BAASnotes.com – Bay Area Audiophile Society

Van Halen “Like a Dog”

Member Stephan S pointed this article out to me.

It’s an interesting read about EVH, his new “signature” guitar, and the rock guitar industry in general.

I was particularly entertained by this passage:

“Ed’s like a dog,” Matt Bruck, Van Halen’s longtime guitar tech, says with a sigh. “He hears things that the rest of us don’t.”

And there were those Ed-isms employed to try to explain his complaints, if poorly. “Ed was always saying, ‘It needs to sound more like nut butter,’ ” Bruck says.

“Nut butter, yeah,” says Fender’s Chip Ellis with a laugh. He was entrusted with building the Wolfgang prototype that will be manufactured en masse. “What does that mean?”

The duo recall listening to the boss wring out pickups — those rectangular, coiled-wire devices that amplify a string’s vibration — for eight months straight. “Ed can even hear the difference between a guitar plugged into a 5-foot cable and a 10-foot cable,” Bruck says. “Nuts.”

For Ellis, the experience proved both a dream and a nightmare, which he documented in a diary. One typical entry reflects Van Halen’s uncanny sensibilities.

May 27, 2006: “Ed called tonight. Said the (prototype) guitar played great and sounded not great. He hasn’t even plugged it in and tells me it doesn’t sound right. What? Then he says, ‘This isn’t basswood, is it? What did you use, alder?’ … I did use alder. I can’t believe he heard that (difference).”

For his part, Van Halen shrugs when asked how he perceives such sonic subtleties in everything from a slab of wood to a wire.

“Sound is a funny thing,” he says, his back to a wall of amplifiers and speakers carrying the EVH logo. “It’s like color to a blind person, I guess. You just feel it instead of seeing it.”

Remind you of anyone you know?

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