WHEN EDDIE VAN HALEN LEFT KRAMER... FOR MUSIC MAN!

Oh hey, I'm Pete Thorne, so if you're like me and you're a Van Halen obsessed guitar fan and you were around in 1990 or 1991, you might remember seeing this for the first time, this is the first Music Man Van Halen . Exclusive guitar ad that appeared in guitar magazines, so keep in mind this is pre-internet, this is a time

when

this is how we got news about guitars, it was all about Guitar World magazines, guitar for the practicing

music

ian, guitarist, magazine, uh, young guitar in Japan, that's how we discovered things in Guitar Land in the early '90s, so this announcement was a surprise, I think for a lot of Van Halen fans, on a couple of levels different, number one since I grew up playing guitar, which was the early '80s.

I always knew Eddie worked with Kramer guitars. The two things were like Van Halen and Kramer guitars, so it was a big deal that he switched brands to a different brand of guitar, but guitar number two. The ad was very different from what we had seen or what we were used to, at least in the public eye, seeing Van Halen play Van Halen. Van Halen was the guy who really put Caster's parts on the map. I mean, there were others.

music

ians from maybe the mid '70s, mid '70s, late '70s, who had modified their guitar.

Steve Morris comes to mind, he had a crazy Telly that he added a bunch of pickups to, but Eddie was really the guy who put in the DIY parts, you know. of Caster super Strat on the map, guitars literally looked different in the 80s because of Eddie's influence, I mean the whole type of scratched guitar, you know, kit guitar and humbucker tilted in the bridge on a Stratocaster and add a Floyd Rose to it and just the The idea that you could change necks, pickups and random things and have fun with it made a big impression on guitarists like me, you literally remember that you have a body cut out of wood and you buy a kit neck with all painted. in a body shop with crazy Stripes bolting a humbucker on, putting it all together myself and thinking, yeah I can do this, if he can do it then I can do it up until that point, I think most people just went to the shop . and buy a Stratocaster or buy a Les Paul, so the guitar that was in the ad was a bit of a shock because it looked more like, dare I say, a traditional guitar that you would buy in the store if it had a flame top.

First of all, it had a sort of flat-top hybrid Telly body, but it looked really cool, it had a pickup on the neck that was a deviation, so there were a lot of things about this guitar that were quite different from what I saw. We were watching, Eddie. Van Halen at least likes it in the public eye and in retrospect it all makes sense knowing that he was 59 Paul younger and had a beautiful Flying V that he played on the song Hot for Teacher and other songs. I played other guitars besides Super Strats, eventually we all embraced the guitar and got used to it and I started wanting one, you know, pretty quickly, but I never got one and always wanted to try one.

So I recently dropped one in my lap and here it is. This is a signed Music Man 92 or 93 guitar. You can see it still has the plastic on the back plates. I mean, this is like a really minty example, it's almost like a time capsule and you saw me play it on the track at the beginning of the video, of course, it was a recreation of the song from uh for illegal carnal knowledge, which is a great sample of this guitar, uh, you know, you can hear the bridge. pickup tone throughout the whole tune, but then

when

we got to the solo of the song, part of why I chose it because he hits the neck pickup Eddie and the neck pickups weren't something we were really used to hearing on the record , at least commonly. up to that point, but here I was playing the neck pickup and basically doing most of the solo on the neck pickup, so that's part of the reason I chose to play it at the beginning of the video because it really shows off the guitar and I think The album, actually the album of the four illegal carnal knowledge, was a great showcase for these guitars and a kind of introduction to the world.

A really great sounding album produced by Andy John. There's more bass on that record than maybe we're used to hearing on Van. Halen makes a really great sounding record, so that probably got people even more interested in guitars. I think around that time, this video will be about these guitars. The Music Man Van Halen model, I think just from a historical perspective, it's an interesting story to tell, it's an interesting period in Van Halen's history, from the period 9091 to 95, I also want to tell the story of this guitar in particular, how it fell into my lap, how I have it here today and I'm going to enlist the help of my friend Simon to tell that story.

Well, here we go, how was the relationship between Kramer and Van Halen? And he ends up going to the musician. Well, there is a great article online written by Sterling Ball where He talks about all of this, so we take his word as gospel. Basically, they were producing a set of Ernie Ball signature strings, the 5150 strings for Van Halen, but they were actually a Kramer product, so Ernie Ball made them for you. They knew the cost and then sent them to Kramer. Kramer was then responsible for all the distribution marketing and royalties that were paid to Camp Van Halen, so at some point there is a dispute between Van Halen and Kramer over the royalties for these strings and that was really the nail in the coffin. of the relationship, so now Van Halen and Kramer are Splitsville, but Ernie Ball is in the mix because of course they were doing these signature strings and Sterling says to Van Halm's business management, hey, why don't we can you make some? guitars and see what you think to get their foot in the door, they end up making a silhouette model that's kind of a super Strat style model, uh, but they ended up taking it out and putting a single humbucker in the bridge and kind of a Floyd .

As they thought Ed would want, he obviously wasn't impressed, that's not what he wanted, but at least he got the ball rolling now, how the unique design of the guitar really came about. I'm not really sure, um, Eddie evidently drew some shapes, but those. were quickly ignored early in the process Larry Demario actually says I think he was happy to hand the body design to Music Man and make corrections from there so that at some point they end up with the Telly's unique hybrid type of look. The body design now, the pickup design is really interesting.

Obviously, different companies were competing to be a part of this guitar and you know, their pickups will be the ones featured on the guitar, the two main players being Demario and Seymour Duncan. Eddie's favorite pickup at the time was the pickup that was in his Kramer 5150 guitar and it was evidently a broken Duncan Jeff Beck seam, so the high E had supposedly gotten caught under the edge of one of the coils somewhere. point of this pickup and the sound changed in a way that Eddie liked, a standard JB has a DC resistance of about 16.4k ohms.

One coil in this pickup reads 8K, so that's correct. 8 plus 8 is 16 correct, but the other coil in this pickup on the 5150 reads 160k, so this LED. Demario thought a coil was working, well it was still working, but it was working as an inductor and also as a standard coil, then Larry Demario finds out about this and says, great, let's make a damaged pickup so that Actually, It wasn't an option, so they set out to make something that sounded good and that he would like. Initially, the neck pickup he was researching into prototypes for this guitar. It was a seam where Duncan Custom Custom is a little bit contradictory because, um, Eddie, obviously.

One of the reasons I had trouble with neck pickups and guitars and why I always used just one was that I always felt that if you EQed the amp for the bridge pickup, the neck pickup sounded weird, so you'd think, well, that means the amp is probably equipped for the brighter bridge pickup, maybe we need to make a brighter and clearer neck pickup, but evidently the first ones Demario came up with for the guitar weren't the right ones at all and when you think about a Duncan Custom Custom Alo 2 magnet it's kind of a hot pickup that's a pretty warm dark pickup, so one thing that De Mario hypothesized was that Eddie seemed to like the degos or the magnetic sound more weak of the Duncan, so you can put a magnet on the pickup and it really type. to demagnetize it so that it acts like you know an older pickup that may have lost some of its strength, but Demario did it another way by using a fully charged Alo 5 magnet but creating an air gap between the magnet and the pole pieces to get an effect similar to the degree sound, but with a clear, open tone and a more stable magnetic field than you can get with a degree magnet, which is why the design ended up winning first.

He liked the custom and they ended up making a The pickup that he liked a little more is the one in this guitar and it has the A5, uh, you know, air space, uh, which, by the way, Demario patented, obviously, Now one of the agreements to make pickups for this guitar was that I wanted the pickups to be exclusive to the guitar. These pads are not available as replacement pads. You can't buy them, they're only made for these guitars, but the closest one supposedly in the Demario line and it's relatively close is supposedly the Air Norton. neck pickup has the A5 magnet with air gap, all that, so the hardest thing to achieve I think was the bridge pickup they set out to make an A5 Alo 5 magnet design but with kind of rich mids and warm treble and something that Eddie liked two style magnets so I don't know how they got there but I guess they were just experimenting with wines and stuff and ended up getting closer and closer with pickups that he liked better and ended up with two pickups that they were happy with and Ed ended up with Steve Luca one day, evidently going back and forth between these two pickups on two different guitars and trying to decide which one was best, obviously Ed was like, I don't know.

I can't say more, I I like them both and Steve said this is the winner so it ended up being the design of this guitar and the other one is actually what Demario now sells as the Tone Zone pickup which is supposed to be very, very close. but slightly different than whatever, you know, the signature pickup is as far as pickup height goes, this was something they obviously worked on, carefully selected by Ed, they're on the low side, actually these pickups , I would say they are not super low. really for me, a medium height, but obviously because I was using the Salono amplifiers, a higher gain preamp, it's kind of a hotter pickup.

I still wanted to be able to clean so I set the pads a little lower and then you can turn them down. volume and get nice clean tones as far as the neck goes, the neck was actually duplicated from his favorite Kramer, the 5150 and who knows if he modified that neck at some point, maybe he sanded it with sandpaper, or whatever whatever you know. change the shape because it's kind of a single neck profile, first of all it's quite narrow at the nut. I think it's like a 1 and 9/16 nut, which is even a little smaller than 1 and 5/8.

I may be wrong about that. but I've read that it's a 1 and 916 and it's kind of an asymmetrical rear profile, so that lends credence to the theory that maybe it's being sanded at some point or maybe it's just been hand-worn. who knows, but they use what is called a tri AIS CNC to precisely duplicate the exact profile. It's quite a vintage feel. In fact, I mean the neck radius is 10 inches, so it's not super straight or flat by any kind of modern standard. The frets are a little small, they used figured maple, this is, you know, kind of like, I don't know, a cross between birdseye and Flame, I guess, and Eddie always liked to finish the neck, so they use a little bit of oil Gunstock, uh, to, you know, get the I feel like it liked it but still provide a little bit of uh, you know, some kind of seal on the neck.

I wasn't happy with the neck heel they first came up with so they modified it and created this five bolt design to provide better access to the top fret, the bridge on these is goto so it's a Floyd with goto license, obviously, um Floyd Rose Originals, they had some kind of exclusive agreement, I think at this point in history with Fender, so it prevented them from using Floyd originals, I think so. They chose this goto version, they haven't touched the woods yet, like I said before, you know, maple neck, but it's a basswood body with a maple top.

I can only hypothesize why tilo, um, is really interesting to mebecause in a way it was You know, that heavy ash body of the original Franken Strat, which is actually a kind of bright wood with a hard sound to the basswood, which is a much warmer Uh wood, so I guess that it's just the evolution of your tone over time. It still has a maple top, so that will give you a little more punch, maybe, but you know, basswood has a very different sound than hard ash. Hard ash is maybe more like maple, so you have alder kind of like that. you know, in the middle there's kind of a neutral wood, I would say, and then yeah, the basswood is maybe the warmest, but you know, it sounds more gainy, maybe as it got older and things that I just wanted, like warmer treble, I think the switch was always Maybe there was a point of contention where he wanted it down here, but once they stopped producing it as the Van Halen model and started producing it as sort of the original Ernie line guitar Ball and called it the axis on which the switch moved down. here you know so this was something that Eddie obviously wanted the switch to be here, it's kind of interesting, in fact some of the early prototypes are just raw basswood.

You can see a photo of one of them on the front of the Young guitar. There is another one that had a humbucker route and the bridge. and two single coils, you can see the guitar assembled in a photograph, but it only has the bridge humbucker, it has no singles on the neck in the middle, well, let's get into the history of this particular guitar and how it came into my hands. It began on a cold winter's day in Guildford, UK, just outside London. I had just had dinner. I was heading back to the place where we played that night.

I was with my friend Henry. I remember a couple approached me outside. who were running down this driveway and yelling at me wait Pete wait a second we want to talk to you so this was a guy named Simon he was with his wife he was obviously a big music fan a big Van fan Halen, um, had been following me for a long time online, knew what a Van Halen nerd I was, said he had a very, very special guitar that he'd had since the '90s that he wanted to get my hands on, we connected on a show, uh, a few. weeks later and he brought the guitar the guitar I consider that the guitar is under my care I consider it Simon's guitar who lent it to me I don't know if he considers it that way but that is what I consider I want you to listen to the However, the story of how he got the guitar is kind of a treat, he's obviously passionate about music.

Van Halen's guitar, here we go, here we are in Dorking Halls, not far from London, actually, this is Mr. Simon's leg, he has a very, very special guitar. um, okay, fan, fan H, I have all the Fantastics records and the t-shirts that go with them, we like Simon, he's a good man, the guitar itself. I became interested when Eddie revealed that he was going to design his own guitar, yes, that was starting guitar magazines. that Tex every month and I got some pictures I thought it was something for me yeah what I decided to do is check it out a little more um and then going back to one time it was MTV's Headbangers dance yeah I remember this and It was a rock. and Metal Show, which is some news and it was about a minute long, this video Yeah, Eddie chatting about the new guitar of him using it with the cigarette and the headstock, yeah, and how nice it was and how balanced it was, we sure had. 30 seconds in the last breath during the sound check uh, after that it plays, so I found the interview that Simon talks about.

I remember watching it too and I think, from a historical perspective, it's cool to get the words straight out of Eddie's horse's mouth right now. Let's take a look at his quest for the perfect sound Eddie has designed his own limited edition guitar. I really want a guitar that he can play on tour and on records. That's exactly what I want. You don't know, not what other companies would think. I want it to be a bit of a boring looking guitar, but at the same time I didn't want something like a crazy looking VX. You know, it's very balanced, it's very comfortable to play and basically what I wanted to do is build like 20 guitars just for myself.

The quality of the guitar is excellent, you know, and I hope that in 10 years it will be respected and seen as Les Paulers are today. I love when he says it's a boring looking guitar, I mean from a marketing perspective it's a Nightmare, not what you'd ever want to say about a new product you're trying to launch, but one beautiful thing I know about Ed was really very honest and had no filter and just blurred things out. and he was honest, you know, there was honesty in it and that pays off in Gold for me, it's something I always appreciate a lot about him.

Then I went to see Van Hanan live at Wy Arena in 1993, okay, and that's the right one. Right now, the tour, uh, and the show starts in the dark and you hear the sound of a call Str go, yeah, obviously P is being played and then all of a sudden the focus is on Eddie and the guitar and that he's always stuck with that image in solo with his own golden guitar, a shiny cordless drill and two and a half hours later, he was completely sold. Shortly after I went to my local music store and stopped by on a Saturday afternoon.

There's one in the window, you said I couldn't believe it. Yeah, I thought it looked good. I actually thought there were quite a few people there and I really don't want to perform in front of several Hay guitarists, so I

left

it. I returned on Wednesday. It sold. Ah, okay, disappointed, but safe. Being a coward, I then decided it was best to go to London, uh, Denmark Street, which was the main street to get all your guitar equipment, also known as Tim Pan Alley, a dangerous place to go with a wallet and yeah , I went there.

Early Saturday morning and I looked down the street and the sun was shining on this particular store and in that window there was this golden man, that man, so I walked into the store and I said, please, I'll try this guitar and he He said to me: Are you serious, he said that everyone wants to pay for this guitar, so I showed him my train ticket, so I have traveled a long way to get this guitar, so I would like to try it, but okay, he said , so I sat down next. That's when he brings it to me, puts it on my lap, plugs it in and, oh my God, I have this guitar.

I didn't know what to play, so I spent 30 seconds tuning it, I pretended it fell, it was perfect, I thought. I just bluffed my way in and I actually think it's something to play with. I finally got some glitches out. I played for about 5 minutes or so and he told me you can show up if you want. I thought he didn't really want to commit to me. I would love to turn it up to 11 and play the Panama intro or something like that it happened, it was already done, it was sold, I mean, it's such a nice thing, the neck was lovely, um, everything, I thought it would be on raw, like this that the credit card came out.

I bought it straight on the train home, straight to my room, plugged into a small 25W amp. I got some instructional DV from Hot Licks, not DVD, actually SK takes at the right time and eh, so I started a Learning my little hints from Van H and that's basically how So Co started, yeah, I love it, yeah, so that's the story basically alright. I guess you should show it to us. Take a look here. Look at that large amount of milk. just amazing man, I remember, I mean this, you know exactly the same time period. I remember seeing the ad for the guitar probably in Guitar Player magazine when it first appeared in Guitar World where it said, you know my latest guitar, oh what did it say?

He said, "I don't remember, but then he said, 'I designed this big difference.' You still have the plastic on the plate. Man, that's crazy. It's like new. I do that too. By the way, I leave plastic on everything. the case is amazing and there you have it thank you very much for watching my video, a little historical video about the model guitar signed by the musician Eddie Van Halen, just a really cool piece of rock and roll guitar history from the history of Van Halen and a special thanks to Simon for allowing me to interview him and for his passion for the guitar, for Van Halen and this guitar in particular I'm sure you can see it yourself if you've made it this far in this video in his story and in. his kind of passion for Van Halen and for music and the guitar, this is what makes the world go around for us and it's really a lot of fun and it's kind of magic, there are people all over the world who have the same feeling and that's something that music does is bring people together and there's this kind of shared community and I think it's wonderful so anyway, hit subscribe if you haven't hit the little bell next to subscribe so you can receive Alerts when you post more videos.

More videos about more fun guitar related things will be coming soon. I'm Pete Thor, take care guys now.