Eddie Van Halen Guitar Timeline And History
After 35 years of both buying and building various electric guitars from different parts and pieces, trying to create a Eddie Van Halen Guitar history is almost impossible. Van Halen and his brother and co-founder of the hard rock band Van Halen, started playing as a group in 1974. During this time Eddie had been tinkering around with several different guitar bodies and neck configurations while developing his trademark “brown sound”.
One of the first of his guitar creations was a black and white Fender Stratocaster that he started taking apart while tinkering around in his garage at home. Urban legend says that Eddie wanted to change out the single coil bridge pickup so that he could attach a humbucker pickup instead.
Instead of making a new and bigger slot for the pickup, he just hard mounted it directly to solid wood body in the bridge position which improved both the tone with less sustain. But after this radical change, he couldn’t figure out how to reconnect all the wiring so he just wired everything into a single volume knob.
Then he attached a neck from an old Charvel guitar, which was actually constructed by Lynn Ellsworth of Boogie Bodies guitars, but who was selling some of their stock under the Charvel label. Once that was done, Eddie attempted to dress up his patchwork monster by using black electrical tape as a pattern and spraying it with red canned paint. This became one of the most famous and recognizable of the Eddie Van Halen guitars, the “Frankenstein” or sometimes called the “Franken-Strat”.
A lesser known Eddie Van Halen guitar was a custom striped black electric guitar. He began playing this guitar during 1980s in the studio and also while on stage. The Steinbergers are noted for their headless necks which allow the guitarist to change the entire guitar into another key with a touch of switch.
Developed and produced from 1990 to 1995 the Ernie Ball/EVH, better known as the Music Man (Eddie Van Halen) was the first Eddie Van Halen guitar that was not striped. With a body made from basswood and top of flame maple with a matching neck and fretboard.
It had 2 DiMarzio custom wound humbucking pickups along with a master volume and 3-way pickup selector. The bridge was a Floyd Rose double-locking tremolo bar with fine tuners.
The next evolution of the Eddie Van Halen guitar was the now legendary; Peavey Wolfgang produced the Peavey Electronics. Named after Eddie’s son, Wolfgang, this Peavey model was produced from 1996 until 2004 after Eddie left Ernie Ball guitars.
Since Eddie had already worked closely with the designer and engineers at Peavey on his 5150 amplifier, Peavey like a natural fit to showcase what he then considered the ultimate hard rock guitar.
These beautiful black electric guitars came in 2 other basic colors: white and a variety of figured maple tops. These models because so popular that Peavey even opened a Wolfgang special shop of four master craftsmen who were solely responsible for creating custom customer orders.
After his departure from Peavey, Eddie approached Fender in 2006 to create a new and improved Wolfgang that is claimed to be the most indestructible of the Eddie Van Halen guitars.
Of course this is by no means a complete listing of the entire Eddie Van Halen guitar collection but it will give you a good starting point in your EVH guitar research.
