Among vintage guitar amps, Marshall is of course the 1st or second name you will hear and it’s for good reasons : those amps forged Rock’n’roll and I really cannot imagine music without them. Most guitar heroes have used or still used a Marshall and their music and tones are closely linked to the signature sound of these wonderful amplifiers. So I propose here a trip though the vintage Marshall of my collection, the Blues Breaker having its own page.

JTM45

What would be a better start that the amp that started the whole business ? I will not come with more history about the creation of this legend, but instead will try to give a short description of its tone : beautiful clear at low volume and a really unique smooth with lovely high-end when pushed.

This, of course, if you use original G.E.C. KT66 tubes. Other 6L6 won’t give this amplifier its genuine signature tone. Note both plexi front plates, golden in front and white on the back, folded aluminium chassis and round three prongs AC plug.

JTM100

Shortly after the creation of the JTM45, a strong demand of higher power amps raised in the UK, as the British bands played in bigger venues and needed to be loud. This particular amp may have been created for P.A. but I am sure many guitarists used it.

Very rare amp, which can be considered as the missing link between the JTM45 and the later famous 100w plexi. Spot the very ‘Voxy’ copper vents on top and unusual power transformer.

The Pig

A very rare and mostly interesting amp, as for a long time only mine could be searched on Google. As the audience increased, the guitar players wanted more power – remember in the ’60s , guitar did not come though P.A. – so why not make a 200w amp ?

This clever idea had some drawbacks : MIGHTY and fragile power and output transformers -on my pig, we had to change the power transformer- and the use of KT88…. when it was quite simpler and maybe less expensive to get two 100 watters.

This explains the short life of the wonderful pig , life in which it had the time of recording the legendary tone of Mick Ronson, and the later great number of amps on stage.

1960 cabinet

All these amps needed cabs of course, and the most famous is the 1960A or 1960B. The beautiful original pinestripe grillcloth of the sixties is now a rare sight.

plexi 50w super lead

The succesor to JTM45 differs from its ancestor from few things : a stronger and more convenient stell chassis and the use of the tube that will become standard in all Marshall amps : the EL34 .

You can find great EL34 tubes these days, thanks to the reactivation of once-lost vaccum tubes factoried. But nothing will replace the perfect distortion of the original Mullard when pushed to their far, far limit. This amp is anyway close to perfection unless you need of course its Majesty ….

The Plexi

By ‘plexi’ I mean Marshall Super Lead 100w plexi front, the king of all amps, used by the most famous guitar heroes of all time. You will often hear you don’t know what is electric guitar until you plug into one of these vintage monsters at full volume, and this is really not far from truth.

The power tubes distortion of this amp is perfect : all of a sudden the raw power in your face turns into a nearly mellow distortion so pleasing you won’t stop playing. Tinnitus-friendly for sure. Here again , genuine distortion tone is obtained with vintage Mullard, newer tubes giving a less smooth overdrive, while this could be subtle if you correctly bias your amp and get a perfect quartet of EL34 as it was done here.

Park amps

Park amps were Marshall when Marshall could not use its brand for legal reasons. They had different but becoming cosmetics and supposed to be a tad better. Most Park had the same Marshall equivalent and mine was simply a JMP 100w.

I say was because because this particular amp of my collection went to another famous collection : Joe Banamassa’s. You can actually spot it in numerous video thanks to its flashing blue colour.

Flag logo super P.A.

This 100w P.A. have a rare and short-lived ‘flag’ JTM logo and is a direct sibbling of my JTM100 P.A. on this page. A real beautiful design with its large front face.

It also features the famous cloth-retainers , made of heat resistant coton and giving a real Lewis Caroll look to the amp chassis. Spot the yellow capacitors and laydown transformer, making it a real plexi amp.

Marshall Major

Well the idea of 200w amps did not die completely : they still wanted to use high-power tubes for P.A. as it was the weak point of all big shows at that time. It’s not a plexi anymore and I wonder if this green light is original. But I still like the large front plate…

The cloth retainers were left for sturdy steel to protect the expensive KT88 or 6550 while it may not have been a good idea to mix them like here. I suppose the strange small double circuit board on the left is a test point for bias or a bug killer.

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Never give up! I had long ago abandoned all hopes to find one day an original bluesbreaker combo. And here is is: the rarest and most valuable collectible amp of all quietly waiting for me to turn it up. Hard to believe. Furthermore, this amp is 100% stock if your except the light black spray on the speaker cloth ( « paint it black » fan?) and much more than this, it is « stock-working » which is my expression to say that the amp has never been repaired and works perfectly. When I say « work », I should say fill your ears with pure guitar tone fanatic nirvanesque delight. Maybe now I should move to stamps.

It has a JMP plexi front, which confirm my knowledge that JTM had ceased to exist well before 1968 as it is currently said on books. Apart from this, it is the same chassis than my 1967 50w trem.

No surprise with the back plexi plate and serial number. T/ means plexi 50w trem chassis and you can see the din female plug for the trem pedal. Nobody I know has ever seen an original marshall trem pedal with its so European din plug but then again nobody I know uses the trem in a marshall amp.

Here is the back view. 1961 models are 4×10 while 1962 are 2×12. Concerning the famous Bluesbreakers « Beano » album , there is no other evidence than 2 front pics of the amp ( those with E.C. in the forefront playing his Les Paul ). So, while it is always stated this was a 2×12 i.e. model number 1962, it is certainly not impossible that this reknown amp was a 4×10 like mine, thus explaining why this historic tone is so hard to obtain with 2×12 reissue or other goodies. In other words, this could be the real amp recorded on this seminal album. Chills. The speakers are ceramic I think, but they still bear the uncanny silverdale road gold marshall label on them. How stock can you be?

This my favourite shot of all: the unbelievable gold silverdale label (which clearly show that these labels were used well after June 66 as it is currently admitted) and the 16KM celestion t-code. For the young amp tiro, 16KM does not mean that your speaker can be heard as far as 16 kilometers from your amp, but 16 October 1967.

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In these times of digital technology and computer based effects, tape echoes nevertheless remain musicians’ favorite delays , just after their old competitors , the analog delays.
This is quite weird, as no effect wanted digital so badly: as you need to play back a signal one or many times with a given delays , nothing should work better than computers.

Why such an obsolete, stuttering , noisy, unreliable tape recorder is preferred by serious musicians to ultra precise 24bit ( or even 32bit ) sampling?
When everyone and his sister will go for a harsher/trebly theory, I would rather invite you to watch any movie where Ray Harryhausen performed special effects. While made with prehistoric do-it-yourself technique, these various monsters will always seem more real than computerized equivalent.
You know why? Because when you use weird ways of creating them, monsters look weird. And monster must be weird.
I don’t want my dinosaurs to move like milk cows! I want them to move in a weird pixilated way.
And echo is a special effect. Echo MUST sounds weird to be real. After all , in mother nature, you need a big mountain to create it.
And when we talk about weird, the least we can say is that our Italian friends from binson got ahead.

Why a simple tape when a direct drive magnetic rotating disc with heads all around can be such fun !

And why using dull jack plugs like everyone when Geloso non-standard bizarre 3 prongs plugs are available only in Italy and for a short time in History?

And why black or chrome, when medicine greenish yellow look so nicely strange?

And why anonymous silk screen when we could look different with plexi non-smoking railway station signs with our logo ?

But, but, even with all this, binson echorecs were a hit because, because their delay tone is RayHarryhauseneskly tremendous!
The main reasons why are:

1- The use of these disc allows to put heads all around it, thus permitting to catch and play back delay in places where no tape recorder can do it. This gave this primitive machinery to create a beautiful sort of reverb, one of the only alternative to spring reverb at this time.

2- These Binson engineers were no beginners at amplifying and create for their monster one of the most complicated all-tube preamp I have ever encountered. Most of the tube were German E83CC double triode , maybe the best 12AX7 tube equivalent ever made.

3- The disc was coated with magnetic substance that was supposed to last ( well maybe not to be still used to day, some 45 years after) and thus react differently from the usual tapes loops to the guitar frequency range.

Pink Floyd , then enjoying a climax in inspiration and taste, made this echo unit their main effect for guitars, bass and organ. For a complete demonstration, buy « Pink Floyd at Pompei » and spot the yellow echorecs all along the movie. It is worth noting that this movie was a French TV production, at a time when money was not important in our cultural landscape, the 2 TV channels then belonging to the republic. It was coinciding with my teen-age too, and believe me it was a wonderful era for rock music.

Anyway, these echoes were not intended to be used as a guitar or instrument effect, but as part as a PA system. Their were sold with their mixer to go then into a power amp for a nice 50w or something all tube PA.
I bought this system from a band of my area, which bought it new in the sixties, and while the PA use of Binson stuff is now obsolete, it somehow interesting to see this surviving all tube mixer.

This is a newer solid state system, with this time all-in-one mixer+echo. Fortunately, while they wised up about all the former weirdnesses, they kept the disc system, making this mixer a guenuine useful (but pretty large) echorec.

Here we have a Binson power amp to go with the modern mixer. They had the matching speakers but I did not bother buying them. What I would really love to find is Binson guitar amps, which I know had a very good reputation, but were kind of rare.

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The Matsumoku made guitars have always bring fascination to my collector ego. Their craftmanship and quality really do not deserve the low price market they are currently going for, or at least to this day. Anyway, this is quite good from an aficionado point of view.
How do you recognise a matsumoko ? Certainly not with brand name, as they seemed to work for all Japanese makers in their glory time. Easiest start is the incredible wood work on them, and often complicated-to-death electronics, while this a not a rule, as we will see.
I will not enter here in precise description of all models, description you can easily find on the web. Consider this page an ode to my beloved ‘woodies’.

Ibanez

Mr.Famous first here with the Musician , an incredible guitar I have always loved for its ultra flat and thin neck, and mega-humbuckers, here in a light natural color and simple wiring. Then, my rare top-of-the-line studio in its elegant veneer. Please note the massive Cimar electric in the back, Cimar being an budget-brand of Ibanez for years.

Slap that bass, as Fred Astaire would say. Two musician and two studio, one being offensively modified. The musician bass was made famous by young Sting, who had nearly every model of this line, including a very rare 8-strings. These bass are excellent but heavy. Better work your back muscle with long rehearsals.

Aria Pro II

Aria was certainly one of the best customer of the mats factory. They came with a lot of models, all of excellent quality, such as my fave red with its casted bridge, really an incredible wood work. You can also spot an Urchin, weird shape at its best. Let’s have a look at their booties :

A very proof that matsumoko mastered all type of necks : bolt-on, glued-on and neck-through live together in perfect harmony, while their neck-through really are exquisite and personnal fave. Cavities are as numerous as in a candy-lover-non-flosser-teen-ager, but always fitted with precise plates within micron precision.

Vantage

Vantage was a very good customer too, but with less fantasy : most of their models, while always at the same level of high quality, look the same.
The dark beauty on the right side was not made in Japan by mats, but in Korea by some crafty admirer of the famous luthier. You can see the woodstripes are not organise as usual at Matsumoko and the dark wood is from a different lumbers. Turn back !

Same display of neck work here and clearly different gluing for the Korean…but I love her the same.

The other brands

Their always should be a french man in every story….and I found one in the matsumoko history with these Morris guitars. The back of these weird Globalsound Morris—brand mostly know for their cheap ripoff guitars in the ’70s—says : ‘ Designed by Patrick Vrolant’…

This french designer even had time to propose bolt-on and neck-through before vanishing in Sologne fog on a winter morning hunting party…
The other guitar bearing the C.G.Winner brand is quite a mats classics if you except its blade humbuckers from hell.

Supermodels time now : The Washburn really is a luxury guitar with a mad array of special features, including metal circle neck markers. Do not snob the Eagle which is by far the best sounding mats of my collection. Light as a feather and ringing like a vintage sg special , this guitar could convert you to matsumoko before you could spell their name correctly.

Really those guys had no family life : matching veneer backplate that comes so precisely in the cavity
you could not put a piece of cigarette paper in the slit.

These poor siblings have hidden talents. Both the Westone—propietary matsumoko brand–and the Kawai Aquarius AQ-555 fro 1984 are perfect axes any pro guitar player could use on a daily basis.

This picture is only here to show you the mapple choice for this cheap westone was far from economics reality…

From my The Aria Pro II PE100 guitar…4-11 NM ?

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Beautiful French singer from the ’60s, Isabelle Aubrey…

Well, to say the awful truth, France has never been a gear country.
When somebody use the word  » vintage  » in our delightful country, you better raise your glass then your axe.
Camembert yes, cheesy fuzz pedals no. Or is it so?

Not exactly. This neat overdrive pedal was produced in the late ’70s by the Stimer firm, better known for its acoustic guitar pick-ups: Django used one for his famous Selmer jazz guitar. They still produced this item when they issued the ST7 pedal as you can see in this wacky catalogue:

The Django pick-up is the 2nd bubble in the central column.

Their complete 5 pedals line was : SP100 preamp, system5 phasing, fuzz machine sustain, my distor tube machine, which, by the way, gives a very becoming overdrive tone, somewhere between a ts9 and a well-done Maurice Chevalier impersonation. The fifth pedal is mysteriously interesting: it is called « The Polyphonic » and bears 6 switches labelled..1 to 6. Room enough for imagination on what this effect was supposed to do…Cassoulet ? Bouillabaisse ?

Garen, as in « lapin de Garennes », is the other French brand with some notoriety. They were mainly present in the small tube amp market at a time where there were nothing else but tubes, and disappear when small Japanese tranny amps enter the market. These small tube amps are now looked after in France, for their champ-alike cranked-up distortion, French black and white ’50s gangster movies vibe and funny way to burst in flames at embarrassing moments.

Here we have a much rarer venue, La Chambre de Reverberation, or more humbly ,the reverb box. All tubes, modern swinging-Leningrad look , spring fitted, this rack is really useful to add some much needed empty swimming pool reverb to your pseudo-surf recordings with a French accent.
Please note that this beautiful box is now part of Musee de Montlucon for popular music collection.

This is a rare europa rack, made in France, complete with a digital prehisotric programming. You can memorize 8 configurations including very noisy overdrive with its dedicated noise gate ( any attempt to use it alone will end up catching an obscure Hungarian AM radio, full volume ) and super-easy-feedback-catching analog delay . All in all , it can give nice tones, all including a nice but obligatory pumping a la slow gear. I have seen other Europa product in ’70s French mags, mostly rackable pedals with exotic connections, but they really are quite hard to find in the flesh. Those into heavy make up ’70s french girls will enjoy….Myself, I can’t resist :

Beat that southern France product….Mireille Darc (French: [miʁɛj daʁk]; 15 May 1938 – 28 August 2017) was a French model and actress.

Now a great pedal. Made in France, by Garen which was somehow affiliated to Stimer in some way. It’s a big and heavy pedal which is more or less a great germanium tonebender, featuring blank marking AC128 transistors, with a great 3 positions tone filter.

I don’t know if these trannies are blank on purpose for copyright fear …however workmanship or ‘ artisanat ‘ is great and this pedal would have been very useful for Maurice Chevalier if he ever had a stratocaster and a marshall stack.

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