NIHD - New Impending Head Day

[Newc]

Working on a deal now for a JCM 800 2203x head (apparently it's the reissue? never really followed Marshall's stuff that closely).

Anyhoo, what should I know about this head?

I've got a Carvin 2x12 cab rated at 300w, but I've also got a Mesa half-back 4x12 with some Peaveys in it (hafta dig it out of the closet to see what's in it - haven't really used it since I got it). I wanna say they're from a 1290MS? Could be mistooken on that, as I said, it's in the closet.
I know these came in 2 configurations: Black Shadows on top with EVs on bottom, or with Celestions on the bottom. The EVs were 120w but the Celestions were 90w? I've only briefly perused online info about them, mostly trying to track down the original speakers, as I'm unsure of the Peaveys.

Pics on arrival, and any help is appreciated.

[jgcable]

The Reissue will have an effects loop. Its extremely loud and has alot less gain then you will expect it to have. Plays very nice with Vintage 30 equipt cabinets. Its one of the greatest most used live and in the studio amps ever made.

[DonP]

Matt,

I saw you going for that on SD forums. Good for you! I saw his location is in MS - is it close enough for you to check out in person and pick up? Maybe he'll cut out the shipping amount. I'm fearful of shipped amps because of damamge but I got a Lynchbox shipped to me with no issues.

Ok, back to that amp, it's loaded with 6550's. Those aren't your traditional tubes. I wired up my 1979 (year) Marshall and it was ppumping out 120 watts clean! In old articles Lynch said he liked these. I haven't ran them in ages because one of my 4 burnt the getter and I need to find a replacement. What you will find is these tubes may be hard and loud. You won't get too much distortion from the power amp with these.

2203's were used a lot back in the 80s with pedals up front. I'm not a big fan of pedals, but I do have the tried and true tube screamer, a DS-1, and a Metal Zone. I also have a wah. But I almost never use these and just go right into the head.

I'd imagine without pedals you should have a great AC/DC, Tesla, or old Judas Priest tone (Point of Entry or earlier).

[Hellbat]

The Reissue will have an effects loop. Its extremely loud and has alot less gain then you will expect it to have. Plays very nice with Vintage 30 equipt cabinets. Its one of the greatest most used live and in the studio amps ever made.

I had several friends that owned JCM-800's back when they were the new thing on the block and every single one of them used a distortion/boost with it, so the gain statement is 100% true. They also clean up amazingly well when you back off the guitar volume.

I'd imagine without pedals you should have a great AC/DC, Tesla, or old Judas Priest tone (Point of Entry or earlier).

This amp will nail the AC/DC sound for sure. Get a ProCo Rat and you can pull off 90% of the hair bands tones. It plays nicely with Tubescreamers, SD-1's, and if you want good doom/stoner tones, grab a muff.

[Newc]

Thanks fellas.

A friend in Lousiana had a Marshall head of some sort back in '87/'88 - don't recall which one, but I'm sure it was whatever the kids were using for Metal at the time (800, I'd imagine) - and he had a real TubeDriver pedal - the big cream-colored jobby. Don't recall if it was the Chandler or the BK Butler (which came first?)
Sounded great with that pedal in front of it, especially for playing all the Shrapnel artist stuff (Becker/Friedman, Howe, etc) and Satch, Lynch, and all that.

And yeah, he's as far away from Memphis as I am, so we're going to meet in Olive Branch, since I'd rather not stop in Memphis unless it was to burn the place down and everyone in it

I saw the price he wanted and checked Ebay for comparison - seemed like a good deal.

Might run my rack through the power section (MP-1, etc) and then might look into different pedals (Boss stuff, of course, like the DS-1, SuperOD, TubeScreamer, MXR Dist+, etc,) and see which one I prefer through the front. Who knows, I might end up going back to a pedalboard

I know there's tons of pedal options these days - BigMuff, Keely mods, the list goes on - but I don't want to be the guy who writes the Ecyclopedia Of JCM800-friendly Pedals

He sent me a YT clip of it - sounds nice, and yeah, very loud. It was overloading the camera's mic, but you could tell what was amp tone and what was camera farts.

Anyone tried an EMG AfterBurner/TurboCharger-equipped guitar with one, with and without a pedal? I always ran my AB on about 3 in the Halford with the original HZs, because anything more was over-saturated for my MP-1 settings. Might stick that in a pedal, too.

[Hellbat]

Typically what I saw people doing with distortion/overdrive pedals on 800's was using them mostly as clean boosts with the volume set at 7-8 and the distortion/gain set fairly low. Essentially they would dial in the amount of hair in the tone with the gain. The volume boost would add a lot of dirt naturally from slamming the front end. With a fairly low gain boost the amps natural crunch and serious child/small animal harming power when you have the master cranked just sounds so thick and chunky. Yet it remains musical when playing chords using more than 3 notes and aren't all octaves and 5ths...

[Newc]

IIRC, back when I had pedals, I used a Boss SuperOD that way - gain low, volume high - to push an MXR Dist+ through a 20 watt Gorilla amp. Saturated the MXR nicely and cut out the farts, yet gave a nice smooth distortion.

I even set the "pedals" in my 1101 and Amplitube vst that way.


I've read a couple of times about some Marshalls having a feature where they had 2 inputs, and you jump a patch cable (like for pedals) from one to the other to get more gain? Something like that? Was that only on the older ones like the Plexi?
And on that subject, if the amp had 2 inputs, and you ran a cable from one input to the other, where the fuck did you plug the guitar?

Or did I just misread that whole thing?

[Hellbat]

The old plexis had the hi and low sensitivity inputs and there was 2 of each. So it's kind of like using a Y cable. You'd usually plug in to the high channel, and then run a short patch from the other high input to one of the low inputs. Each channel had it's own volume so you could kind of mix the 2 knobs to vary how much and what kind of crunch you were getting as the high channel was brighter than the other. Or you could dime both channels if you wanted to destroy things.

[warlok]

I think that was the 4 input heads using the jumpers.. And if you don't want to do a bunch of pedal testing, grab a MXR Classic OD or GT-OD. They both have the switch inside to change from Tube screamer-ish to ZW/SD-1 type OD. That'll get you better ideas for cheap. I put a switch on the outside of my Classic OD to switch back and forth as I see fit. Love it!

[ralph]

older 800's had two inputs, low input & high input,

Low input was for weaker signals (low output SC for example), high input was for higher output pickups

If you plugged a guitar with highoutput humbuckers into the low input, youd get more gain

note sure if the 2203x has this or not

[DonP]

LOL about Memphis. I thought you lived there and felt sorry for you

The ADA MP-1 is a perfect preamp for this amp. It would make pedals redundant. Many 80's player went from pedals to MP-1's.

The old 4 input plexis were designed to have two guitar players use one amp. There are two preamps. When you jumper the two together, you are able to use the gain of both in parallel. A circuit like this adds the gains (instead of a series circuit where the gain is multiplied). So if each channel had a gain of 10, you would have 20 in parallel (but 100 in cascaded series).

One other thing to mention is that the 800's with stacked inputs (like your reissue) were desireable because when Marshall changed the circuit from stacked to side-by-side, they "got cheap" and got rid of one of the large filter caps on the 100 watt models. Less filtering = less bottom end. I'm not sure how this applies to re-issues. Either way it will be a gloriously loud amp.

Link to sale for those who want to see pictures:

http://www.seymourduncan.com/forum/showthread.php?260918-FS-Marshall-JCM-800-2203x

[Newc]

Awesome, thanks for the info

Gonna meet up Monday and pick it up (damnable work schedules)

[sambencuda]

I have a Mesa Half Back with Black Shadow labeled V30's(british) in the bottom and New V30's in the top. I have the Black Shadow labeled Celestian C90's (2) that I took out of the top if you are interested. I just never liked those speakers. Make me an offer or trade me something. I just want to get rid of them.

The 2203 is a great amp. I find that with the right pedals or preamp in front you can do just about anything with it. Don't know much about the reissues, but I imagine there comparable tonewise. I'm sketchy when it comes to Marshall's reliability on anything after the 800 series. I'd still pick one up at a good price though.

[Newc]

Cool, thanks. Was thinking of putting it back to stock, or even rigging it up like a Marshall 1960a cab (they had what, V30s mostly?). Once the head gets here I'll see what I can see.

Another question: I know what speaker load attenuators are and what they do, and there's a bunch out there - Sholz, Kolbe, Marshall, etc. "Best" is a subjective term, of course, but what are the pros and cons of the the Sholz Powersoak, Marshall Powerbrake, and Kolbe "Black Box" (I think that was the name of it)?
Then again, what else is out there that is comparable? I want to use the head, but I'm not at liberty to run it wide open all the time, so aside from turning my closet into an isolation box, what are my options in load attenuators?

[Hellbat]

I think the Palmer DI's also act as attenuators, plus they give you a good recording option as well.

*Edited to add video...