Van Halen – Women and Children First (Remastered)

During studio session for the band’s third album, ‘Women and Children First,’ Van Halen surprised Templeman by playing a Wurlitzer electric piano through a Marshall stack while the band tracked the anthemic ‘And the Cradle Will Rock … ’ Eddie later explained to one interviewer that fans “might not even notice” the keyboard on the finished track, because “it sounds like my guitar.” In other words, the band and Templeman let Van Halen add piano to the song precisely because it didn’t sound like piano.

Eddie Van Halen described his use of a Fender Bandmaster amplifier in a Guitar Aficionado article quoted in Warehouse Guitar Speakers article titled "Eddie Van Halen Secret Amp: the Fender Bandmaster!"

“I used that amp for years in two ways. I already had the Marshall, but I had not stumbled onto the Variac thing yet, so I would use the Bandmaster through the Marshall cabinet when we gigged at smaller clubs like Gazzarri’s.”

“The real beauty of that amp is how many songs I wrote with it. I wrote all of the early Van Halen songs for the first three albums with that amp, playing quietly in my room. It was really quiet, so my mom couldn’t hear me, but it sounded amazing. My dog Monty would sit down next to me, and he dug it. When I wrote the intro to ‘Women in Love,’ he was sitting there with his ears perked up, like the RCA Victor dog. That Bandmaster was more important than my Marshall head, because I wrote everything with it.”

As seen in pictures from sessions from Van Halen ii and women and children first, David Lee Roth recorded through a Neumann u87