After The death of this guitar player, Larry Dimarzio wrote a remembering tribute pdf about this guitarist and it passed almost unnoticed in the guitar community.
The story is so crazy that you begin to ask yourself if what happens to this guitar player is like not random but litteral fate and that his life was entirely dicted by it...
what if i told you that this guitar had a pickup reading 180k ohms :
it was probably used to record the albums 1984 and driver down the beat it solo too.
Well for many years many websites and many die hard fans believed that what was in this guitar was a custom custom from duncan because there have always been crazy rumors about him. however maricela juarez the lady who hand winds pickups at duncan's for the custom shop told an administrator on the forum that the pickup was a JB. Because the pickup sounded so different people didn't want to believe her, but she was right. This lady knows what she does.
Prior to all this questionning there was a Guy named larry dimarzio which had to work with music man to create a pickup for the new Van Halen guitar the Music Man Axis.
So Dimarzio went crazy when he entered eddie's studio he brought some test pickups with him and tested many of Eddie's gear. The kramer 5150 was the most comfortable guitar and it sounded really good even unplugged. Eddie told them that his actual favorite pickup was the one inside it. here comes the crazy story.
Eddie was known to disassemble pickups and improve them his own ways. For example he was one of the firsts to wax pot humbuckers. Another thing he used to do was to shield the pickup coils with copper foil... Yes...
Eddie told Dimarzio that once the pickup caught the high E string and that it literraly changed the tone and that eddie liked it better that way...
well the story becomes even wilder haha here is what larry dimarzio said after inspecting this JB :
"Ed wanted me to make the new DiMarzio bridge pickup to be as good or better than the damaged JB. After assuring him I wouldn’t change or d age it, I asked Ed if he would let me remove the pickup to measure it.
The DC resistance of a JB reads about 16.4K Ohms. Ed’s pickup measured 180K Ohms! Measuring the coils individually produced a normal reading on one coil (8K Ohms) and about 160K Ohms on the other. (Something peculiar happened when they were connected.) I think the 160K coil, being neither open nor shorted out, was functioning as an inductor as well as a standard coil. The damaged coil was clearly functioning, as the pickup still cancelled 60-cycle hum as well.
When we compared it with a stock JB in one of the Music Man prototypes, Ed didn’t like it as much. The damaged JB sounded more solid and focused, especially in the mids, and the highs were fatter.
Larry DiMarzio: When Steve told me that the pickup still worked but was reading 180K, I said, “Great, we’re going to build Eddie Van Halen a broken pickup?”
after this they made many pickups to test for the axis and dudley sterling and Steve lukather went along to test them with eddie. They couldn't chose but finaly lukather had a preference and went with it.
Here is the PDF about the whole story and it contains beautifull pictures of eddies guitar vault :
The story is so crazy that you begin to ask yourself if what happens to this guitar player is like not random but litteral fate and that his life was entirely dicted by it...
what if i told you that this guitar had a pickup reading 180k ohms :
it was probably used to record the albums 1984 and driver down the beat it solo too.
Well for many years many websites and many die hard fans believed that what was in this guitar was a custom custom from duncan because there have always been crazy rumors about him. however maricela juarez the lady who hand winds pickups at duncan's for the custom shop told an administrator on the forum that the pickup was a JB. Because the pickup sounded so different people didn't want to believe her, but she was right. This lady knows what she does.
Prior to all this questionning there was a Guy named larry dimarzio which had to work with music man to create a pickup for the new Van Halen guitar the Music Man Axis.
So Dimarzio went crazy when he entered eddie's studio he brought some test pickups with him and tested many of Eddie's gear. The kramer 5150 was the most comfortable guitar and it sounded really good even unplugged. Eddie told them that his actual favorite pickup was the one inside it. here comes the crazy story.
Eddie was known to disassemble pickups and improve them his own ways. For example he was one of the firsts to wax pot humbuckers. Another thing he used to do was to shield the pickup coils with copper foil... Yes...
Eddie told Dimarzio that once the pickup caught the high E string and that it literraly changed the tone and that eddie liked it better that way...
well the story becomes even wilder haha here is what larry dimarzio said after inspecting this JB :
"Ed wanted me to make the new DiMarzio bridge pickup to be as good or better than the damaged JB. After assuring him I wouldn’t change or d age it, I asked Ed if he would let me remove the pickup to measure it.
The DC resistance of a JB reads about 16.4K Ohms. Ed’s pickup measured 180K Ohms! Measuring the coils individually produced a normal reading on one coil (8K Ohms) and about 160K Ohms on the other. (Something peculiar happened when they were connected.) I think the 160K coil, being neither open nor shorted out, was functioning as an inductor as well as a standard coil. The damaged coil was clearly functioning, as the pickup still cancelled 60-cycle hum as well.
When we compared it with a stock JB in one of the Music Man prototypes, Ed didn’t like it as much. The damaged JB sounded more solid and focused, especially in the mids, and the highs were fatter.
Larry DiMarzio: When Steve told me that the pickup still worked but was reading 180K, I said, “Great, we’re going to build Eddie Van Halen a broken pickup?”
after this they made many pickups to test for the axis and dudley sterling and Steve lukather went along to test them with eddie. They couldn't chose but finaly lukather had a preference and went with it.
Here is the PDF about the whole story and it contains beautifull pictures of eddies guitar vault :
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