David Howell Evans was born at the Barking Maternity Hospital, in the county of Essex in England, on 8 August 1961. He is the second child of Welsh parents Garvin and Gwenda Evans, who originated in Llanelli, a coastal town in South Wales. Garvin was an engineer who worked for the local electricity board, and then took a job with the electronics company Plessey. The Edge has an elder brother Richard (often called Dik) and a younger sister called Gillian.

As a guitar player, The Edge has a sound typified by a low-key playing style, a chiming, shimmering sound (thanks in part to the sound of Vox AC30s) that he achieves with extensive use of delay effects and reverb. The repeat delay is often set to a dotted eighth note, and the feedback gain is adjusted until a note played repeats two or three times.  In 1987's The Joshua Tree, The Edge often contributes just a few simple lead lines given depth and richness by an ever-present delay. For example, the introduction to "Where the Streets Have No Name" is simply a repeated six-note arpeggio, broadened by a modulated delay effect. The Edge has said that he views musical notes as "expensive", in that he prefers to play as few notes as possible. He said in 1982 of his style,  I like a nice ringing sound on guitar, and most of my chords I find two strings and make them ring the same note, so it's almost like a 12-string sound. So for E I might play a B, E, E and B and make it ring. It works very well with the Gibson Explorer. It's funny because the bass end of the Explorer was so awful that I used to stay away from the low strings, and a lot of the chords I played were very trebly, on the first four, or even three strings. I discovered that through using this one area of the fretboard I was developing a very stylized way of doing something that someone else would play in a normal way.  His first guitar was an old acoustic guitar that his mother bought him at a local flea market for a few pounds; he was nine at the time. He and his brother Dik Evans both experimented with this instrument. He said in 1982 of this early experimentation, "I suppose the first link in the chain was a visit to the local jumble sale where I purchased a guitar for a pound. That was my first instrument. It was an acoustic guitar and me and my elder brother Dik both played it, plonking away, all very rudimentary stuff, open chords and all that." The Edge has stated that many of his guitar parts are based around guitar effects. This is especially true from the Achtung Baby era onwards, although much of the band's 1980s material made heavy use of echos.

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