Colorado Axeman
Inspired
How would I go about emulating his amp tone with no Marshall Major amp model? Here's something I found on the Marshall forum about the Major:
There's also this bit here from elsewhere on this forum:
the Marshall Major is not in the format of your classic 1959 or 1987 amplifier. While it does have some of the Marshall character implemented into it, the original circuit design was actually done by GEC in England and not really meant to be a loud rock guitar amp. It is kind of a mix match of Marshall, Fender, and Hi-Fi all in the same package. I think initially that because venues were getting bigger and the bands were getting louder, Marshall wanted to offer a louder more powerful amplifier. In addition, since I don't believe that Marshall wanted to design a brand-new amplifier from the ground up they borrowed the initial design from GEC.
Now the model 1967 (major) is first bigger than the standard hundred watt head (1959). The chassis is 2 inches deeper to accommodate the large transformers so rather than being 8 inches in depth the major head box is 10 inches in depth and it is the first way to tell that it is the Marshall Major (just look at it from the side view). Now on the technical side now the front-end circuit of the major is classic Marshall it has the 820ohm/250mfd & 2.7K/.68mfd split Cathode set up, but then it ends there abruptly after the volume pots. The Marshall Major has an enclosed tone stack as well as an enclosed feedback loop, "which means the negative feedback is applied much earlier in the circuit then your standard Marshall." and the tone stack while having Marshall standard values it is enclosed ala’ Fender. The third unusual thing is that the major does not have a long tailed phase inverter it has the Cathodyne type phase inverter, which is not as linear, or have as much gain. The fourth and most unusual, and sometimes trouble oriented part of the Marshall Maj. is that it has an ultra linear output section, which means the screens are fed directly from taps on the output transformer and that there is no standalone screen circuit. Another factor is that the Marshall Maj. has no choke in the circuit, which also contributes to its tone; the choke was not utilized because of the large filter capacitors in the power supply.
There's also this bit here from elsewhere on this forum:
In the case of Deep Purple, in the 70's Blackmore tapped his AC30 after the preamp stage and fed it into his Marshall's (before he modded his Majors to replace the AC30/preamp). I've also seen pix (as mentioned above) and a video with an AC30 in behind Blackmore's Marshall, and you can see the connection lead from the AC30 to the head clearly. He even built an AC30 into a 4x12 cabinet at one time apparently.
Jon Lord did a somewhat similar thing; he tapped his B3 organ before it's power amp and ran it into Marshall's as well so he could get even more grit.
In both cases the amps were modded to get the taps, set the proper level, etc., and both bypassed the power amp to only use the preamps as 'drives'.
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