Author: james

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Blonde Sound™ II: Over the Edge

With the Blonde Sound recently dialed in using the VG204D Amplifier, we decided to explore if this was the “baby” used on all of the classic VH records with David Lee Roth, not a Marshall. We re-tested previous theories with the new amplifier and the results were stunning. Here’s the second installment, Blond Sound II: Over the Edge.

Cutting Edge Speakers

“The majority of it […] is everything just stacked up and blazin’ away.” – Eddie Van Halen1

In early tone tests, our ears picked out Celestion G12Ms with black magnet covers—blackbacks—as being crucial to the sound of the second album. These speakers were a variant designed by Celestion and shipped during the mid to late 70s, with Kurt Müller cones. While we assumed Van Halen II would be a fresh take on Eddie’s tone, we found this to be more of a continuation of what Ed and engineer Donn Landee were experimenting with on the first album.

We use the term experimenting here because that’s the best way to describe what we think was happening. Most guitarists working on a sound tend to stumble onto something they like, lock it in, and make sure things never deviate from that magic recipe. While recording, if settings get adjusted or mics get moved by accident, they may need to start all over again fiddling to find the right combination of things that sounded so good. With Eddie and Donn though, it seems like they were constantly changing the sound, song to song as well as album to album. There must have been a confidence that no matter what, they could make their experiments sound good on record. Maybe they were using their time in the studio to learn as well as record. If things are always done the same way, you’ll never know any better. It’s just amazing to think that for a band that was defining a paradigm shift for electric guitar, they would continue to charge forward, never looking back.

So Who Was Kurt Müller?

Dr. Kurt Müller was a German cone maker who founded DKM in Berlin in 1922, quite possibly the oldest surviving cone factory still running. In 1970, the company bought a UK firm called Pulsonic Ultrasonics Limited and folded it into a subsidiary, Kurt Mueller UK Ltd. The Pulsonic cones Celestion fitted through 1973 are the ones collectors still chase—the warm, forgiving paper behind a lot of classic-rock tone. Around late 1973 that supply ran out. The story usually told is that a fire at the Pulsonic factory destroyed the formula for those cones—the fire is more legend than documented fact, and the truth behind it has never been fully pinned down.

The switch wasn’t immediate. For a couple of years Celestion used their own in-house “RIC” cones, only starting around 1975 did Kurt Mueller become the standard supplier—right as the cream magnet covers gave way to black, the “Blackback” era. Mueller cones sound different: a tighter low end, harder midrange, and a brighter, sharper, more aggressive top. That’s the voice a lot of hard rock and early metal was built on. One caveat on the ribs, though—those pressed concentric corrugations stiffen the paper against flex, but they aren’t a Mueller signature. Transitional Pulsonic cones carry pronounced ribs too, which is exactly why players can mistake one for the other.2-5

Going Over the Edge

There’s an old forum post that’s often quoted stating that for Van Halen, Eddie used a load resistor, and wouldn’t return to this setup until Women and Children First. For Van Halen II, that implies that if the amps were cranked, they were running at full volume in the studio. While we’ll never really know, the record does seems to have more cabinet ambience, and ultimately a darker tone, or at least not as bright as the first record. Maybe after a year of touring, Eddie had gotten used to using his live setup of re-amping and wanted to push his speaker cabs harder than what was achieved on the first record. Essentially, the sound of the VG204D Amplifier with some speaker distortion.

For the Blonde Sound II presets, we added a small amount of Cabinet Drive to simulate Celestion speakers being pushed hard. It’s a subtle touch to an already cabinet-heavy tone, and it does bring a certain edge to the sound. Chords get chunkier with more bass, leads have a searing, blistering quality, and as Eddie said himself, “everything [was] just stacked up and blazin’ away.”

Blonde Sound IIDownload

The canonical second iteration of the Blond Sound—a deep, edgy, cab-heavy tone. Perfect for tunes like “Light Up the Sky.”

Doctor!Download

A brighter take on the second album, specifically targeting the razorblade edge of “Somebody Get Me a Doctor.”

WomenDownload

More bass in this tone, but still with edge. Try the distorted riffs from “Women in Love.”

GirlsDownload

A cross between the previous two presets, brighter but not as harsh, targeting the inimitable phrases from “Beautiful Girls.”

More Lore

There’s also a connection to Over the Edge with “Light Up the Sky.” The song wasn’t written for the film—it was one of Eddie’s first riffs after the debut album. Warner Bros. was financing the movie and wanted Van Halen to write a theme song. The band considered offering up “Light Up the Sky” for the job, but it never happened. Eddie’s recollection is characteristically offhand—Warner backing “some movie,” the band thinking about using the song, “but I don’t think so. […] it ain’t gonna win no Academy Award or nothin’.”6

In the end the film went another way, licensing “You Really Got Me,” Van Halen’s Kinks cover off the first record and the only VH track on the Over the Edge soundtrack.

Notes

1 Rosen, Steve. Tonechaser: Understanding Edward—My 26-Year Journey with Edward Van Halen. Steve Rosen/Robert Smith/API Print Productions.com, 2022, p. 75.

2 Klasco, Mike. “Dr. Kurt Müller Anniversary! 100 Years of Loudspeaker Innovation.” audioXpress, 23 Dec. 2022, https://audioxpress.com/article/dr-kurt-muller-anniversary-100-years-of-loudspeaker-innovation.

3 “Vintage Celestion Guitar Speaker Cones.” Bygone Tones, https://www.bygonetones.com/vintage-celestion-guitar-speaker-cones.html. Accessed 22 July 2026.

4 “History.” Dr. Kurt Müller, http://kurtmueller.com/en/historie/. Accessed 22 July 2026.

5 “The Greenbacks.” FUZZFACED, https://www.fuzzfaced.net/greenbacks-pre-rola-rola-difference.html. Accessed 22 July 2026.

6 Rosen, Steve. Tonechaser: Understanding Edward—My 26-Year Journey with Edward Van Halen. Steve Rosen/Robert Smith/API Print Productions.com, 2022, p. 70.

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Music Made by Metal Machines

There’s no definitive answer as to why Lou Reed made Metal Machine Music. Landing in 1975 between the pop albums Sally Can’t Dance and Coney Island Baby, the record spawned a mythology all its own: some read it as a deliberate purge of the pop audience his recent fame had won him, others read it as a “f**k you” engineered to break his RCA contract (though he tellingly stayed on the label). Reed himself denied all of it to the end, insisting it was a purely artistic act—born, in his words, out of love for guitar-driven feedback.1

Experimenting with SynthStamp

Enter the B500. We’d been experimenting with continuous sampling and a melody sequence playing underneath when the results tipped into something uncannily familiar: guitar pitched up and dragged back down, phrases folding over themselves, chaotic breaks ripping across the top. A cacophony, but not an aimless one—the same controlled-noise territory Reed staked out in 1975. The difference is in the making. He assembled his in the studio, guitars leaned into amps, tape sped up and slowed after the fact; ours arrived live, in a single take, direct to video with SynthStamp.

Here’s how we did it:

1. (Stereo) Audio Input

Start by configuring your audio input for mono (L + R) or stereo (L / R). Note that mono is configured by selecting the same source for both left and right channels, the signal is combined and optimized internally.

2. Memory Sequencing

Next, add a melody sequence, Normal mode will suffice. You can just start plunking away on the keyboard and by default quarter notes will populate. For something more interesting try changing the rhythmic pulse by adjusting the duration of groups of notes. In this case, pitch doesn’t matter as much because you’ll be playing back a live buffer of whatever you’re playing on guitar, and unless you plan on sticking to modal scales, dissonance is mostly unavoidable.

3. Continuous Sampling

And that brings us to Continuous Sampling. Though not a formal circuit bend, it falls within the same ideology. On the actual instrument you can set up a continuous trigger on the sampler, ideally corresponding to the full buffer duration of 1.4s, then add a custom input route for line level audio, and voilà. The bonus here is that not only does the keyboard play back realtime audio at different sample rates, you can combine this with a note sequence in memory for hands-free operation of the sampler. This allows focusing on live audio input, which for this purpose is the guitar. Playing along with the sampler as your audio gets drastically modified by a repeating note sequence is like having a conversation with yourself.

Needless to say, we think the results sound pretty close to Metal Machine Music. Or Pachinko.2 It’s time to explore your sonic potential.

Notes

  1. Doran, John. “Lou Reed Interview: Metal Machine Music Revisited” The Quietus, October 28, 2013, https://thequietus.com/interviews/lou-reed-interview-metal-machine-music/. Accessed July 6th, 2026.
  2. Pachinko In Your Head: Non-Linear Music. Blue Rahn Studio. Celestial Harmonies, 1998.