Dave Friedman. It's Just the Sound in My Head

Detroit, the early 1980s.

Dave Friedman was born and raised in Detroit. Motor City, rock city.

He is a guitarist, and he dreams of what every guitarist his age dreams of: a band, a tour, a record deal.

His heroes: Eddie Van Halen, Warren DeMartini, George Lynch, Ty Tabor of King’s X. And before them, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend and early Aerosmith.

But the stage interests him less than the sound.

Later he would put it simply: he was obsessed with guitar tone and always wanted to know how to get that tone.

Even then Detroit has people who modify amps. One of them, Dan Russell, would later design the Naylor amps. Another, Bruce Egnater, is yet to play an important part in this story. Teenage Dave takes his gear to them.

He himself has been taking apart everything he can get his hands on since he was a kid. His BMX down to the last bolt, and then back together again.

While still in Detroit, Friedman finds the name of Andy Brauer from Los Angeles in a guitar magazine and contacts him with a question. They stay in touch, and Brauer tells him to look him up if he ever comes to Los Angeles.

Around 1987 the eighteen-year-old Friedman moves to Southern California. And looks him up.

Brauer gives him a job carting for Andy Brauer Studio Rentals: delivering and picking up rental gear.

The company’s clients are the top studio guitarists of Los Angeles. Steve Lukather, Dean Parks, Michael Landau, Dann Huff.

Familiar names. In those same years Lukather would become one of the first customers of Mike Soldano, and Landau would leave Soldano one of the three messages on his answering machine.

And Brauer’s warehouse has everything: blackface Fenders, tweeds, Hiwatts, Marshall Plexis, modded Marshalls.

Every unit that comes back from a rental has to be checked in and tested. Friedman hears them all. Later he would call that warehouse his library of sounds.

One day the man who built Brauer’s racks leaves. Friedman has been watching him work for a while, and he says: "Hey, I think I can do that for you!"

They give him a shot. That is how his career as a rig builder begins.

In early 1991 he drives a cabinet in his own car to Eddie Van Halen, who is recording For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge at the time. A slanted Marshall cab with 75-watt Celestion speakers: Eddie plays his Soldano through it, and he would later buy it from Brauer. Van Halen comes out to the car himself, says "let me help you with that", grabs a handle and carries the cabinet together with the delivery guy.

Later Brauer partners with Greg Bales, who has a music store in Chicago called Make’n Music, and they open one like it in Los Angeles. Friedman works there.

One day Randy Jacobs, the guitarist of Was (Not Was), brings a Soldano preamp modded by Bruce Egnater into the store. It sounds fantastic.

Friedman calls Egnater and makes him an offer: if he builds a four-channel preamp, Friedman can easily sell it to the store’s clients. Egnater builds it. They fine-tune it together.

That is how the Egnater IE-4 is born, hand-wired, before the Rocktron version. Almost every studio guitarist has one in their rack.

This is when Friedman really gets into electronics. Egnater becomes his mentor.

In the early 1990s Make’n Music would fire him. At that time the store owned Bogner, and Friedman never came to love the Bogner Ecstasy and kept trying to talk customers into something else.

From 1991 on, Friedman has his own company: Rack Systems Ltd. in North Hollywood.

Racks, pedalboards, switching, amp mods, touring rigs. The company’s website promises "military grade wiring, bulletproof construction".

Ready-made power supplies for pedals do not exist yet, so they drill the boxes and build the power supplies themselves. Friedman says so himself: he is really a metal guy. The kind of metal you drill.

The client list on the 2008 website: Van Halen, Linkin Park, Slash, No Doubt, The Offspring, John 5. The same year Guitar Player names Friedman alongside Pete Cornish and Bob Bradshaw, the builders of guitar systems for the stars. Bradshaw is the same man who once suggested that Soldano build the X88R.

Steve Stevens, Billy Idol’s guitarist, is unhappy with how his switching system sounds. Friedman offers to build him a system that is totally transparent. If he does not love it, he does not have to pay.

Stevens paid.

From then on Friedman repairs his guitars and builds his MIDI switching system, and later his effects and amps.

Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains got his first rig back in the Make’n Music days. The showroom had two cabs, one with Greenbacks and one with Vintage 30s. Cantrell played through both at once and liked the blend. Then they lose track of each other for years and meet again when Alice in Chains are making their first record with the new singer William DuVall. Cantrell would later say that Dave built pretty much every rig he ever had.

With Van Halen it is important not to get things mixed up. Eddie did not use Friedman amps, and there is no signature model for him. Friedman built rigs for him and serviced his old amps.

In 2004 he builds Eddie’s touring rig. Around 2009 he goes through the "Holy Grail", Eddie’s famous 1968 Marshall: he rewires it with original Marshall wire of that era, taken out of another Plexi, and brings the circuit back to the spec of those years. Eddie says the amp has not sounded this good in twenty years. Then Friedman builds him an exact duplicate.

He has also seen how Eddie tests amps. He would hit the strings, lay the guitar on the floor, crank the amp and leave the studio. For days. If the amp was still alive when Eddie came back, it had passed the test.

In the early to mid-1990s Friedman starts modding Marshalls: he puts the channel from his IE-4 into them.

Then he designs the front end of the Budda Superdrive amps and, together with Roy Blankenship, builds the Blankenship Variplex.

Billy Howerdel of A Perfect Circle loves his Naylor Superdrive 60 but wants to merge it with his 100-watt Marshall. Friedman builds the mod: the front end from the Naylor, the power amp from the Marshall. Howerdel records the first A Perfect Circle album on this amp.

The amp has no markings on it at all, so it is called the Naked. About a dozen of them would be made, and most would go to Japan.

Los Angeles has a legend of its own, too: José Arredondo (1923 to 1994), one of the first craftsmen to start modding amps. At eighteen, just after moving to California, Friedman takes his amp to him for a mod, to his house in Sherman Oaks. Amps everywhere, a striped Eddie Van Halen on the wall, and the only way through the rubble is sideways.

Many years later Friedman would work on José mods by the dozen. "Literally hundreds," he says. When James Hetfield’s José-modded Marshall started acting up, it was Friedman who fixed it. The amp ended up on every song of 72 Seasons.

Friedman has his own yardstick, too. A 1968 Marshall Plexi, 50 watts, Super Lead. For years he has run it through a Variac, cranked to 10. This, he says, is "the Van Halen school of Plexi".

By 2008 Roy Blankenship has taken his business to Diamond Amplification, and Friedman decides it is time to make his own.

The first brand is called Marsha. A cease and desist arrives from Marshall, and the brand becomes Friedman Amplification. Friedman calls it a nice letter.

The first Marsha is a single-channel custom amp. A clean channel, an effects loop, the Fat, C45 and Sat switches: each one is added if the customer wants it. Later a production amp would grow out of these options.

In 2009, at the LA Amp Show in Van Nuys, Friedman shows his Marsha amps to the public. One of them, a 50-watt head with the Brown Eye mod, has just come back from an Alice in Chains tour: the knobs are set the way Jerry Cantrell left them.

The name Brown Eye came from an employee. Friedman insists he was thinking of Van Halen’s "brown sound" and at first simply missed the other meaning of the phrase. The mode with even more gain got the name Hairy Brown Eye. Premier Guitar, writing about it, tactfully added an "ahem".

Friedman is generally relaxed about names. Dirty Shirley: a pin-up reference, and a drink too. Pink Taco: a restaurant he ate at.

In 2010 Premier Guitar reviews Friedman’s first production amps: the 100-watt Brown Eye, a "high-gain monster", and a reissue of the Naked. They are sold only through Tone Merchants in North Hollywood. The Brown Eye is the future BE-100, the brand’s flagship.

Friedman explains his start simply: he was in the right place at the right time. For years he had built rigs for Stevens, Cantrell and others, so it was easy to get his amps in front of them. "Obviously, the sound had to back up my pitch to them. But it did."

He never gave anything away to anyone. Once they had heard it, they always wanted to buy it.

Friedman’s first signature amp is made for Steve Stevens: the SS-100, 2011. It is shown at NAMM in January 2013. Stevens was a big Plexi guy and was involved from start to finish.

Then the JJ-100, Jerry Cantrell’s first ever signature amp, and the 20-watt JJ Junior in 2019.

For Jake E. Lee they make the JEL-100. At NAMM they sell 150 heads in two days. Lee puts it like this: Dave does not hear things as a technician, he hears things like a musician.

In 2024 the PLEX comes out, a "sonic twin" of that very 1968 Marshall. The simplest amp in the line. It sells massively.

At NAMM 2025 Friedman shows the JOSE, a tribute to José Arredondo developed together with his daughter Marisol. He could not just take someone else’s circuit and release it, like so many people do.

And pedals. The 2016 BE-OD captures the sound of the BE-100, and in 2023 the IR-X preamp comes out.

Soldano had his gearbox. Friedman has his own image: the rubber band.

The sound has to be spongy yet tight. Under a hard pick attack the amp sags, then bounces back like a rubber band. That is where the touch sensitivity comes from: turning down the guitar’s volume cleans up the sound.

There is one yardstick: his own 1968 50-watt Plexi on a Variac, cranked to 10. The BE channel was originally designed to clone that sound. Ever since, every B-series amp has to be able to sound like that Plexi in at least one setting.

Why the Variac? That Plexi has a plate voltage of about 460 volts. The Variac lowers it together with the heater voltage, and the heaters are the key: the tubes roll off some of the highest highs and the lowest lows, and the sound gets punchier, softer and more compressed. It seems like gain for days, but it is really compression.

To this Plexi Friedman adds what the 1968 Marshall did not have. A boost that hits the front end harder: the HBE mode is that extra gain stage. And a master volume at the end of the preamp, before the phase inverter.

Many people love a master after the phase inverter. Friedman does not care for it. Such a master takes the negative feedback loop out of the amp: the further it is turned down, the less negative feedback is left, and the amp gets brighter and harsher.

The main trick is in the bass. Friedman lets only a little low end into the front end. Bass at the input clutters the gain-staging, and the overdrive turns muddy and, in his word, "farty". He makes up for the low end later, in the power amp. On the BE-100 Deluxe this returned low end went onto a Thump knob with a frequency switch, and the depth of the power amp’s negative feedback onto a Response switch.

Soldano does the same at the input, as told in the story of the SLO-100. Two builders, the same physics.

And one more habit. Friedman voices his amps at low volume. Like mixing a record: if the mix is balanced quietly, it sounds good loud too. The other way round does not work. That is why the master on the 100-watt BE-100 works even at bedroom volume. Friedman himself says there is nothing special about the master: it is how the entire amp is voiced.

Same story with gain. Phil X of Bon Jovi, playing a BE-100 for the first time, reached for the gain first thing and turned it down, and all of a sudden the sound had articulation and was open. Friedman does make amps with a lot of gain, but that is not where his head is at. He makes them for the people who want more.

And the switches on the back panel, Fat, C45 and Sat, are former custom mods. Once they were soldered in for a customer on request; now they are toggle switches. Sat adds saturation and compression, and the volume drops when it is on, as the manual honestly warns.

In 2014 Friedman does a deal with Boutique Amps Distribution: from then on, that company builds the amps and distributes them around the world. It also does the marketing and the accounting.

Friedman became a licensed brand that gets a percentage of the production. Friedman himself no longer has to run a factory, employ people or deal with workers' compensation.

But once a week he goes to the factory and tests a whole rack of finished amps. He listens to every amp that leaves the factory and signs it.

And an email to Friedman’s customer service is answered by Dave himself.

Since 2019 the same Boutique Amps Distribution has also owned Soldano. And among the brands it distributes around the world is Egnater, his mentor’s name.

In the early hours of June 1, 2021, the BAD building in Huntington Park catches fire. The fire destroys the back section, occupied by another tenant, and stops at the shared wall. But the smoke and the firefighters' water still do irreparable damage. A year later a new factory was up and running.

Friedman still builds rigs. Now also for Wolfgang Van Halen.

And he does not like modeling. It is just not interesting, he says, it gives no feeling: the air has to shake the pant legs a little.

There is a symmetry in this story too.

At eighteen Dave brought his amp to José Arredondo for a mod and squeezed sideways through the rubble in his shop. More than thirty years later he releases the JOSE amp together with José’s daughter.

All his life he chased sounds, built the most complex rigs and modded hundreds of other people’s Marshalls. And then he made the PLEX, a copy of his own Plexi. He finds it kind of funny: all his life he worked for all these sounds, and then the Plexi was easy.

Friedman did not invent a new sound. He never meant to: guitar players, he is sure, generally do not want completely new sounds. They want sounds from the past with some variation: more gain or something else added.

That sound had been in his head for a long time. He just made it so that others could hear it too.

On our site, Friedman is represented by the free RedPawAmp plugin and the IR-X NAM captures.