David Friedman
Very simple. Rudy leiren told me personally. Flange phase echoplex into a marshall with variac to 90 into only one cab. The univox echo or whatever was only patched into the chain for eruption he also used a eq for eruption. Eq was also occasionally used for tone shaping with amps that did not sound as good. This was the core setup. As more vol was needed more amps were added and more cabs but sill only one per amp. There really is nothing more to it. Lots of sustain and feedback from the sheer vol of it all. Now ed was always experimenting and still does to this day so there might have been some mishaps along the way like tubes melting etc. No lying just things not explained the right way out of a lack of technical knowledge.
Well here is what i was told by Rudy Leiren his long time tech. This was just last week. His setup was flanger phaser echoplex amp. His main 100 watt was used on everything. The bias was turned all the way up and the variac was set to 91v. into only 1 cab. There is a pic of the early days with a 50 watt and a vox. He told me the 50 was a back up to the 100 and the vox was a last ditch back up. He often borrowed amps for his back ups. In fact he told me a story that at a party they were playing ed blew a fuse in his main amp and did not have a backup and had to rum home to get a fuse while the band was playing. After this he always made sure he had a backup. Now Rudy said the eq pedal was used only for certain guitars or sometimes when he used rental gear that sounded bad. Also the univox echo was patched in by hand for eruption only and then was taken out of the chain after. Later there was another cab on Mike side that was driven from another amp they used a splitter to do this. As time went on more cabs where used and so where more amps. The amps would only drive one cab though. Now he did say ed was always trying shit but would always come back to this set up. This info follows everything ed has ever said to me personally. Also when 84 hit he changed his set up to H&H power amps and some different effects etc. He still used a cab off the head though no load resister. The Load resister came for the 5150 tour.
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The Bob Bradshaw EVH Slaving 5150 Tour Load Resistor
http://forum.metroamp.com/viewtopic.php ... 54#p284854" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
When we were developing that whole thing, we used load resistors. Load resistors were padding the signal down and loading the amplifier [so it could] act as a pre-amp. We went that way for the longest time. The Boogies were some of the first amps that we started doing that with. They were much more forgiving (having a load resistor on them) than, say, Marshall amps. As soon as we put a speaker on the amplifier it was like night and day: the amps were breathing properly. The Marshalls were the most sensitive to that. So I thought "Okay, I'll put a 16-Ohm cabinet on my Marshall amp." Suddenly people were carrying around these [closed] boxes with a speaker in them. Those are the load boxes so you can have a reactive load. When I first did Van Halen's rig, I built him a load box that would allow him to switch different heads into the same bank of load resistors. For years – starting with the 5150 tour on through OU812 – I realized that we shouldn't have this load resistor on his Marshall amp, we should have a speaker. I was all excited to hip him to this revelation, you know! And I got up there, man, (they were in rehearsals) and said, "Look at this Ed, you've got to have a speaker on there!" (I wasn't even talking about incorporating that dry speaker into the overall sound, I was just talking about hooking up a speaker and burying the thing so that it is just a reactive load.) He heard it and he just went, "Nope, it ain't happening." I was crushed, man. He was like, "I didn't like it. It didn't work well with my wireless." I was just like, "What are you talking about, are you nuts? You ****ing idiot, I can't believe you're saying this." He went back out on tour with his normal load-resistor thing. It took another year or so before we incorporated the speaker. Finally, somehow, it clicked with him. That's when we started thinking, "Why are we burying the speaker?" Then he went to the [left wet - center dry - right wet] configuration." The main thing is to preserve the pure tone of amp straight into speaker, whilst having (mostly time based stereo) effects at the same time. some people also run mono wet/dry setups. The key thing is to preserve the tone of your amp reacting a cab like it would if you had just a amphead and a cab. Most people run their pedal effects OD/fuzz/octafuzz/wah etc. before the amp so those will affect both the dry and wet cabs.
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I can remember you were in the magazines all over the place for a while.
This business is all about what's hot and what's new, bla bla bla you know. But yeah,I got my name going out there with Rocktron and along with Buzz Feiten comes Mike Landau, from him comes Steve Lukather, from Steve comes Ed Van Halen, from Ed comes Steve Vai, it's all word of mouth. And in between there were many, many others. Studio/session guys to …Poison for example.
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Ed's early pedalboard
http://forum.metroamp.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=30570" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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Ed's May 1977 Whiskey 50 watt amp setup
http://forum.metroamp.com/viewtopic.php ... w=previous" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;