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Joe Satriani has never been someone to do things by halves, so when he was tasked with honoring Eddie Van Halen in Sammy Hagar’s Best of All Worlds tour, he knew he needed a custom amp to nail his tone.
Naturally, he went straight to the source for help, and the late virtuoso’s electric guitar techs all pointed to one person: 3rd Power’s Dylana Scott.
“Ed’s own techs said the only person that could help was this girl outta Nashville called Dylana Scott,” the amp builder tells Guitar World. “Joe called me and said, ‘Apparently I should be talking to you.’”
Satriani is a huge Van Halen fan, and he had a specific era of Eddie’s tone in mind, since he was to be playing both David Lee Roth- and Sammy Hagar-era material.
“On our first call, he said he’d been talking to Edward’s techs, Zeke Clark and Tom Weber, describing the sound he was looking for,” Scott details. “The 5150 [in 1986] tour was Ed’s last tour with the famous Marshall. He had all the candy, but it hadn’t moved into the more modern Van Halen tone.”
After conversations with Hagar, Satriani had homed in on the band’s Live Without a Net live album from that tour, because it captured such an important tonal transition and was, err, the best of both worlds of the band’s two most distinct eras.
The resulting amp – and the one that Satch has been pushing air with on the road – is the DRGN 100. To bring it to life, Scott had one request: “Let me build the perfect racecar for you to drive.”
“Did he want more horsepower at this turn, or better traction over here, or extra acceleration back there?” she posits. “I’m a big fan of his work, so I explained that I didn’t want to watch him play a covers set. I said, ‘None of us need to see you play note for note; we need you to interpret the essence of the moment while honoring the king.’
“Obviously, I had to make sure he had all the tones he needed – the intro to Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love is like taking a flint and stone to make a spark,” she adds. “It’s a two-hour set with moments that also sound creamier.
“This amp was designed to lift Joe up the whole way through, so that even someone in the last seat of the arena would feel the buzz and stand up.”
With the DRGN 100, Scott more than lived up to her reputation, with Satriani later purring that the “harmonically rich and touch-sensitive” tube amp is “my favorite new amp.”
After a raft of choice guitar mods, it was the final ingredient needed to Van Halen-ify his rig.
Elsewhere, Satriani has opened up on the failed Van Halen tribute tour that would have seen him take EVH’s place in a Roth-fronted Van Halen, and named the two guitarists he felt would have nailed the gig better than him.
Scott’s full interview can be found in the latest issue of Guitar World. Print and digital copies can be ordered from Magazines Direct.
