Brown Sound in a Box

He invented the superstrat, an electric guitar for shredding, a masterful style he pioneered. Of course, it's Eddie Van Halen, one of the world's greatest guitarists. Brown Sound is his signature sound, and we will try to recreate it today.

It all started in California in the first half of the twentieth century. Jazz developed rapidly. The musicians hunted for increasingly complex chords and incredible improvisations.

The usual banjo and mandolin no longer satisfied performing needs, and more and more jazz musicians became interested in the Spanish guitar. It has as many as six strings, at least 19 frets, and quart tuning, setting the mood for serious performance.

But the guitar turned out to be too quiet compared to wind instruments and pianos. Therefore, luthiers began to assemble jazzboxes with a body width of 16 to 19 inches—real mammoths! Pictured is an 18-inch Gibson Super 400.

Jazzboxes had an arched top body, similar to a cello, with f-holes instead of the traditional round ones for guitars. Jazzmen installed thick strings on them, 12 or even 13-gauge. The standard scale length was 25.5 inches, like the future Fender Stratocaster.

In 1921, Gibson began installing truss rods in the necks to withstand such high tension on steel strings. Among other things, this made it possible to create a low string height above the frets and subsequently create thin, fast necks.

Thanks to the truss rod, electric guitar virtuosos were able to improve. Especially since Gibson began producing instruments with a shorter scale of 24 ¾ inches, which is easier to bend.

Then, guitars received an electromagnetic pickup and a tube amplifier, and guitarists wanted their sound to be even more loud and overloaded.

The hollow guitar body, critical in the pre-amplification era, became a nuisance: it was susceptible to microphone proximity effects and self-oscillation.

The hollow body also nearly killed sustain, as its essence was to transmit the strings' vibrational energy to the air. As a result, the sound is louder and brighter, but at the same time, it fades faster.

The first experiment in creating an electric guitar without a resonator body involved a lap steel guitar played with a slide. Finally, in 1950, Leo Fender created the Broadcaster, the first true, commercially successful solid-body electric guitar, which soon evolved into our beloved Telecaster.

While Gibson always created guitars as art pieces, Fender instruments were originally conceived as DIY kits. When the frets wear out, you can simply buy a new neck and replace it by removing four screws. There is no need to take your guitar to a luthier and wait for the repair, having no instrument on hand and thus being left with no income if you are a professional musician.

It is worth noting that the Broadcaster's neck had a serious technical flaw—the absence of an anchor. The Telecaster has this drawback eliminated. Vintage Fender guitars require removing the neck to tighten or loosen the truss rod. In contrast, more modern guitars have an Allen key screw in the base of the headstock to adjust the truss rod.

In general, Leo Fender's guitar parts were designed to be removable and attached with screws. This meant that the instrument could be purchased as a modular kit. One can put a humbucker instead of a single-coil and a Floyd Rose instead of a Fender tremolo machine with six self-tappers.

This is exactly what Eddie Van Halen did when creating his Frankenstrat. After all, he was a talented musician, artist, and craftsman. And he came up with the first superstrat in history, a guitar for the ultimate rock and metal.

The Superstrat badly needed super distortion, and we're not talking about the DiMarzio pickup with the same name. Eddie Van Halen's secret "brown sound" resulted from a rather complex sequence of electronic audio signal conversions, which is no longer a secret today.

Happy concertgoers and inspired TV viewers who followed Eddie's every move with bated breath saw a full stack of Marshalls with a Plexi head amp behind him. It was an excellent device, but many people had it.

Van Halen's secret recipe consisted of several ingredients. First, an MXR equalizer was hooked between the guitar and the amp input. It allowed Eddie to fine-tune the gain structure so that some frequency bands were boosted to hard clipping while others passed through the amp relatively unaffected.

Secondly, Variac's variable transformer connected the amplifier to a 120-volt electrical grid. It was powered by a voltage of 90 volts, 75 percent of the required. The tube cathodes were cooler, and the anode voltage was lower than during regular operation of the amplifier. This had a dramatic effect on the nature of the overload.

Thirdly, it was not the cabinets connected to the amplifier's output but the dummy load. This was not a modern reactive electronic load like the Torpedo Captor X, which simulates the impedance of real speakers. It was just a powerful tapped resistor providing the audio with the required amplitude.

Next, the signal went to the pedalboard with the flanger, phaser, and tape delay. From there, it goes to the MOSFET power amplifier H&H V800 and only then to the cabinets. Let's say Eddie implemented an effects loop, which his Marshall Plexi did not have.

Fourth, the cabinets were loaded with a specific combination of different speakers, which Eddie changed from time to time.

Van Halen subsequently moved on to use the Soldano SLO 100. Then he developed his signature 5150 amp with Peavey and the guitar Wolfgang, named after his son. Later, in collaboration with Fender, he created the EVH brand.

I had the EVH 5150 III lunchbox, which is just a great amp. Interestingly enough, the best room sound came not from the Celestion Greenback speaker but from the nameless black 12-inch speaker from the first-generation Fender Mustang II digital combo amp. I got the body and the speaker from this amp without electronics, and they became my favorite closed-back cabinet.

I also had a toy-like EVH 5150 III microstack. If we could add an output jack to an external cabinet, we'd feel some Van Halen vibes, but I didn't like the sound itself.

Unlike the Orange Crush Mini, this EVH product is more of a gimmick than a guitar amp. However, once I came across a YouTube video where this microstack sounded pretty good in an empty concrete room. Which once again proves the impact of the environment on the sound of an electric guitar.

As you can already tell, I like Eddie Van Halen's guitar tone. I don’t so much strive to recreate it as I look for inspiration. That's why building today's pedal is especially interesting for me.

In this diagram, we do not see the usual operational amplifiers. Instead, five JFETs are used here: four in two mu stages and one in a conventional common-source stage. The sixth JFET is responsible for the Millennium bypass. It simply turns off the LED when the gate of the transistor is connected to the ground through the volume control and lights the LED up when it's not.

A mu stage is a cascade with an active load. In a simplified way, transistors Q1 and Q3 operation can be represented as current stabilizers. After all, a JFET is a current stabilizer controlled by gate voltage.

Resistors R4 and R5 form a virtual ground—a voltage source equal to half the supply voltage. It is AC grounded by capacitor C2.

We also see power filters. The C8R10C10 U-filter filters the power supply for the entire pedal, and the R7C6—for the first mu stage.

The active load transistor gates Q1 and Q3 are connected to virtual ground through resistors with significant resistances (R2 and R9). Capacitors C1 and C9 are connected between the sources and gates. Therefore, our active loads are not just current stabilizers but also active filters.

R6 is a gain control, and C7 is a treble bypass capacitor. The peculiarities of human hearing are such that when the volume is reduced, the sound seems duller, which is why the volume and gain controls are equipped with such frequency compensation in many devices.

Q5 serves as the output buffer, and R15 is the tone control. In the up position, the pedal outputs more high frequencies, and in the lower position, more low ones.

This is what this distortion sounds like with a Squier Bullet Mustang HH guitar and an Orange Micro Terror amp. I hear hints of the EVH sound in it. Still, it's more reminiscent of the Soldano SLO100 (which Eddie also used until the 5150 was developed).

Despite my stages and good power filters, the distortion is hairy. It must be put in a shielded housing for it to work typically. But even then, this circuit retains a fairly significant noise level.

However, these imperfections do not spoil the sound but make it more alive. If you want no noise, then an EVH 5150 amp is waiting for you to buy it. Fender engineers put a lot of effort into shielding and routing the boards of these high-gain amplifiers so that they are almost completely noise-free.