This is the second part of the "Guitar Artists with Great Tone" post. Feel free to check out the first post at anytime. Read on...
Eddie Van Halen - Van Halen
Eddie is a good example to show that great tone mainly comes from fingers, not from expensive gear. In the early days of his success, he used nothing more than just a Frankenstrat: a home-made $300 strat with humbucker pickup on the bridge.
His early Van Halen era tone is called "the Brown sound" which basically comes from a humbucker-equiped strat plugged into a variac-ed Marshall Plexi Super Lead Amp. For those of you who don't know about variac: it's basically voltage transformer that can drop or raise the amount of voltage going into an amp. Thus, the name variac came from "vary AC". It's not really clear whether Eddie lower or raise the voltage using the variac device, he blew lots of amp and cabinet(theoretically can only be caused by raising the voltage using the variac). Nonetheless, many people agree that he lowered the voltage judging from the sound.
Another important thing to mention here: Eddie don't really use gain boxes or preamp before the Marshall Plexi Super Lead. It's just straight Frankenstrat into the Marshall. He did have EQ-ing between the Marshall and the cabinet.
There's no doubt that this guy is another important figure in the world of guitar tone. Definitely check out his early days Van Halen work and you'll be pleased with his classic early-shred era tone.
David Gilmour - Pink Floyd
Another guy with classic rock tone that everyone praised. His great improvisation skill was the main factor of his great tone. His main guitars are mostly Stratocasters and the most famous one that he uses is the black on black '69 Strat with maple neck and DiMarzio FS-1 pickup on the bridge position. Apart from Strat, he also used Les Paul, Telecaster and Esquire.
Talking about amps, he did use Hiwatt 100W heads and Mesa Boogie Mark I during "The Wall" era. For the FX units, he used lots of different units but mostly they were delays, compressors, wahs, choruses and gain boxes.
If you never heard of him before, check out "Comfortably Numb" from "The Wall" album. The solo part is arguably the best solo guitar on the planet!
Lincoln Brewster
Not many people know him, but he's actually a pretty great guitarist with great tone. He is a Christian musician/composer and has recorded many great Christian albums with cool guitar parts. His tone is very fat and warm and received so many praises from his audiences.
He uses Stratocaster mostly, preferably the '57 and '62 reissue Strats equiped with DiMarzio Area series pickups. He also uses Les Paul '59 reissue on some of his works.
This is where the fun starts: He doesn't not use vintage amp with boutique pedals. He only uses a Line 6 POD X3. That's it. You can even download his patch on his website and load it to your X3 to get his tone. Well, actually you will also need his fingers and maybe part of his brain? Haha, just joking...because I tried his patch on my X3 and when I started to play, it doesn't sound like him at all *sigh*... :'(
So once again, it's been proven that the tone lies mostly on the fingers, not on the gear. Check out the song "Today is the Day" and listen to his solo guitar. That solo is just amazing, plus the tone is very pleasing to the ears!
Gary Moore (R.I.P.)
A classic Les Paul guy, his live performance tone has been praised very much for its crazy-fat-warm-sustain quality. He's one of those guy who redefined the term "tone" in the guitar world.
Mostly a Les Paul '59 guy throughout his life(it's Peter Green's LP), but has been seen using other guitars. He used Marshall Guv'nor pedal and Marshall JTM45-reissue amp. That crazy overdrive was mostly from his already overdriven amp combined with the Guv'nor overdrive pedal.
I remember saw him once on a live performance DVD where he got that crazily fat and overdriven tone with just a crazy amount of sustain. That's just fantastic !!! He will always be remembered for his work on the music world, Gary Moore is a legend !
Stay tuned for the final part of the Guitar Artist with Great Tone! The last post will contain the man with the greatest tone in my opinion!
Cheers and God bless :)
So sorry for the very lack of update last week, I went to so many places and didn't have much time to update the blog. Anyway, here I am with a review of DiMarzio PAF 7, the seven string DiMarzio low output PAF style pickup.
