1. Las metáforas
1.1. Las metáforas conceptuales
EDDIE VAN HALEN
PORTRAIT BY KEVIN BALDES
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Guitarist Presents Guitar Gods
You seem very conscious of the fact that it’s your name on the gear…
“Yeah, well, I’m not endorsing a product; it’s my product, y’know? It’s definitely a team effort, I couldn’t do it on my own. But it’s a brand, it’s our company, so to speak. The only variable or possible thing that we have no control over is tubes. Like last tour, I blew a head once, because I had a bad tube. But you know, you get a bad tyre on a car or whatever. We don’t make tubes. If we made EVH tubes, they wouldn’t blow! [laughs]”
You mentioned the Lunchbox earlier. It’s a small amp, but it has your sound…
“Yeah, and that’s the whole point. It’s a 15-watt amp, and it just screams. I mean, you could play The LA Forum with that amp. It’s got a quarter-power switch that brings it down – we used EL84s in it, they’re great tubes. It sounds like a 5150.”
Was it a challenge to scale that sound down?
“Everything’s a challenge, basically. When we come up with the idea, they build it and send it over and then I’ll suggest changes and it’s just back and forth until it’s right. The pickups on a Wolfgang – we had two companies each build us 40 pairs of pickups. So, we had 80 pickups, and I didn’t like any of them! I ask Fender,
‘Who makes your Strat pickups?’ They go, ‘Well, we do them in-house.’ So, I say, ‘Well, let’s build my pickup in-house.’ First time around, first attempt, boom! That’s what I want! Because they listened. The other guys, I don’t know, I guess they just threw me something that they already had so they could say, ‘Hey, Eddie Van Halen uses this model pickup.’ I mean, it wasn’t the point – I would have used anything if it sounded the way I wanted, but it didn’t.”
The power switching thing is kind of a continuation of the whole Variac idea…
“Yeah! On the combo 5150 III, it has a knob that does the same thing. It’s a different circuit, but it’s the same premise, so that’s actually more like a Variac.”
Could you imagine what it would have been like to have had that in your early days?
“Oh, man! These things happen for a reason, I guess…”
The Lunchbox also has a lot of features on it compared with a lot of low-wattage amps. Was it important to keep features like full EQ, the effects loop, and so on?
“Oh, definitely. Our mission is to build a better…
everything. Whatever it is that we approach, it had better be better than our competition.”
And you’ve included Resonance and Presence controls on there. Do you think these are often misunderstood, sometimes forgotten by players?
“Well, you shouldn’t be afraid to fucking turn anything!
That’s my philosophy. I know it’s a Spinal Tap line, but I turn everything up to 15. To the point where it gets so ugly, then I back it off to the point where the ugliness goes away. That normally ends up around 14, not 11!”
More than 11…
“Yeah! And then we continue to push. Just like the burn channel on the 5150 IIIS is hotter than the 5150 III. It’s like a race car, every year you’ve gotta be faster.
It’s never-ending.”
It sounds like you’re never going to stop looking for improvements in tone…
“It’s just innately part of my DNA, you know? It’s who I am. I like people to be able to pick up a Wolfgang and a 5150 and not have to struggle to get a sound. I mean, I see so many people who plug into an amp and they don’t have a clue how to even set it. With a 5150 III, it almost doesn’t matter where you set it, it’s going to sound good. Just turn the volume up; it’s not difficult.
To get a bad sound out of a 5150 is really difficult. I know so many engineers who have a 5150 III in their studio, because they re-amp. When the guitarist leaves they plug it all back through a 5150 III and the guy comes back the next day and goes, ‘What did you do, man? It sounds fucking great!’”
Finally, what’s your advice to aspiring guitar players?
“Obviously, enjoy doing what you’re doing. Bottom line is, you’ve gotta love what you’re doing. There are no rules. I think it’s funny when people take all these music theory classes, it’s exactly that. It’s theory. You have 12 fucking notes, the 13th one is the octave, do whatever you want with them. It’s really that simple. There are no mistakes: I call those passing notes! [laughs]”
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Guitarist Presents Guitar Gods
T
he time is New Year’s Eve 1973, and the place is a small, out-of-the-way club in downtown Sydney. The clientele are awaiting the arrival on-stage of a new band named AC/DC, eager to usher old Father Time out to pasture, and ring in 1974. Not one of them knows what to expect, but when the lead guitarist, standing barely five feet tall, scampers on to the dancefloor dressed as a schoolboy and blasts the intro to the first number, every jaw in the house drops with unabridged surprise.So began a rollercoaster ride that would see AC/DC become one of the planet’s biggest bands.
Angus says: “That gig was really wild. It’s wild on New Year’s Eve anyway, but putting what we were doing on top of all the seasonal stuff just made it wilder!”
As we all know, AC/DC are revered as a live act, with Angus and either Brian or Bon vying for the audience’s attention. And you can’t fail to notice the diminutive axeman during an AC/DC show, as he never stops running around for the entire duration. The only time he pauses is to either moon at the crowd, spin around on his back, take a lungful of oxygen from a backstage cylinder, or simply gurn with pleasure. Apparently, it takes him around six hours to come back down to earth.
But is he actually conscious of what he does up there?
“Not really… I concentrate on that and whatever comes, does so by itself, rather than me thinking, ‘Now move left then right.’ Then it becomes robotic. I get my rocks off on the guitar and I’m lucky that I hear what’s going on behind me on stage and I can’t help but move.
Even if you gave someone else the guitar – if it wasn’t me – they’d be moving, too.”
Although our Angus is no Holdsworth in the technique department, he certainly has an ear for both blues and rock ’n’ roll, whatever you may think, and his influences come straight from the golden era of this type of music.
“Good rock ’n’ roll is hard to come by. You still get The Stones going out there and doing it, and they know a party tune when they hear it, and that’s what rock ’n’
roll is all about. I grew up on Little Richard and Chuck
Berry. I never really plugged in to Elvis Presley, not even The Beatles. I didn’t get off on all the She Loves You…
stuff; it was just pop, and used to make me cringe. When they played a rock ’n’ roll tune, they were cooking.
I mean, even John Lennon said that The Beatles were a great band, but they never wrote Great Balls Of Fire.”
Newcomers to AC/DC have a hard time different-iating between albums and even different songs, as they all have a tendency to sound fairly similar, to say the least. Yet there’s something primal about the sheer strength of the rhythm that each offering possesses.
“I like doing what I’m doing. I like rock and I always find a challenge in it. There’s one great thing that stands out on guitar for me, and that’s Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode. You hear that and you immediately know what it is. For me, that’s the thing; that’s what it’s all about.
If you can come up with something like that, great. As long as it’s different but it’s still you, that’s the challenge.
There are always new things that you can plug into.
You can always try to find new ways of looking at things.
Hey, you might even get a Johnny B Goode,” he laughs.
Angus’s AC/DC have remained unchanged by the fickle music business, and have continued to sell albums by the container load, regardless of who’s in vogue. Mr Young doesn’t think all that much of what’s out there at the moment anyway.
“Some people plug into an era and say, ‘Well, this is today’s music,’ but what I hear now and what I’ve heard over the years hasn’t impressed me as much as the stuff I grew up on,” he explains. “I always felt that the stuff people would write about, or put on TV, was rather safe and acceptable.”
With titles such as Sink The Pink, Let Me Put My Love Into You and Given The Dog A Bone, the lyrical content of the band’s songs is often less than ‘acceptable’ to staid moral society, but you can’t fail to realise that this is tongue-in-cheek.
Angus explains: “All we did in those days was play half a dozen Little Richard and Chuck Berry tunes, then throw in our own and play them ‘as is’. We had bigger amplifiers, but it was the same deal. We weren’t reinventing the wheel, you know?”