There’s just something about the 3×10″ 5E7 Bandmaster that drives vintage-Fender nuts gaga. Yea, that's serious.If ever there was an amp to make a fan of tweeds go wobbly in the knees, this is it. Okay, lot's of mind blowing info here, but the part about writing all of the first three albums on the Bandmaster. That Bandmaster was more important than my Marshall head, because I wrote everything with it.” When I wrote the intro to ‘Women in Love,’ he was sitting there with his ears perked up, like the RCA Victor dog. My dog Monty would sit down next to me, and he dug it. It was really quiet, so my mom couldn’t hear me, but it sounded amazing. I wrote all of the early Van Halen songs for the first three albums with that amp, playing quietly in my room. “The real beauty of that amp is how many songs I wrote with it. Everyone says that you can’t do that because the transformer will blow, but the amp never blew up. I could turn everything all the way up, which is what I always did anyway, and there was this small amount of bleed that sounded exactly like when the regular output is turned all the way up, but it’s really quiet. She’d always go, ‘Why do you have to make that high crying noise?’ “If you plug the cabinet into the external speaker output instead of the regular output, it’s really quiet. In the little house in Pasadena that I grew up in, my mom always hated what she called ‘that high crying noise’-in other words, soloing. I already had the Marshall, but I had not stumbled onto the Variac thing yet, so I would use the Bandmaster through the Marshall cabinet when we gigged at smaller clubs like Gazzarri’s. do it now, before it's gone forever! Okay, on to the Bandmaster! Here's Eddie's actual Bandmaster, the one we're talking about: Here's what Eddie had to say about his 1963 Blond Bandmaster: Go ahead, take a moment to go read it right now, I won't be offended, and since Guitar Player's future is in serious question as of this writing. Sadly, that awesome magazine has went the way of the dinosaurs, but parts of the interview are still available at this site by Guitar Player Magazine. There is SO MUCH great info there! Nuts & bolts stuff about his guitars and amps, the stuff we gear heads relish. The hands-down best Eddie Van Halen interview ever conducted was done by Guitar Aficionado Magazine in their Jan/Feb 2014 issue. Okay, that's a stretch, right? This however, is not: Eddie's most important amp at the time of the first THREE Van Halen albums was NOT a Marshall at all, nope, it was a blond Fender Bandmaster! Holy crap. We all know that Jim Marshall basically copied a Fender Bassman when he had his first amp designed, so in that way Eddie's famed Marshall amps are. However, as a SERIOUS fan of Leo Fender, this last gem I uncovered may just be the coolest of them all. Cool, but while researching that I stumbled upon some seriously interesting tidbits about his first Frankenstein guitar, which of course led to another blog. It started with a simple request to do a blog on Eddie Van Halen's use of a Variac. Okay, I never imagined how far this journey would take me. Eddie Van Halen Secret Amp: the Fender Bandmaster!
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