We Are MArshAll
Marshall has spent six decades as the amp brand to beat. The firm has remained at the cutting edge of the music scene, arming A-listers and next-big-things…
Right now, somewhere in the world, a musician is firing up a Marshall. They might be a rock legend in a boutique Los Angeles studio, rolling up the gain on their vintage JCM800; a rising British hip-hop producer digging fresh digital tones from a CODE combo with their laptop or smartphone; or an about-to-blow female punk band relying on their Studio and Origin valve amps to get them through a tour. Genre, geography and generation: none of these things matter when it comes to the products embossed with that iconic white signature. We are all Marshall.
Relying on past glories is a dangerous game. With no stake in the modern music scene, most heritage firms trumpet their distant golden age, ancient products and long-gone endorsers. Marshall’s relationship with its own history is different. The back story of Jim Marshall’s amp-building operation lands with a thump, groaning with A-list stars and seminal albums. But this visionary firm doesn’t take nostalgia trips for the sake of it. Marshall’s past is a signpost to its future.
It’s a chain of quantum leaps from the original JTM-45 to the new Studio series; a shuttle-run of game-changing musicians that spans from Clapton and Hendrix to Bring Me The Horizon and You Me At Six.
“We have the history,” notes Managing Director Jon Ellery, “but we’re looking to the future and the next generation. Everything we do is still in Jim’s name.”
Walk the corridors of the Milton Keynes headquarters where Marshall amps are still crafted, and you’ll find memorabilia ranging from Zakk Wylde’s leather jacket to signed shots of Oasis. Amongst these treasures, one stops you in your tracks. In an unassuming glass cabinet sits a battered amp chassis: the sole example still left from the first batch of JTM-45s that were sold over the counter of Jim Marshall’s original West London shop at 76 Uxbridge Road, back in 1962.
To the casual observer, the Marshall shop didn’t look like the site of a revolution. By modern standards, it was a poky bolthole, mostly selling the skins and cymbals that testified to Jim’s roots as a dance band drummer. But there was genius afoot in the nascent guitar amps dreamt up by the circle of engineers that included Ken Bran and Dudley Craven. As amps came in for repair from brands like Selmer and Vox, and demand for imported Fenders could not be met, a founding concept took shape. They would build a new breed of British-made amp: richer, punchier and more powerful than anything on the market. The blueprint might have been the Fender Bassman, but the earliest Marshall amps soon became a different beast entirely. “The RCA output valves were the only parts in common with the Fender,” the late Ken Bran recalled in 1993 (he sadly passed away in 2018), “and different transformers and passive components meant ours sounded quite different.
“First – this was the big improvement – there was more gain. Second, it had a different tonal signature: our transformer had more iron, so gave richer harmonics, especially at low frequencies.”
As Marshall’s choice of power valves moved from the 6L6 to the more familiar EL34, the Celestion G12 loudspeaker replaced the original Goodman, and the output began to climb towards the ferocious 200-watt Marshall Major of 1967, ears pricked up across London. Lured by that sweet-but-ragged roar – a tone unlike the reigning AC30 and Fenders – the gainhungry leaders of the nascent rock scene loitered at the Marshall shop.
Legends in waiting like Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, Ritchie Blackmore and Jimi Hendrix demanded amps that pushed their sound further, often by increasing the gain in the preamp (“to the very edge of what was technically feasible,” noted Bran) or combining the 1959 Super Lead 100-watter