{"id":480,"date":"2020-12-09T05:58:51","date_gmt":"2020-12-09T05:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/craftofmanhood.com\/\/?p=480"},"modified":"2020-12-09T05:58:53","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T05:58:53","slug":"what-guitars-did-eddie-van-halen-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/craftofmanhood.com\/what-guitars-did-eddie-van-halen-play\/","title":{"rendered":"What Guitars Did Eddie Van Halen Play?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
The late great and never to be forgotten Eddie Van Halen passed away on the 6th of October 2020 at 65. To say he will be missed is an understatement, and he personally molded and sculpted the way I play guitar, from the sound and tone I try to achieve his technique style. There is nothing about Eddie Van Halen that guitarists still don’t try to imitate today, especially his tone. In his passing, I decided to dedicate this article to his guitars that served as his instrument to bring love, joy, happiness, comfort, and strength to tens of millions worldwide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Van Halen played, designed, and built most of his own guitars, which included the Frankentrat, the Frankenstrat 2, the Bumblebee, The Shark, the EVH Music Man, Krammer signature series 5150, the Steinberger GL2T, and a few more guitars designed with mixed parts. However, these were Eddie’s main guitars that he used throughout his career.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In this article, I will go over a bit about Eddie’s guitar history. Then we will look into all the guitars that the virtuoso played and recorded with throughout his illustrious career. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you don’t already know, Eddie was famous for designing and creating most of his guitars from an early age. If you think about Eddie, you probably think about his bastardized fender style guitar, red with white and black stripes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, over the course of Eddie’s carrier, he painted, designed, and built many guitars, finally turning to companies such as Ernie Ball, Kramer, Peavey, and Fender to create build his guitars. At the same time, he sat in on the design of them all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eddie Van Halen was known by all and said to have the greatest guitar tone ever. Running his bastardized guitars through his Marshall Plexi amplifiers and later his Peavey 5150’s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eddie had a wide variety of guitars, and that is what we will have a look at now. Enjoy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n This was not Eddies first guitar (which we will cover later) but rather the guitar that he is known for and delivered him that signature sound that we all came to know and love. Wanted a Fender guitar with a Humbucker because he liked how a Fender played but the sound of the humbuckers from a Gibson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Back in the 70’s they did not make or sell these guitars, so Eddie took it upon himself to build his own. Eddie Picked up a contoured ash style fender body that was cheap and a two-piece maple neck, then proceeded to chisel out the body in the bridge position to make way for a PAF humbucking pickup that came from a ruined 1958 Gibson ES-335.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eddie even dumped the pickup into paraffin wax to reduce feedback. He never knew what to paint on it, as he said in a few interviews, so what he did was get electrical tape and a can of spray paint. The guitar ended up being white with black stripes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is how the most iconic guitar in rock history named the Farankenstrat was made. Not from one that was bought off a shelf in a store but from a young kid wanting to create a vision he saw in his head.<\/p>\n\n\n\nEddie Van Halen’s guitars overview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Frankenstrat<\/h2>\n\n\n\n