Specs on EVH wolfgang pickups

[Ronsonic]

Oh no, it's a lot more fun just to parrot internet buzz, hearsay and sheer speculation...

As Seinfeld said: "If you believe it, it's not a lie anymore!"

There's another layer of BS here as well. Eddie Van Halen used to make shit up and magazine writers would dutifully and earnestly report his not-entirely-sober statements. People would then blow up their amps and fuck up guitars and we would get to fix them.

"Dude. 'Brown' in an electrical sense means a low voltage condition, not a high voltage. This is what we call a clue?"

"But Eddy sez...."

"Didn't Eddy also say he used to turn his back on the audience so people wouldn't know what he was doing when he was tapping? Maybe he doesn't want people to know what he's doing?"

This conversation was repeated in many shops by many techs.

There's information in this thread about the famed pickup that I am comfortable believing. Both from the people who have examined it, have access to information from an examination and from careful winders who have worked their way back from the resulting sound. I don't know that any feel obliged to tell everything they know, but they're credible guys who with so much opportunity to not say anything at all, do share information. They've got no reason to lie. But anything Eddy himself has said .... I'm not buying it.

[dai h.]

Cleaning pots very definitely changes the feel. The original grease is either thinned by cleaners that contain a compatible oil or washed away by the other cleaners.

As for consistency in manufacture, it isn't just the viscosity of the grease, but quantity and placement.

So there is some real world technical issue(or issues) that keep the results from being particularly consistent?

Re: cleaning pots, I remember once I used a cleaner that was basically (AFAIK) just alcohol and propellant, and using it resulted in a frozen pot (in hindsight, I had apparently washed away all of the damping grease).

Also, for some reason information about "damping grease" was really hard to find (when I searched for what the lubricant was). It's there in bits (maker sites, some places selling the stuff for cameras, etc.) but didn't really seem to be mentioned at gtr. and amp bbses. I also remember buying some stuff supposedly for lubricating pots (for a gtr. EQ pedal's sliders or something) but it just felt wrong (more gritty, not the same feel as the original stuff) so I was wondering for the longest time what "the stuff" was.

[RedHouse]

I install a lot of CTS pots in guitars and often have to remove the back's and swipe out about 1/2 the grease in there, then re-assemble and install.

It makes the pot turn more easily and closer replicates the feel of an aged pot.

I call it "stiction" when the grease creates that harder-to-turn condition.

[dai h.]

Thx. So *more* grease can make things worse?

(Sry if I'm coming off as overly inqusitive. If I had all the answers already though, I wouldn't be asking!)

[RedHouse]

Thx. So *more* grease can make things worse?

(Sry if I'm coming off as overly inqusitive. If I had all the answers already though, I wouldn't be asking!)

Well at least in the case of CTS pots, they put a dob of some kind of grease that isn't very smeary. This may not apply to these Bourns guitar pots, guess it's time to order some in and see if they're better than CTS.

Also be aware that when you solder to the backs of pots, you cook the grease a bit and that's not the best thing to do, if you have a choice, solder onto the side of the can away from where the grease is.

You can see here where the grease is on the back side of the cans.
(borrowing pics from the LPF, they'll probably ban me)

Sometimes when a customer was really used to (and likes) old pots which turn easy, I even open the new pots up and slightly bend the spring-contact (wiper) so it doesn't press as hard, be carefull doing this though you can get it too weak where it doesn't provide good contact.

Here's what Gibson, Centralab, and CTS pots they look like inside, and here you can see the wide ring-shaped bearing surface that presses against the inside of the back cover (can), it's the large circular shape on the left pot. That ring gets the grease and if the gease is sticky it has much stiction leverage against turning the pot easily.
(with your pinky)

Strangely enough some CTS pots have no grease inside at all, and the hard to turn'ness comes from only the spring-wiper pressure as in the pic below.

[dai h.]

thanks for taking the time to link up the pics. Interesting point about soldering heat possibly effecting the grease. I kept thinking that soldering to back of pots should be fast to reduce any chance of melting plastic parts inside--the grease aspect was completely off my radar.

re: the Bourns (which I think is conductive plastic). What I wondered about the "extra smoothness" was whether if this was more marketing than an extra special quality expressed (though I'd imagine the quality of the pot is good). I do remember having a Bourns conductive plastic wah pot (from a Roger Mayer kit) which did feel smoother than the Dunlop/Clarostat Hot Potz and somewhat recently I found a conductive plastic pot in surplus, and I did notice that it had a noticably looser/smoother feel so makes you wonder if more smoothness relative to carbon is just something instrinsic to the material(the conductive plastic element the wiper rides across)--maybe carbon is physically grainier.

[5150mod]

I've looked into eddie's VH1 pickup for a few years and it ain,t no Gibson PAF .
The pickups he used then were Ibanez Super 70(7.9K alnico8) in his destroyer and a Mighty Mite medium output around 12K (Mighty Mite only had a couple of pickups around at that time)in his black&white franky.
He might have used the neck pickup off the destroyer(super 70)in the b&w franky as he took it out of the destroyer at some point after VH1.A lot of people know this and Super 70 prices are pretty high because of this.
He was changing pickups all the time in the early days.
So chasing a PAF clone for that VH1 tone is off the mark.The tone is more in slaving a fully dimed out plexi into another amps power amp section ,making the plexi an overdrive pedal

[copperheadroads]

Yes there is some new info on this
MetroAmp.com Forum • View topic - Some thoughts on PICK UPs

[big_teee]

It all sounds like a bunch of gossip and hear say to me!
I'll go with the frankfalbo explanation, it is much more credible and believable.
Also I built the A2 pickup, and it sure had the franky sound to me!
Rock on!
Terry

[RedHouse]

Yes there is some new info on this
MetroAmp.com Forum • View topic - Some thoughts on PICK UPs

I'm not really into the VH thing (I like the first few albums) although I do remember the fuss when I first heared him on the radio back in the late 70's and he played at the Paramount in Seattle, he was unorthodox in his style like Beck.

What I do like though is these guy's passion about digging through all the mis-information trying to get to the bottom of the real story.

It's a shame really that (a few) players back in the day (Page/Gibbons/Halen etc) were so insecure about "whatever" that they actually gave mis-information during press interviews so others couldn't get their "sound". Back then guitar players thought their success was all due to their sound and not their playing. Might have something to do with Tom and his new Boston sound at the time I suppose, man I remember we all tried to figure that one out right away so we could do Boston covers in the taverns.

[David Schwab]

It all sounds like a bunch of gossip and hear say to me!
I'll go with the frankfalbo explanation, it is much more credible and believable.
Also I built the A2 pickup, and it sure had the franky sound to me!
Rock on!
Terry

Yeah, it's a bunch of crap. Ed used the Ibanez on tracks that didn't have the Floyd. Ibanez pickups don't use A8 magnets. Ed stopped using the Ibanez because after he cut the body with a chain saw the guitar didn't sound the same. The Frankie body is not a Charvel, it's from Lynn Ellsworth (Boogie Bodies). All this stuff has been in interviews with him in Guitar Player mag. He also never ran his plexy into another amp as a preamp, he reduced the voltage to his amp with a variac.

And in the end, why do people care?

[RedHouse]

...And in the end, why do people care?...

Well IMHO (and it's just an opinion, not an arguement) it's because he was fairly unique in his time.

He was the next "thing" going on back in the mid 70's as far as hot riffs and grabbing/using sounds (much as Hendrix did) in his songs, before Eddie things like the pig-squeel/chirp and the tapping and the monster flanging etc were being done but none of it was really knitted into the style, oh yeah Jeff Beck was doing tapping and flanging stuff before Eddie, but just like in Hendrix's case when he came along feedback was certainly being used but as a sci-fi/acid-trip type effect, but no one had really knitted it into their tone/lead/presentation/style.

On one hand I can hear ya on the who really cares view but on the other hand I can also really understand those guys who like Eddie's early stuff and are "into it" much as I was with Page and Hendrix and thier old days, these guys who are digging Eddies thing well it's their generation so I say let 'em have it.

After all the smoke clears, he (Eddie) will go down in history and one of those who came along and things were never the same after. I realise he was in-play in the SoCal scene at the same time as others were, Rhoads and Lynch and others, but it was Eddie and his crew that rose above the din and really pushed the second wave of hard rock forward moving it away from the 60's thing into what we now recognise as the 70's thing.

The previous was just an opinion, had this been a real argument oxygen masks would fall from the ceiling and we would all take the hunker-down crash position ....this was only an opinion, YMMV.

[Electricdaveyboy]

I tried the Super 70..

Yes got one and I tried it in my Explorer and it sounds close to the first VH recordings.
It nails the You Really Got Me tones and most rhytm guitar sounds from the early records were no wangbar was used.
I do not think it is the Franky pickup, it was in his Ibanez Destroyer before he cut it out.
The Super 70 is too weak for a strat type tremolo guitar.
That Super 70 pickups needs some wood.....

[copperheadroads]

Now !!!! Where did i put that piece of paper with Eddie's phone number on it

[David Schwab]

Well IMHO (and it's just an opinion, not an arguement) it's because he was fairly unique in his time.

He was, and he is. He's a very good musician. But getting the same pickup is not going to make you sound like him. Like that old story about Ted Nugent trying out his guitar and amp and all at a sound check and was surprised he sounded nothing like EVH. He said he sounded like Nugent. Ed probably used a half dozen different pickups and guitars and he always sounds the same.

I guess I bought a Rickenbacker because I liked McCartney and Squier, but I didn't try and sound like either of them. And there's an example of two people using pretty much the same instrument and pickups and not sounding anything alike.