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Too mellow and too muted
Guitar Player reprints online a story of how Ritchie Blackmore got the “loudest amp Marshall ever made”.
In his Deep Purple days, Ritchie Blackmore was known for two things: his habit of torturing his Fender Stratocasters and his love of volume. But getting an amp as loud as he wanted took particular skills and talents. It also took perseverance on Blackmore’s part to convince the only man he knew could do it: Jim Marshall.
“I knew him as a friend, because I used to buy my guitars from him,” Blackmore told Guitar Player in 2018. “He was a drum teacher, and he had a music shop in Ealing. Mitch Mitchell [of the Jimi Hendrix Experience] used to work there.”
As Marshall moved into amp making, he opened a factory in Bletchley. “Jim was a very nice man,” Blackmore said. “His office was down the road from the factory, but he would always come in when I was in there, because he could hear me blasting away. He would say, ‘I knew you were here!’ ”
Continue reading in Guitar Player.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Yeah, the story that Ritchie’s first Marshall had the innards of a Vox AC30 has been making the rounds since the latish 70s. It’s been told so often, it must be true.
I actually wasn’t such a great fan of Ritchie’s early sound, the combination of Gibson ES-335 and Vox AC30 (as during the Child In Time guitar solo) was a bit too distorted for me, I preferred the Fender Stratocaster with a real Marshall, that was cleaner, yet had had authoritative oomph circa Machine Head onwards – no idea whether at that point his Marshall still featured Vox entrails, I think the Vox content became less and less over time and was eventually phased out as Marshall came closer to the exacting demands of Ritchie with their own electronics. Of course, his Hornby Skewes Treble Booster unit also played a large role in his sound.
February 4th, 2025 at 13:47