Hello Guys,

i've been researching about Edward Van Halen Brown sound for 10 years. I mean the VH1 and VH2 albums.

I've tried many brown sound amps like the bray 4550, many plexis, sv20 and so on. I've come close with them but there always seemed to lack something.

because of that i've learn how to build amps to fulfill my quest and i think that by accident i found what was perhaps going on in eddie's amp. I believe i've perhaps built the best brown sound sounding amp and i want to share the mods i used with marshall.

I believe it was modded because in a biography released by journalist Neil Zlozlower José arredondo is interviewed and he said he created eddies tone with him and that the amp was really modded. José was at the end of his life and stopped modding amps he had nothing to win. Moreover eddie never denied this claimed from his biography. Then there is Rudy leiren which was eddie amp tour tech, josé was more the modding amp tech. Rudy leiren also admitted that the amp was modded. 

If Steve Fryette, Mike Solano, John Suhr and Dave friedman said that the amp was stock it's only because josé put the amp back to stock. Dave friedman even admitted in a live stream that half of the components were not stock but some had stock marshall values. here is a picture of Eddie's amp on the top (by dave friedman), the bottom one is a stock super lead 68 12309 8 numbers appart. :

See those cherry drop capacitors ? those were used a lot by José to mod amps. It's like one of his signatures.

It has been 2 years that i build amps and this year while experimenting with mods with Eddie's amp preamp specs (the ones leaked by dave friedman) i've managed to get closer than anything i've heard and it happened by accident. I inspired my mods by José arredondo mods (he was ed's amp tech from 71-72 until 1979 after being diagnosed with cancer). I was modding my amp and i forgot to solder something back and i turned the amp on and suprise i got the brown sound with this extremely rich and thick distortion. I was like wtf... ?!!!!!!!!!! then i checked my board and saw what happened. 

i'm not claiming it's the exact same mods eddie had but i believe it's close enough to offer to sell a brown sound amp for guitar players. It's way better than any brown sound amp that i've  ever tried for Vh1 and Vh2.

i've even made a website related to the tone (there are many corrections and updates to do) 

I really dig everything about his tone his humbuckers etc. For example i recently learnt that eddie used 12H30 55hz blackbacks combined with 20w greenbacks and got the confirmation by someone selling original cabinets owned and played by eddie during his early tours. The JBL d120f were there only to fill voids on the top cabs.

His first frankie humbucker was probably a dimarzio paf then when it got painted he used an overwound PAF from an es-335. The Bumblebee used an overwound dimarzio super distortion from the 70's. He later swapped the ceramic magnet for the one in the paf (which is probably alnico V). He then asked Duncan to clone the super distortion in black and decided to swap to alnico 2. This is the humbucker for fair warning and women and children first. for 1984 the kramer 5150, it was a damaged duncan JB reading 180k instead of the usual 16k this was recently confirmed by larry dimarzio

I wanted to share my findings with marshall amplification. if Marshall doesn't want it then i'll probably make the layout free access for everyone... and only those who will get their amp modded will be able to enjoy it...

it would be a waste to not take advantage of this and to give guitar players an opportunity to get this sound.

So is there any possibility to contact your team of research and development concerning guitar amplification ?