Artist Gift Guide: Van Halen
Published on 01 October 2024
So, you’re looking for a gift for your beloved, and you happen to know that they love and adore Eddie Van Halen. Am I right so far? You’ve stumbled onto this blog in the hopes that you’ll be put on the correct road for a bunch of gift ideas. Understood.
Well, let me make your dream come true today: I’ve scoured the guitarguitar site and found a veritable treasure trove of Van Halen-related gifts, from just over a tenner right up to a couple of grand. Whether it’s a stocking filler, a momentously special gift or somewhere in-between, your Van Halen-loving special person will be delighted with anything from this blog. I’ll start with the lowest-priced gift ideas and move up to the big stuff. All you need to do is have a look through the guide and see what fits your needs.
Three Fun Things You Need to Know
Before we commence, you’re going to be hit with certain terms over and over again during this guide, so let me take a second to explain them to you, before you get all confused and overwhelmed…
- Stripes: the stripes you see on lots of this stuff were Ed’s trademark visual ‘thing’, originally made with criss-crossed electrical tape over his original ‘Frankenstein’ guitar’s body. The design carried over into other guitars and then into endless merch, to the point that the stripes are instantly identifiable today as meaning ‘Eddie Van Halen’. The stripes are normally red, white and black (no real reason as far as I know), with a popular variation being the ‘bumblebee’ scheme of yellow and black.
- 5150: it’s California police code for someone who is mentally unstable and dangerous. The cops call it on their radios (451 is arson, for example) and Ed must’ve liked the number and implied meaning of psychosis (this was the 80s) because the 5150 term became the title of a Van Halen album, the name of Ed’s home studio and his famous guitar amp, whilst also appearing on loads of band merch.
- Brown Sound: It’s an unfortunate name, I’ll agree, but it was Ed’s own expression for his famously excellent guitar sound. He believed that sounds had colours and reckoned that his signature crunchy tone was brown. Fair enough, Ed!
Okay, you are now fully prepared: time to cue up Eruption on your stereo and let’s get gifting!
The Gifts at a Glance
EVH Striped Series Frankie Guitar
Dunlop EVH Max Grip Picks
These wonderful EVH Max Grip picks from Dunlop are the exact ones used by King Edward himself. Surprisingly skinny for such a shred legend (most flashy players use thick picks), these instantly recognisable striped plectrums are handy and portable ways to pledge your allegiance to Ed.
The picks themselves are all 0.60mm thick, nylon and have the textured Max-grip surface. You can buy packs with the striped design and 5150 logo (you’ll see a lot of this today), and you can also get lovely pick tins filled with striped picks and adorned with the same graphics on the tin’s cover.
EVH D-Tuna
Does your beloved/giftee already have a guitar equipped with a Floyd Rose tremolo system? Not sure? Have a look and see: it is a type of bridge for electric guitars and it looks like this:
You are unlikely to confuse this with anything else, to be honest. If the answer is ‘yes’, then our man Eddie VH actually invented a very cool, useful tool that can be added to most licensed Floyd Roses. It’s called an EVH D-Tuna, and the punning title goes some way to describing its function: they attach it to their bridge at the right place and, with the flick of a wrist, it can transform the tuning of their guitar in an instant and very handy way. It D-tunes it, see?
I won’t get too into the hows and whys of how it does this, but this is the kind of gift that makes you look like you’ve been paying very close attention to all of your giftee’s endless guitar gear witterings, so it’s well worth investigating!
A Very Cool Guitar Case
Guitarists all need hard shell cases, and they never buy them for themselves because distortion pedals are about the same price and are much more distracting.
Why not gift your special person with a quality EVH hard case that features Eddie’s famous stripe design? It’s more subtle than many striped products, but there’s the unmistakable association with the world’s greatest rock guitarist on the embossed exterior. This case will be suitable for nearly all regular Fender-style guitar shapes, so if it looks like a Stratocaster or Telecaster, it’ll fit in here no problem.
And if their guitar doesn’t fit in this case? Well, I’ve yet to meet a musician who wouldn't just take that as an excuse to buy another guitar, right?
EVH Wolfgang Pickup
None of today’s gifts will transform a player’s skill levels into those of Edward Van Halen. If it were that easy, we’d all be legends! That said, one can approach the rapturous sounds of the man himself by choosing the equipment he personally designed. A guitar’s bridge pickup is a very significant part of any player’s overall sound, and this EVH Wolfgang bridge pickup has been made to Ed’s ceaselessly specific preferences.
You can actually buy a set of these (bridge pickup and neck position pickup), but Eddie famously eschewed the whole notion of a neck pickup for the majority of his career, so I’d encourage you to both save a little cash and appear more Ed-savvy by opting for the bridge model.
It is a direct replacement for all normal-sized humbucker spaces in electric guitars, so there shouldn’t be any crying tantrums on Christmas day if you decide to gift this to that special person.
Eddie Van Halen FX Pedals
One of the many things that VH fans get excited about is how Eddie commanded his effects pedals. Some extremely fresh and peculiar sounds erupted (sorry) from his set-up, and that was partly down to his expert use of effects.
MXR was a brand he used extensively, and there is quite the selection available today. Here’s the current list:
Boss also make an EVH-branded digital delay, the SDE-3000 EVH, in tribute to the rack mounted units he used to use.
Now, that’s a lot of stuff right there. All of them are proper EVH collaborations, but I’d say that two in particular stand out as being ‘the ones’, if you want to make an impact with your gift-giving. His most famous ‘effects moments’ are in the songs Ain't Talkin’ Bout Love and Unchained, and for these sounds, you need the EVH Phase 90 and the EVH117 Flanger, respectively. As far as I’m concerned, these are the bullseye buys and the others are additional pieces for checking out afterwards.
If you need to choose one over the other, then - as much as I personally like the Flanger - I’d recommend going with the Phase 90. He used it all the time and it sounds very authentic.
EVH Wolfgang Standard Guitars
He was one of the most famous guitarists on the planet, so the actual guitars he used throughout his career are probably worth paying attention to, right?
I’ll come back to this topic later, but let me begin with these relatively modestly-priced Wolfgang Standard models. The Wolfgang was the guitar that Ed himself co-designed over the years, and it is named after his son. You can buy Wolfgangs that are £500-ish like these ones, and you can buy Wolfgangs that are £4k. If your gift-buying budget extends that far, then by all means go for the USA-made Wolfgang Edward Van Halen Signature because it’s the best of the best (and exactly what Ed toured with until the end), but let’s be more realistic here.
The Wolfgang Standard is an excellent guitar for anybody to play, use and love. Eddie still rigorously tested everything that went out with his name on it, so you can bet your ass that Eddie - a famously fussy guy when it came to EVH equipment - fully slammed these around and shred-tested them until they met his satisfaction.
The EVH Wolfgang Standard is available with a number of different finishes and exotic timbers for the guitars’ tops, so you’ll see a number of prices out there around £5-600 depending on those options. I’d not call £500 cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but it is the most affordable electric guitar you can buy that is directly associated with this guitar legend. The dearer models bring their own benefits for sure, but all of these guitars were good enough for Eddie Van Halen, and they are all made by Fender too, which should tell you everything you need to know.
Now, it’s just about picking a colour, right?
EVH 5150 Iconic Combo
Given that Ed was famous for having an outrageously good guitar sound, it probably also makes sense to go for an amp that he not only used exclusively but designed and refined throughout his lifetime. I’d say that this is actually a more important part of his sound than any guitar, if I’m being honest. Guitars are more fun to check out, but the amp is always doing the heavy lifting, tone-wise.
Now, there’s actually a whole line of EVH amplifiers available, so let me save you the confusion here. The newest models - the EVH 5150 Iconic series - are the ones to go for. Why? Here’s why:
- They are made in Mexico rather than the US, so the prices are more attractive.
- The clean, non-distorted sound is better than it ever was before.
- The distorted sound truly is the ‘brown sound’ and is one of the all-time great guitar tones.
- It has a special-design speaker that sounds excellent.
- There are a load of extra cool features on board that make the amp more fun and even better value (FX loop, boost, power attenuation etc).
- It’s a ‘real-deal’ all-tube amp, not a digital copy.
- There is the aspiration element here: the 5150 is very famous amongst guitarists, and it’s a cool thing to own one.
This amp is available in 15w, 40w and 60 watts. I’d say that the 40 watt model is the perfect mix of size, sound and features. It can wind down quietly enough to be played in the house, and it can absolutely hold its own at a gig.
EVH Striped Series Frankie Guitar
I said I’d come back to guitars, and this is the reason. The EVH Striped Series Frankie. The original Frankenstein guitar is absurdly iconic, and this very reasonably-priced ‘Frankie’ is a fantastic recreation of that instrument.
This is a great tribute to that famous guitar because it recreates the wear and idiosyncratic build elements that a young Eddie Van Halen carried out on this guitar as he moved through the early stages of his career.
Obviously, you can see the authentic striped finish (EVH fans will love to tell you how many times the guitar’s look changed before he settled on this style), but check out the other details: the fake neck pickup (this is a one pickup guitar!), the broken pickguard, the artful wear & tear of a lifetime’s loving tinkering. It’s all here in this recreation, which I should also say plays brilliantly and sounds superb. You also get the EVH D-Tuna that I showed you earlier.
For a Van Halen fan, this is the ultimate gift. Yes, you can buy me one whenever you want!
Everything a VH fan Needs
Well, that just about sums it up for today. I started off with a pack of plectrums and I’ve brought you to a replica of Eddie’s iconic guitar. Did you find something in today’s guide that resonated with you? Have I helped you in your gift-buying mission? I hope I have, and I hope you were blasting vintage Van Halen tunes the whole time you were reading this blog! There will be other artist gift guides online very soon, but in the meantime, here’s one last VH tune to send you off…
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