Metropoulos Forum

This is continued from my last thread which was titled ELECTRO HARMONIX BIG BOTTLE 6CA7 anyway i use to speak to jose arredondo on a weekly basis a couple times a month and we would talk about amps and different tones and how to achieve them. I remember talking to jose about achieveing the VAN HALEN 1 sound and that i was going to send im my 72 marshall super lead to mod for me to get that sound and i quote jose he said to me that on the first van halen record i didnt do any mods for ed he also explained to me that edward did use a distortion pedal for that sound jose didnt remember which unit edward used and he also explained to me that he did start doing mods for ed when they started to make VAN HALEN II . So he said to keep your 72 super lead stock and try different pedal he said thats a good sounding marshall so i took his advice.I tell this to some people and they still dont believe, but it came right from joses mouth anyway i continued to speak to jose until his death he was a very nice guy and he knew his marshalls very, very well thanks again.........

the distortion pedal is most apparent on the intro to "im the one"

AH HA I knew it.......

yeah you can definantly hear something being used on im the one, now the question...which pedal could have it possibly been?

MXR

Now hers one thought on this. MXR what? Distortion+ or Microamp? Both sound similar in a cranked Marshall with the Dist+ compressing a bit more than the Microamp. I would take a stab and say it was either a Microamp or a Dist+ run as a clean boost.

I agree with rockstah, mxr or ehx big muff and dont forget pro co rat pedal. Eddie use to shop at a store in LA called DR. MUSIC thats where he purchased his mxr phase 90 and his mxr flanger so he could have purchased the mxr distortion pedal there..

The mxr micro amp didnt come out until the early 80s i believe 82 so the micro amp could not have been used during the VAN HALEN 1 recording.

the first mxr distortion.

rockstah wrote:the first mxr distortion.

And this would be what Mark? I've only seen the Distortion+ the early ones had the script lettering and later black lettering. You have me insterested in this now.

i would bet my left nut it was nothing more than a clean boost aka microamp!

sounds like more than a " clean boost" to me - it sounds like a distortion -infact it sounds like a mxr distortion. it always has sounded that way to me.

Just that song or the whole album? EDIT: nevermind I retract what I wrote in this spot. Re listens do wonders sometimes.

on that 1978 oakland picure you can see a pedal with number " 2 " written on it that kinda resembles a big muff

The mxr micro amp didnt come out until the early 80s i believe 82 so the micro amp could not have been used during the VAN HALEN 1 recording.

I have a photo from the VH1 tour of Japan where you can see an MXR Micro Amp. It's not plugged-in in the photo but it's there. I don't believe he used a distortion pedal...but I could be wrong.

So...if Jose didn't mod his amp(s)...who did? His #1 has that switch/pot...what is it and who installed it? I doubt he bought it that way from the Rose Palace...but who knows.

Great thread!