jimmarchi1's Pedalboard

I had one of the '88 RI's as an integral part of my touring backline for years thru a tall cabinet with great old celestions in it. What a fine amp. I tweaked mine a little to sound better with a strat, but I recommend this amp stock for anyone who needs a lot of stage volume and plenty of treble on tap. She wasn't as reliable as a vintage blackface fender, but she never failed at a show and always sounded pretty solid unless the wall voltage was outta control high (I eventually started power conditioning or even running a variac). While I typically deplore working on PCBs, Marshall does a great job with their layouts and spacing. This amp was easy to repair, rebias and modify. Not the holy grail as some attest, but very very good

I have one more thing to say.... this amp will not be what you expect at less than theater-filling levels. If you do not tour then get a 50 watt JCM800 2204 or maybe an 18 watt. Still, this is THE Marshall sound you've always heard about. You may not find that sound easily, but its in there if to start in the right place. If you don't use overdrive or fuzz pedals, here is my advice:

Try setting the amp fairly flat (dime the mid and crank the treble to 10 or until it hurts your ears, add bass to suit your taste and cab) but keep the presence below 5. Don't jump channels like Hendrix, plug in the bright channel and dime it out, then add the normal channel to taste (there's crosstalk and subtle ghosting, but beware nosie and squeals at high presence settings). Then use your guitar volume control (yes, the knob next to the tone you don't use either) to vary between clean, crunch and lead. This amp does not respond like a hot rod deluxe or even the venerable tweed bassman that's in its DNA. I prefer an Amperex bugle boy ecc83 in V1 and an rca or ge 12ax7 in v2. The phase splitter sounds fine with ost any well made tube. In a pinch V1 sounds good with a well-tested tung-sol RI 12ax7. Alright, TMI

Plagued by the same problems as moreley's ABY box, the whirlwind selector is built a little better. While it has a nice, sturdy box, the buttons are way too close together for comfort. I thought the Moreley felt tight until I tried the Whirlwind. Better wear J Toe cowboy boots to stomp this guy with any precision.

You can use this for routing between 2 amps if 1) there is no ground loop potential between your amps and 2) you don't mind having your signal cut in half between both amps or you leave both on all the time and feed the whirlwind with a nice line driver.

I recently bumped into my block logo, 90s dynacomp while cleaning up my gear closet. I was looking for my SD1 and BF2 (not sure if I sold them) and found this gem instead. I was really into this pedal at a couple periods of my playing career. Great lead boost into a slightly dirty amp, the extra sustain allows you to play with a little less gain when using a strat and the midrange presence lift really helps cut a mic. Great into a clean fender for chiken pickin' Dare I add this to my board again? Maybe with analog chorus? How 80s of me!

But yeah, if you want classic guitar compression that's not studio grade and just does its thing? this is a great place to start. It colors your tone, but that's the point. Great in a dense band mix. They say the script logo is better but I could never hear a substantial difference. A grey Ross definitely sounds better without adding a bunch of features like booooo-teek versions. Set and forget squash that used to be one of the few pedals I couldn't do without in the recording studio. I am really inspired to plug this in again after replying to a compressor thread in the guitar forum! Everyone should have this or a boss compressor around. They are cheap enough.

For years I would tune with a boss needle tuner and then go by ear between songs, but my most professional band demanded silent tuning so the signer could attempt to banter with the audience once in a while... so I bought the ubiquitous TU2. It worked fine I guess. Didn't like the buffer in it (which soudned brittle and played hell with fuzzfaces and tonebenders), but since I was using a radial switchbone to fuel my multi-amp rig I just used the tuner out and assigned my 3rd footwitch on the switchbone to mute. I guess I could've hooked the needle tuner to the board but it woulda been impossible to see on a lot of stages. The TU2 is a but hard to see as well. I later added a rack into my rig and ran the tuner out to my korg rack tuner which was very visible although it required an extra 20' cable rune very night. When I was doing sideman work alter I went to a 1 amp rig with no rack for most gigs and dumped the TU2 in favor of a pitch black because it was true bypass and SUPER bright. I never looked back. The boss pedal tuners are dinosaurs. They were at one time a must have, but these days they're pointless. Frankly I don't know why anyone would sue this when Peterson makes the strobostomp, korg has the pitchblacks and TC offers the mighty polytune. All 3 have different pros and cons but one is bound to suit you whereas the TU2 and 3 are a joke comparatively.

This ABY box does its job perfectly. The Radial 'drag' control really lets you tune the buffer circuit (used to not halve your volume between amps) to sound just like your guitar straight in. The switches are sturdy and roadworthy. The boost/mid-boost function sounds awesome in any of the settings. In mute mode the boost button is hand for putting your tone-sucking Boss TU-2 (or 3 or whatever) on the tuner out and still having silent tuning. The only problem with this bad boy is the odd-voltage/current power supply! The Radial wall wart is not sturdy. I have destroyed 3 of them. No one else makes a power supply that will sub in. You cannot hook the Tonebone pedals to your multi-pedal power supply either, they need too much current. If I toured with the Radial again I would make sure to travel with at least 2 radial wall warts.

other than the low output and top-end suck in bypass common to many pedals of the era this version of the smalls tone is absolutely EHX's best phaser.... this is the wide-sweep, clean guitar phaser to beat. I often regret selling mine, but it was either that or the mu-tron phasor II. I really needed some extra cash!

I got to borrow this from a friend of my old drummer's.... I was really sad to return it, but the guy never did me any harm so I gave it back when asked. This guy ahs the low output and level drop of most early flangers and phasers, but apart from that tis one of the 3 top flangers of all time in my book (the other 2 being the electric mistress and AD/A). This is the roundest toned of the bunch with the warmest feedback effect. It does an excellent chorus-like sound that's so much more inviting then the andy summers Mistress chorus tone. Its other amazing trick is that apart from a bypass button it has a footswitch to disable the LFO and activate the treadle so you can control the sweep like a wah. You can get silly with this and I never actually recorded with it, but I did use it live once in a while. The other nice touch is that it includes 2 controls for the depth, so that rather than having a knob for the center of your LFO sweep you can set the top and bottom extremes individually. Very precise tones can be dialed in this way and its an excellent feature that's shared by AD/A's famous flanger… but the Mu-tron takes it further because the two depth knobs also dial in the heel and toe response of the treadle! So you can make it a really tight and subtle foot sweep or a total freak out depending on your needs. YES! I wish I had scraped up $1000 and bought this guy from the owner. God knows what tis worth now. I've never seen another one, ever.... its on the cover of Analogman's book. RARE. And rightfully hyped just like the bi-phase...mu-tron gear is fabulous.

I dock ceriatone's 18 watt a star for the transformers. I blew the OTs in my friends and in mine and I wasn't abusing them in anyway, just playing them all the way up as god intended. These amps are really some of the finest 18 att based amps going. The TMB channel is fun but I always just played a strat or LP jr into the normal input with the tone and volume wide open. If you want clean headroom try the 20 watt head. These amps have voxiness and plexiness in one box and can win the folgers taste test against any ac15 made since the JMI era. I really think the ceriatone is the best sounding 18 watt I've played, but you might as well buy a classic tone output transformer right out of the gate and put that in because the stock one is going to melt down, it sounds fine, but its a piece of shit.

These early, rebranded Magantones are generally seen with an 8" speaker and a champ like SE amp featuring a 6SJ7 pentode, 6V6 and 5Y3 rectifier, just a Magantone varsity jammed in there.... mine had the same cab dimensions but with a 110" jammed in powered by a push-pall amp. Sort of like a melodier amp, but all octal and with one of the inputs driven by a 6SJ7 gain stage.... similar to a Gibson GA20 leatherette on paper. This amp broke up early. It wasn't quite as loud as a 5E3 even through ane xtrenal cab with efficient speakers. It had a very, very distinctive sound, particularly when playing into the microphone input that was powered by the pentode. It actually was loaned to me for about a year by a very close friend and I used this amp extensively for 'color' parts with a tele or LP jr when recording the UYB record. This was one of the 'tiny music' amps as we called them on the sessions. We were inspired by the most-hated but most-toneful of STP records to use a lot of little, oddball amps like this to balance out the plexis, showmans and V4s... they wound up taking over a lot f the tracks. This was without a doubt my favorite little guy besides the marshall 18 and 20, but they have more of a little-big-amp sound. The more common single ended Leillani palm tree amps are sweet too (and dead similar in sound to an early Gibson GA5), but this is the one. This little guy has its own thing going on. I'm always looking for these because my buddy won't sell it to me.