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Eddie Van Halen interview

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Paul
Posted on Wednesday, July 31, 2002 - 04:32 pm:   

EVH interview.

Guitar.com (Circa 1978)
"The Initial Eruption: Eddie's Gear"
by Jas Obrecht

Full interview at:

http://www.vhlinks.com/pages/interviews/ evh/gu1978.html

Guitar.com: And the rest of your gear?

EVH: Ah, I'll tell ya, man, the stuff I used onstage today isn't really my setup. See, we toured Japan, and on the way back over, all my good s**t got ripped off. Got lost in air freight � by [shouts into microphone] Pan Am, ya f***ers! No, really. Some of it got lost � didn't get put on the same plane, whatever. I used to have four very old Marshalls � about '65 � and I had a guy named Jose [Arredondo], who's in the San Fernando Valley somewhere, beef 'em up. He put bigger transformers in 'em. There's a thing called bias in an amp, and you crank it all the way up and it really makes the tubes hot. I use [the amps] with these other things, which are called voltage generators � like a Variac. It's a big box with a knob on it that controls voltage. Plug your amp into it, and it goes all the way from zero volts to like 140. The amp's only supposed to take 100 volts, but you crank the thing above that like to 130, 140 volts, and the tubes really glow. So ya gotta keep a fan on it. Those amps used to blow like every other gig, and you have to re-tube them every other day, but they crank! They sound like nothing else to me, because they're so overdriven. They usually don't work for more than ten hours of playing � maybe even less, because every other gig they blow out. It fries, you know. I had four good amps that I used to use all the time, but I don't have them any more.

Guitar.com: What do you have now?

EVH: What I basically have is three different setups, three complete setups. I have three 100-watt tops of whatever make � right now I'm using Music Man, a couple of Laney amps, which are English, and a couple of new Marshalls.
I'm just using everything right now because I lost those old amps. But I use three 100-watt amps for the main set � what I call it � and then I do my guitar solo, and after that I change guitars and amps to setup number two. Setup number three is also again three amps, for backup.