It goes without saying that Jimi would sound like Jimi through any rig. His live sound does change from 67 to 70 though. His sound at Monterey was very different from his sound with the Band of Gypsys at the Fillmore, and his sound at Woodstock was different again. Mainly in the midrange to me. The sound he got was very important to him.
I've also been also drooling for those tones for ages. I think I'm using a JTM45 model in Normal channel with the Plexi 100W tone stack and a few tweaks for Jimi tones atm. I also changed the Pyramid JH string set to my strat a few years ago and never looked back. I think it sounds and feels great.
Here's a small clip when I tried the 1968 Cafe Au Go Go setup from few years ago. Axe FX II with Ibanez Roadstar. Sorry about the crackle and noise, I have a really noisy house. Although the original recording also has lots of noise.
Also here's some snippets from my notes:
"The 100 Watt Marshall amps use the same NFB circuit as the 50 watt amps but the voltage at the 4 ohm tap is 41% higher so they get 41% more NFB which tightens up the transition from clean to distortion and makes the overdrive tone more aggressive."
"JTM 45 is tube rectified, JTM 45/100 solid state. Lower supply sag for 100W model."
"• Jimi bell-like sound: pick/play from neck
• Jimi blues song sounds: play more from bridge
• More fatness to fuzz sounds: play with thumb and fingers"
"As far as Jimi's strings were concerned, he used the Fender `150' set which is gauged .010, .013, .015, .026, .032, .038, and composed of a pure-nickel outer jacket in a roundwound format."
"For the 1967 Black flag the closes amp model in Axe FX is 1987X JMP.
• These transformers are very similar but the 132 has slightly less bass than the 119
• first Black Flag amps used 270K mixer resistors (like the JTM45s), whereas the last ones used 470K mixer resistors (like the later amps), resulting in slightly more gain as well as more low midrange on the bright channel.
• This amp can be seen the first time June 18 1967 at Monterey and appears to have been used extensively for dirty tones on Axis: Bold as Love."
"High-capacitance cables shift the resonance towards the lower frequencies which dramatically alters tone. For example, Jimi Hendrix used a coiled cord with 3,000 picofarads (.003 microfarads), shifting the resonance below 2,000 Hertz on his Strats. Shifting the resonance frequency at 2,000 Hertz has a similar effect to a midrange boost. However, when he recorded and needed a typical Strat sound for some tracks, Jimi switched to a short, low-capacitance cable."
"Eddie Kramer did a video several years ago and he specifically laid out that four mic formula; it included the SM57. Whether he used it London I can't say, but to my ears, it worked. Sometimes the English studio engineers used SM58s which give a nice mid-lift to Strats (Robtin Trower still does this reportedly). But no question the M160 and Room mic U67 dominate (at zero db) on the Board; the MD421 on cone at -3db give sit some mid focus, and he blended the SM57 at -10db. If you lost the Sm57 it probably would not change the sound much."
“In the studio, we’d have some other circuits to put in front of the Fuzz Face to drive the unit differently. Of course, in the studio you can vary the voltage you’re running the Fuzz Face on, so we had much more control. I’d put different buffers with different equalization in front of them to drive the actual Fuzz Face from a low-impedance source rather than the high impedance of the guitar. Then we’d add the distortion after that with pre-EQ. Then we could also fuzz the device with post-EQ.
“You’re not going to get the tone that Jimi Hendrix got on a record with one simple device – that’s not going to happen, mate!”"
