00:28Hi this is Richard Barrett for
00:29Guitarist Magazine and I'm here with the new Marshall JCM900 and it's the 20 watt high gain
00:36dual reverb studio. This is the smaller of their heads that's available. It's got identical
00:43circuitry to the full-size version with slightly scaled down power due to custom transformers
00:49and lower plate voltages. That's how they managed to make it sound the same as the big version
00:53but not as loud. First of all let's just have a listen to some of the sounds have a little
00:58play
00:58with the controls and then we'll come back and we'll get into more of the deep dive stuff about
01:02the specs.
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03:14as you can hear this this amp can cover
03:17from from completely clean up
03:19from completely clean up to really high gain I mean even by modern standards sure
03:23there are amps now that have more gain but I would debate how useful that really is at stage
03:28volume a lot of the time a lot of the sounds that we hear aren't quite as dirty as we
03:32think
03:32but anyway let's go to the controls from left to right we have the master volume and the reverb for
03:40each channel so
03:41channel a is the clean channel b is the dirty though using the input gain controls you can get a
03:46thousand shades in between
03:48I'll come back to that
03:49then we move on to our presence
03:52bass middle and treble
03:55and that's a pretty standard lineup for Marshall amps and yes they're you know centered at certain frequencies and it's
04:02quite useful
04:03I mean I did try and emphasize that by pulling out the mids and then putting them in it really
04:08does change the character of the sound
04:10but
04:11one thing that I'd like to add from my own personal experience of these because they were the ubiquitous higher
04:17amp if you had a higher back line and you were touring
04:20then
04:20you would basically have a choice of JCM 900 or JCM 900 and that was fine actually because
04:28they were a very versatile amp and I found that the input gain control of each channel
04:33it was really worth spending the time to trim that to suit my individual guitar as you should if you
04:40try one of these
04:41with the input gain set to a higher level on both channels
04:47you'll get much more bass and a looser bass and as you reduce that as I say on the clean
04:53channel or the dirty channel
04:54things will start to tighten up and get chunky and that will affect the EQ as well
04:59in a similar way that a treble bleed might do on a guitar
05:02it can get quite sharp if you want it to
05:04having described that manipulation of the input gains I thought I might like to actually show you in practice
05:10now the beginning of the signal chain if you like is this guitar they're not super powerful pickups but they
05:15are EMGs
05:16they're a pickup that was around a lot in the 90s these are the SA's in the neck and middle
05:22and it's an 85 in the bridge none of them are set super high I'm not looking for massive amounts
05:29of output
05:29so this is probably comparable to various other pickups is what I'm saying
05:33so let's have a listen to the clean channel with let's switch to the clean channel first
05:38with the gain around about halfway up
05:46now if I take that back to about three we really get a
05:52it thins out and obviously it's a bit quieter but I'd just crank the master to compensate
05:57and let's take it up to about eight
06:03way louder much more bottom end coming in so I think I might go for a sweet spot of about
06:09six here
06:15to my mind some of the best clean sounds are just on the edge
06:19you might not even hear that they're on the edge but there's a smoothness to it
06:23now on the bridge pickup I'm going to need to dial that back a little bit
06:33so it's not crystal clean I can get there
06:38again I'd have to crank the output to match the level
06:41but you can hear that that's affecting the tone
06:44I've left the EQ with everything on about halfway
06:47because I found that I didn't really get a sound that I liked better
06:51by doing extreme settings or cranking the bass or anything like that
06:55now in a gig situation maybe it's worth a try
06:59but I as I say those input gains are really key
07:03so I'd like to show you the B channel the dirty channel
07:06I'll go bridge pickup
07:11now with the gain on about halfway like that or just above
07:14I'm getting quite a chunky fast response
07:22now if I go up
07:28you can hear that it's not quite as focused there but it is better for
07:39if I come back
07:47you can hear that kind of sound that was appearing in the Foo Fighters and Green Day certainly
07:52I mean I think that the I think Oasis would run there's pretty much flat out
08:01you get the idea of that so again without touching the EQ I can get a range of sounds by
08:07manipulating the gain
08:09and probably by using the guitar volume
08:16there's a kind of snarl about the top end with these that you get from putting a drive pedal in
08:21front of a JCM 800 as well
08:24that's very much baked in to the amp and that's part of the sound
08:29these are available in various models the combo 1x12 combo
08:34or you can use a head like this into any cab really you've got all the connections on the back
08:40and with the combo versions and this version you've got your effects loop with the level control
08:45everything is basically exactly as it was back in the day on the JCM 900s including the direct out and
08:52the frequency compensated out
08:54these days people will probably plug into a speaker sim or something like that
08:59but you have most connection options that you could want
09:04these are made in the UK Milton Kings factory
09:08in the way that Marshalls have always been made
09:10this is very much a heritage product
09:13you've got little stickers giving you the name of the person that finished off the amp
09:17everything is exactly as it should be
09:19it's reflected in the price I suppose the combo is a little bit over a thousand UK pounds
09:25the head version like this is a little bit under a thousand pounds
09:29so it's time to give you the full version of the track I did earlier
09:33I hope you like it see you next time
09:35I hope you enjoyed this video
