THE BROWN SOUND | The Secret of the VAN HALEN Guitar Tone!

In this episode we explore Eddie Van Halen's use of a Variac (variable transformer) to achieve his signature Brown Sound.
#EVH #BrownSound #MarshallAmps

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[mikefalappi]

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."

[hsfinlayson]

“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.”

[voodoochildaz]

"The first thing we are going to do is try to recreate the Brown Sound..." said every guitarist since 1978

[robt]

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.

[Sodacake]

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.

[RCSmiths]

EVH is a legend that changed guitar for the better. One of the all time greats!

[greenchilaquiles]

That Hendrix "Angel" riff was soooo good

[diamondstud]

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 🤔

[michaelb.]

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.

[ZombiedustXXX]

WARNING: The red variac (actually an autotransformer, as Variac is trademarked name) shown does not output a regulated voltage. The variac's specifications shown @ 1:45 states: "INPUT 110VAC". With that info, dialing in the variac to the 120 volt setting while inputting 123VAC will yield approximately 134VAC output! The variac fed 123VAC dialed to the 100 volt mark will output approximately 109VAC. The variac fed 123VAC dialed to the 89 volt mark will output approximately 97VAC. The only way to tell how much ACTUAL voltage is coming from the variac is by testing the voltages directly at the variac's output socket with a voltmeter. In this video, whether the variac's voltage output was tested at the output sockets is not clear.

[HeadHunter]

7:10 Hendrix "Angel" in case anyone's wondering. Doubt many are as we're likely all deep lovers of great guitar music.

[These_go_to_eleven_]

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!

[JB-bilf]

My favorite VH album is Women and Children First. The energy is incredible

[kessbar]

Me: same thing every time, right?
Them: definitely more saggy, sweeter, tighter, compressed...
Me: erm... sure, sure!

[BPToneReview]

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.

[Walkerbjj]

I’ve been playing since ‘88 and I couldn’t hear any difference when I closed my eyes. It’s so minimal. Not to mention, wouldn’t you want to rebias the tubes for the lower variac setting? Love your channel Rick

[tubebobwil]

The last few notes of the 89 volt setting gave me chills it was so close to the album tone to my ear.

[TomBelknapRoc]

Guitarists messing with electricity. What could go wrong?

[DavidDiMuzio]

Now I need a Variac sim for my Amp sim 🤘😜

[darsure]

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.