stef wrote:Thorny wrote:
Dime a plexi and play the RWTD riff. When you hammer on the chords in the riff it will sound musical and clear. Put a pedal on that and youll never get it to sound right.
I play with everything on 10 and have tried some pedals in front: bsm, dod250, ds1, rat, maxon 808...tweaking the pedals etc... Maxon sounded the best but more Lynch and RAT like than evh... If he did use the od- boost pedal then volume I was not on 10 IMO. Strat78 and Ralle and Thorn proved that plexi (12000) on 10 is enough
Put the blue mxr eq in front of the 12000 and it goes even beyond the gain levels on Vh1 with a 13k ceramic pup in the guitar (with the enormous hiss too)
The 808 is a tube screamer copy so it being the best sound pretty well is saying an extra tube is required or the gain from a cascade was used then that opens up more cans of worms cause then too many things are possible ....like a second volume control (like the white one on the back) where the volume is set to 1...but I am total agreement that whatever is going on he has everything set to 10 on the front even the bass and that is a biggy clue pretty well saying bass light treble heavy tone going in.
The big mystery is when you start cascading the clarity and the ability to use his other effects properly just don't sound right ...so were back to square one ..stock plexi with an unknown box that is low/light and treble/heavy with a volume control, harmonically rich distortion and a unique edge.
We did experiments way back on urei preamp circuits.....the 1108 fet was interesting ..some said they heard something vh others like R stash said no way ...the only one we didn't try was with the actual mic pre Ed used on vh1, that's the all tube 1008 which can give @40 db boost and produce a flat frequency response over 20hz to 30khz within 1 measly db........all the front ends of his name brand amps try and do this IMO or mimic his effect chain gain and probably mystery box and that is why his tone isn't exactly the same.
Oddly enough the 1008 is a cascode circuit, something covered in other threads, (some with jose mods in relation to EVH vh1 tone too I might add) ...not a cascade circuit the cascode circuit typically represents the highest possible gain you can get from a 12ax7 with the widest possible bandwidth...obvious why it's used as a mic pre .....this also follows Ed's own theory of how he likes his tone to sound like a stereo, I'm thinking he's not talking about seperation but bandwidth????
And cascode circuits were used extensivly in high end stereo audio equipment of the past for that very reason....all the so called brown sound boxs , pinnacles etc and many pedals that have come out using fets in the last 5-10 years have been cascode type circuits and many proclaiming to be the brown sound box ..so there might be something to them. One guy comes out with the word brown sound and 100 others jump on the copy/clone band wagon so good look finding a tuned real mcCoy in the rat pit. :stars
as a matter of fact i think he used the lower output than the DSD Duncan SH5 with a little extra gadget 
