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.
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.
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TONE TALK //
The Brown Sound: 5 Boxes That Nail It