I had it earlier when i was sitting on the.........

Toilet?

My question still remains! why would you want to copy somebody else's sound...?!? I can care less if his tone is brown,green, red or blue
just play your guitars darn it!!!

Yeah, I actually do wonder why more people haven't been able to achieve it. But then again, I said I came very, very close, but not 100%. No one will ever be able to. There's part of it that is in the way you pick, how you fret the notes, etc...

Also, keep in mind that we have the wonderful tool called the internet now, so it's a lot more easier to find out these things nowadays than it was back then.

Nobody but Ed will EVER achieve that sound perfectly. Like I said, there are just so many little details about Ed's gear that can't be replicated by the Fender Custom Shop, like how he burned up Frankie's PAF when he was potting it. That kind of thing will contribute to the sound, but you can't really replicate it.

I mean, Chip Ellis said when he tried to get a reading from the Frankie's PAF, it was dead. He thought he'd broken it, because he couldn't get a reading. But when he wired it back up to Ed's guitar, it worked! That can't be copied.

And, you can't forget that Ed himself is the biggest part of the Brown Sound.

But I'm sure that you could get it close enough to the point where anybody who wasn't a diehard EVH fan wouldn't know the difference.

get a strat copy, and modify it so you can put two bass pafs in there. make it so they over lap like so:
SPACE****
sPACE22****
because there are only 4 little dots as i call em. that way u get all strings.
well probably not that might work but...
might as well just feed people a ton of xlax that might be easier... then play so loud it scares the **** uncontrollably outa them (lol i want that as a sig now...!)
but ur better off with ur own sound. maybe try a vary high pitched pickup with low turned up all way and mids at like 2 and high at like 3

I can't understand why poeple keep bringing up high powered pickups in this discussion - Ed's original guitar had a Gibson PAF pickup, set slightly farther away from the bridge than you'd expect to counter excessive trebly-ness, running through a couple of bog standard MXR pedals and an old Echoplex, then into a Plexi head.

My understanding of the whole variac thing is simply this - you lower the supply rail voltage, you starve the tubes, which gives them less headroom - that in turn means that they will saturate much quicker, and more than normal, as well as compressing more due to their reduced dynamic range.

Again, as far as I was aware, "brown sound" comes from the term "brown out" which is the term normally applied to a power grid when it drops below a minimum acceptable operating voltage.

I thought Ed's tone was absolutely stellar up until just after Fair Warning - then it seemed to get progressively fizzier and shriller with each subsequent album.

(Theory being that the etymology of "brown sound" is that it is derived from "brownout" due to the variac being used to lower the power supply voltage, as in a brownout).

Ah, well ok. It wasn't my theory, I read that ages ago in a guitar magazine, (almost surely it was Guitar for the Practicing Musician), and it seemed plausible and authoritative, but, I don't have firsthand knowledge, so you may well be right.

I'm 100% with Olie on this one. Then again, I have gotten pretty close to Ed's early tones using only a Behringer V-Amp Pro through my hifi, believe it or not. The best £100 my girlfriend ever spent on me.

That's what I read too. Nothing to do with "brown out".

I agree. The main parts are a Plexi and beating the hell out of your strings. I can get an okay VH tone from my Vox AD15VT by using the Plexi model with everything cranked except the master volume, a little compression, and simply attacking my strings. It's shockingly similar to his tone on "Panama", or at least it is to my ears.

I read that he was chasing after the famous sound that made people's bowels move uncontroably(!) aka the brown sound.

LOL...............

You mean the brown note? Didn't they try to hit it with a bunch of subs on Mythbusters?

yes, and so has the military. i think it might have been in guitar world. ill go find it.
i looked and i ddint findit! WHERE DID I REaD THAT???

The tone is in the hands. You may be able to sound similar to EVH (or any other player) but you will never sound exactly like anyone but yourself.

So, instead of putting alot of time into sounding like EVH (or whoever), why don't you spend the time developing your own unique voice on the instrument?

Just my two cents

Rock on!