Get Yer EVH Striped Series!
I was just cruising through some of the online retailers looking for a good price on an Ibanez Iron Label 8-string (hey, when is enough strings ever really enough? No! Nine for me please!) when I noticed that the EVH Striped guitars – which were officially announced at Winter NAMM in January – are now showing up online. Want one? So do I! Here are some shopping links for you to make your stripey dreams a reality. And of course, if these retailers don’t ship to your particular country, hit up your local retailer and support your local musical instrument industry. I can’t wait to see these guitars showing up in the wild. If you get one, post a pic on the I Heart Guitar Facebook page!
EVH Striped Series – White With Black Stripes
EVH Striped Series – Red With Black Stripes
EVH Striped Series – Black and Yellow
NAMM: EVH 5150 III Combo
You asked for it, and here it is! The EVH 5150 III 2×12 combo! It has three channels (Clean, Crunch, Lead), master Resonance, digital reverb, two 6L6 power tubes, a whopping seven 12AX7s, effect loop, a pair of Celestion G12M 8 ohm speakers in a sealed speaker chamber, and it even has a headphone out. It’s 50 watt RMS maximum but can go down to 1 watt with adjustable power scaling. And it’s EVH!
NAMM: Relic’d EVH Wolfgang
If you’ve been to the EVH Gear section of the Fender room at NAMM, you might have noticed this particular Wolfgang USA Custom hanging on the wall with a few others. If you looked a little closer though, you may have noticed something that skipped your glance the first time ’round…
Yup! EVH is getting into the relic’ing game! Continue reading
Just a teaser of something cool…
I just got back from the Fender party here at NAMM (where I – briefly, I’ll admit – met Eddie Van Halen!!!), and I happened to spy these beauties…
Not only are the guitars cool, but check out the amps under them…
More info over the coming days!
Winter NAMM 2013: EVH Striped Series
YES! I’ve been hoping, wishing, and making bird offerings to my Viking forbears for this guitar for years, and finally EVH Gear is coming through with the goods! This is the EVH Stripe Series [official website]. And they’ll be surprisingly affordable, all things considered. US recommended retail is $1,199.98.
EDIT: The page on the official EVH site seems to have disappeared now.
It features a Basswood Stratocaster-style body with EVH stripes in three finishes: red with black stripes, black with yellow stripes and white with black stripes. There’s a graphite-reinforced maple neck with a hand-rubbed oil finish and thumbwheel truss rod adjustment, compound-radius maple fingerboard (12”-16”) with 22 jumbo frets and black dot inlays, and a direct-mount Wolfgang® humbucking pickup.
Other features include a single white volume control knob (labeled “tone” which is a classic Eddie-ism), single-ply black pickguard (white with black stripes model only), bar string retainer and Floyd Rose® locking nut, EVH-branded Floyd Rose® locking tremolo with EVH D-Tuna®, EVH die-cast tuners, chrome hardware, vintage-style strap buttons and EVH neck plate.
More info on the official EVH site.
REVIEW: Peavey 6505+ 112
The 6505+ has a storied history. Its ancestry can be traced back to the 5150, Eddie Van Halen’s first signature amp. That screamer wasn’t quite flexible enough for some players (including Eddie, it seemed), so the 5150 II was produced, featuring a more useful clean channel. When Eddie left Peavy, the 5150′s spirit lived in on the form of the 6505 and 6505+, which drew from the designs of the 5150 and 5150 II, respectively. While the head versions are 120 watt monsters, the 6505+ 112 is a 60 watt combo version with a single 12″ speaker.
REVIEW: Sterling By Music Man S.U.B AX3
The Sterling By Music Man S.U.B Series family of instruments are designed to provide a new level of quality, features and value for the beginning or intermediate player. Part of this philosophy includes using established (and very player-friendly) Ernie Ball Music Man designs such as the Silhouette and Axis as the basis for budget-priced guitars. A lot of us might remember the SUB name from a previous attempt by EBMM to make their designs more affordable: the original SUB instruments were US-made but with more budget-friendly finishing techniques. The new S.U.B line is made in Asia, and ironically the finishes look a lot prettier than the old SUB line, which had a sort of industrial vibe.
Continue reading
INTERVIEW: Gojira’s Joe Duplantier
French metal band Gojira have been a ‘next big thing’ for far too long. They’ve maintained the same line-up since forming in Bayonne in 1996, and each successive album has pushed them closer and closer to the spotlight. But L’Enfant Sauvage is going to change all that. This is the album that seems finally destined to bump Gojira all the way into at least Lamb of God/Trivium levels of fame. It combines a Devin Townsend-esque appreciation for atmosphere and melody with post-thrash rhythms, post-death metal drumming and a live, human element that’s missing from so much current studio-tweezed metal. After a triumphant run during Australias’s Soundwave Festival (which saw Devin Townsend and Meshuggah’s Fredrik Thordendal join them on stage for a historic performance of their studio collaboration “Of Blood And Salt”), Gojira are ready.
“The reason why we did that tour was to see a kangaroo,” guitarist and vocalist Joe Duplantier says of the recent Soundwave shows. “That was our main purpose! The reason why we came to Australia! And then we played some shows with Soundwave. But mostly we wanted to see a wild kangaroo. The last day of the tour we still hadn’t seen a kangaroo so we rented a car and went to the desert. Couldn’t find one the whole day. But on our way back to Perth we saw one, man! The night was falling and this huge kangaroo was jumping, and everyone was screaming in the car.” But now that the hunt for bipedal marsupials is over, Gojira is getting down to business. L’Enfant Sauvage is their first album on Roadrunner Records. It’s a diverse collection of tracks, some heavy, some more ambient, with an unusual amount of colour and drama for most bands other than Devin Townsend and Cynic. “I don’t listen to metal a lot,” Duplantier explains. I listen to Massive Attach and Morcheeba and Radiohead, Portishead. My brother [Mario Duplantier, drums] likes Indian music. Christian [Andreu], the other guitar player, doesn’t like music at all! He likes silence! He’s like, “Wow, this is the best.” And the bass player [Jean-Michel Labadie] listens to all kinds of metal. He’s a huge metal fan. So it’s an interesting mix. We have different attitudes, and it creates something more personal. I’d like to think that through the years, as we release albums, it’s getting closer to what we are, closer to the core. It’s a nice feeling. I love this album. We reached something that Im’ really, really happy with.”
NAMM 2012: New from EVH Gear
Eddie Van Halen and his EVH Gear team have got the really hard work out of the way – designing the flagship EVH Wolfgang and 5150III amplifiers – and now they seem to be really having fun with it. Case in point: this 5150III. It’s still a 5150III as we know it, but slightly more Van Halenized. Dig the matching logo on the cabinet too.
Note the 1X12 speaker cabinets under the for the 5150 III 50 watt head. It’s rated at 16 ohms and is loaded with a 30-watt Celestion® Heritage speaker. It’s exactly 25 percent of the cubic size (by volume) of its 4×12 big brother and is available in black and ivory. I played through this rig at the Fender party the other night and it sounds INCREDIBLE. Very responsive, very raunchy and very, very rock.
Hi! I'm Peter Hodgson. I write for Gibson.com, Australian Guitar, Australian Musician, Mixdown Magazine (including my instructional column, 'Unleash Your Inner Rock God,' which has been running since 2007), Blunt, Beat (including their weekly hard rock/metal column Crunch) and The Brag. And I'm Assistant Social Coordinator with Seymour Duncan.
I've been playing guitar since I was 8 years old, and I've been writing for magazines since I was 18. I've also worked as a guitar teacher (up to 50 students a week), a setup tech, a newspaper editor, and I've also dabbled in radio a little bit. I live in Melbourne, Australia, and my hobbies include drinking way too much coffee, and eating way too much Mexican food.
You can check out my guitar playing at Bandcamp or on YouTube, and feel free to email me at iheartguitarblog@gmail.com