The guitar tone achieved on early Van Halen records, which guitar people commonly refer to as "the brown sound," has been enormously influential, as well as legendarily elusive. Many players achieved similar technical feats in Eddie's wake, even surpassing him in terms of pure virtuosity, but none have ever truly replicated his tone. As most of us know, trying to cop another guitarist's tone is ultimately an exercise in futility, but this fact has done little to dissuade legions of EVH-obsessed shredders from chasing that brownest of sounds. The Internet is full of magazine and blog articles that attempt to painstakingly dissect each minute element that contributed to Eddie's tone, breaking it down to a near-molecular level in an attempt to capture his magic. Many of these dubious dissertations contain wild theories about mysterious boxes, unusual amp modifications, complex signal routing schemes, and various bits of studio trickery, illustrating the never-ending rabbit hole that one can fall into when a tone chase gets out of hand.
These extremes aside, however, there are many more casual fans of the early Van Halen sound who might like to incorporate some of his signature brownness into their own guitar rig, without diving headlong into full EVH mania. For these guitarists, there are many great options for approximating the tone of Eddie's cranked 100-watt Marshall Super Lead. Players who already own a classic Marshall can probably get in the ballpark without too much trouble, but for everyone else, a good brown sound pedal is likely the best solution. Here are a few of our favorite stompboxes for adding some warm earthen shades to your tonal palette.
General Guitar Gadgets BSIAB2
One of the most widely respected of all the brown sound boxes is General Guitar Gadgets's Brown Sound In A Box V2 (BSIAB2, for short). This flexible, Marshall-voiced distortion box comes in kit form for a paltry 54 dollars, and can be fairly easily constructed by anyone who has a little soldering experience. It is superb for summoning that vintage-Super-Lead-on-11 sound that defined early Van Halen records, but at a volume level that will not summon the cops to your door. It can do lighter, smoothly overdriven sounds just as easily as it can do tight, hot-rodded saturation, and with the Tone knob and the optional Contour control (which adds three dollars to the kit cost), the tone sculpting options are many and varied. For brown sound enthusiasts that are on a budget—and don't mind doing a little soldering—the BSIAB2 is the way to go.
MXR EVH 5150 Overdrive
If one wants to distill Eddie's tone down to a stompbox, going directly to the source is probably a pretty good way to start. As such, MXR's new EVH 5150 Overdrive, reportedly developed in very close collaboration with the man himself, holds quite a bit of promise for EVH and brown sound fanatics. The cool thing about this pedal is that it does the brown thing really well, but with a few knob tweaks you can also get the tone that Eddie uses today, which is a much more modern high-gain tone with a lot of chunk and note articulation—Van Halen tribute bands, take notice! The 5150 features a Boost switch for kicking up the compression and gain, a three-band passive equalizer section, and a very handy noise gate built in for eliminating high-gain hiss, and tightening up those staccato metal riffs. If you want to cover the whole gamut of Van Halen tones with one pedal, the MXR EVH 5150 is essential.
Mad Professor 1
Mad Professor's 1 pedal is a stroke of genius. It starts with a spectacular distortion circuit that comes as close to a cranked Marshall Super Lead as any pedal ever will, and combines it with plate reverb, that often overlooked—but no less important—element of Eddie's distinctive tone on the first Van Halen records. Of course, this reverb was not originally generated by a pedal; it was created in the studio with an EMT 140 plate reverb unit, which is made from a sheet of reverberating metal mounted in a wooden box—it’s a contraption big enough to take up one wall of a modest-sized bedroom. Obviously, you're not getting one of these on your pedalboard, but the 1 comes really close. Its Marshall-flavored dirt tones are excellent as well, and the Brown and Presence controls offer a wide range of tweakability for getting the pedal perfectly matched to your guitar and amp. The Mad Professor 1 is absolutely brilliant sounding when plugged straight into any clean amplifier.
Wampler Pinnacle Standard
Mr. Van Halen's former guitar tech, Zeke Clark, has proclaimed the Wampler Pinnacle to be the ultimate brown sound pedal. This seems like a rather ringing endorsement that is deserving of extra weight and consideration when one is shopping for an EVH-style distortion. The Pinnacle has long been at the front of the brown-sound-in-a-pedal pack, and even with all of the current competition in the field, it holds its own very well. It has a wide range of gain levels, and its super useful Contour control gives you complete power over the mid-range content, whether you want something scooped out, or warm and articulate. The Vintage/Modern switch boosts or cuts high-end, great for matching it to different pickups, or switching between a browner tone and a more modern crunch. The Pinnacle also has a Boost toggle switch, which is especially useful for getting dimed Marshall sounds at very low volumes for recording or practicing.
MI Audio Super Crunch Box
I have long considered the original MI Audio Crunch Box to be among the finest distortion boxes ever made. The company's most recent version of the circuit, the Super Crunch Box, retains the signature wallop and crunch of the original, but adds a few more controls for greater tone tweaking capability (The paint job is also, uhh, different, but I'll refrain from making any judgments about that). The Super Crunch Box's greatest strength is its ability to mimic a classic Marshall set on destroy, so naturally it's a great pedal for getting your brown sound on. The Tone and Presence controls are quite powerful, giving the user the ability to roll off the top end a bit and push the mids for classic EVH tones, or create something more modern and aggressive. In fact, it's really excellent for getting just about any British amp tone one can think of. Buy one now!
Eddie Van Halen's guitar sound has long vexed even the most skilled, relentless, and wealthy tone chasers, helping to cultivate a mythical status that is a frequently referenced part of rock guitar culture to this day, nearly 40 years after the release of Van Halen. The continued relevance of his tone, as well as the effect it had on guitardom, speaks to its timeless qualities of warmth, definition, sustain, and all-out rock n’ roll ballsiness. Most guitarists recognize that nailing it perfectly is not a realistic goal (or at least not worth the effort and money), and for these players there are many fine distortion pedals available that are quite capable of injecting a little brown into their sound with relatively little trouble and expense.