1978' GP interview.........
Eddie Van Halen: The Complete 1978 Interviews
http://jasobrecht.com/eddie-van-halen-c ... nterviews/
[GP], What kind of equipment and effects do you use?
[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 shit got ripped off. Got lost in air freight – by [shouts into microphone] Pan Am, ya fuckers! No, really. Some of it got lost – didn’t get put on the same plane, whatever. I used to have four very old Marshalls – like ’65 – and I had a guy named Jose, 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 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 ’em. Those amps used to blow like every other gig, and you have to retube 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 usually every other gig they blow out. They drop like flies, you know.