EVH Patches for GarageBand 🎸

What is this?

This repo houses my attempts at recreating Eddie Van Halen's guitar tone—from various eras of his playing—using only GarageBand. There are lots of guitar amp simulators for various platforms that do this, and do it well. But GarageBand is free, it's well-supported, and millions of musicians already have it. I took this project as a challenge to see if I could get close to some of Ed's famous tones using only what comes preinstalled in GarageBand 10.3.5 for mac OS.

Current Patches

This repo currently contains only one patch:

"Van Halen 1" Era

This patch tries to replicate the sound that started all the fuss. This is based on GarageBand's "Brown Head", which is a clone (sort of an amalgamation, really) of early Marshall 100 watt amps.

Van Halen himself famously used a Marshall Superlead connected to a Variac voltage regulator (allowing him to play the amp at maximum volume and maximum gain without blowing it up) on Van Halen 1. In these early days, EVH also used an MXR Phase 90 and an Echoplex. I've attempted to include GaragaBand's analogues to these pedals, as well as a chorus pedal. By doing that, this patch can also cover some of the tones on Van Halen II ("Dance The Night Away", etc.).

Hear a sample of the patch here. This sample was played on a 2000 Fender Telecaster.

Using the patches

After downloading a patch, it needs to go in: ~/Music/Audio Music Apps/Patches Then, it should be available as a User Patch in GarageBand.

Future Patches

Currently, I'm working on:

"1984" Era

"1984" represents the biggest refinement of the "classic" EVH tone.

"Post-1984" Era

Also known as the "Van Hagar" era, this tone is marked by a slightly more scooped character and more frequent use of effects, especially chorus. By this time EVH was also using his own signature 5150 amps.

Why are you doing this?

Eddie Van Halen is the Mozart of his generation. He was a supremely talented musician, arranger, and player. As good as his lead guitar playing was, it could be argued that he was an even better rhythm player. I'm sad that he's gone. The world is poorer for it.

Hopefully, you can use these patches to have fun learning his tunes.