I-95 Drive Home Mystery Artist [VIDEO]

Tonight’s mystery artist started tinkering with guitars out of necessity and a lack of money to produce the right sound.  Can you guess who he might be??

Turns out he comes by the genetics to tinker naturally.  His musician father had lost a finger and some teeth he needed to play his sax and clarinet so he invented some prosthetics that allowed him to keep on playing. At least that is the story told by Eddie Van Halen to Popular Mechanics as to why he thought fixing these little problems was just the normal thing to do. Some of Eddie’s early modifications were:

• He took sandpaper and reshaped the neck to be very flat.
• He refretted a few guitars early on because I wanted to shave the fingerboard down and make the neck even flatter.
• He didn’t like the lacquer on Fender guitars so when he built his first guitar, he used natural wood saying that sweat and oil would soak in to make it smooth.
• One time he was messing with an amp to make it run hotter when he touched a capacitor. Eddie says,

“I opened the amp up and saw this thing. I found out later it was a bias control, which controls the power to the output tubes. I'm poking around, and all of a sudden I touch this huge blue thing and my God, it was like being punched in the chest by Mike Tyson. My whole body flexed stiff, and it must have thrown me five feet. I'd touched a capacitor. I didn't know they held voltage.”