of them, I have like 12 to 15 100-watt Marshalls onstage in pairs of four, hooked up together. Then I have three switches where if the first stack blows, I can switch in the next one. That's about it for live. I have such a big setup: 80 12" speakers for my last setup, which was the equal of 20 Marshall cabinets. The next one will be World War III. But it's not for overblitzed noise. Is it to refine the sound? It's to make a good tone even louder, some people get a sound like an amplified AM radio. I like it to be like a nice home stereo amplified-you know, the difference between tone and no tone. I have some other tricky stuff in my amps which I don't even want to talk about because if someone reads it in the magazine they are going to hit up Jose, an old guy from Argentina who knows a lot of tricks and does stuff for me. He doesn't want people to know who he is because he's getting mobbed. He also puts little things inside my MXR stuff, like permanent gain controls that boost when I kick them on. I don't even know what they're called. They reduce noise and boost the signals. Do you have the sound you want? Sometimes. It depends on the arena, depends on my mood. It's dependent on a lot of things. I'll tell you, the best sound I ever get is sitting home alone playing through that little Bandmaster cranked on 10. GUITAR PLAYER August 1991 Besides the Music Man guitar, is there any gear you're excited about? My new amp, the Peavey 5150 model. I've been working on that for about a year, too. It's great, man. Did you have much input in its sound? Oh, yeah. Everything. The way it looks, the way it sounds. James Brown from Peavey and I worked for hours on this thing. It will be commercially available as soon as I get a cabinet that I like. How is it different from a Marshall? Okay, I don't own any new Marshalls, so I can't compare to the new ones. But the Marshalls that I own, which are very old, are real abrasive-sounding. They're not as sweet as I would prefer. The tone isn't as warm. It took a long time to get that [in the Peavey]. It has a couple of extra gain stages, this and that. But when we first started talking about extra gain stages, it kind of scared me. I'm going, "Yeah, I didn't want the thing to sound like a fuzz box. I'm looking for sustain and clarity." I don't like that real headbangin' fuzz sound. But then again, a lot of people might think that the sound I get is too fuzzed-out for them. I go for it feeling nice when I play it. You hit a note, and you get sustain and it sings. How do you mike your Marshall cabinets? Two SM-57s. Those old Shure deals still work. GUITAR PLAYER March 1995 Even though you used the same technique and gear on the early records, it really sounds different from record to record. Yeah, I know, but I don't know why. I used exactly that same amp head on every record, except for the last record when I used the Peavey 5150. On this new record I went back to the old Marshall plus the Peavey. But even the Marshall sounded different-I don't know. . sun spots. [Laughs] Maybe I just didn't like it that old way, because for a while I stopped using that Marshall amp because I just didn't like it any more. So it never really broke or anything? There's the big myth that it broke. Well, I thought it did. I think I broke-I just got tired of it. Did you get that amp modded? No. You can check it out. It's a stock fuckin' amp. People are pulling their hair out trying to figure how to get that sound-myself included. I feel kind of bad, because Jose Arredondo just passed away. He was a buddy, and I tried to help him out business-wise. He used to do amp mods for people, so I said, "Go ahead and tell them that you do my amps." I was thinking it would help him, throw him a bone and get him some business. But if people only knew that amp is completely stock. They do now! I just plug into it and turn everything all the way up. There's no master volume. No extra tubes. There's nothing to that amp. Matt Bruck [one of Eddie's techs] actually got me using this amp again because he had this guy Peter Van Weelden, who's totally into making Marshalls original again. He took mine and made it original, and I guarantee it doesn't really sound any different than the day I stopped using it. It's just cleaned up now, and it still goes "shhhhh" if you get too close to it. It does all the bullshit that I hate about a Marshall, but it does have a unique sound. What was your main amp on this record? The old 100-watt Marshall that I've done all the records with. I just added the 5150 to the arsenal because it does things that the Marshall won't do and vice versa. It's a more high-gain sound. Do you still use a Variac? No. The only reason I ever used that was in the club days to get my sound, but quieter. The only way I can make that Marshall work is with everything all the way up. In a club it would be uncontrollable. It would be too loud and it would feed back. I actually started out with just a light dimmer. I hooked it up to the house and fried a fuse. I went, "There's got to be a better way to do this." I went down to Radio Shack and bought a Variac. That worked.