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RIP, Electric Amplifier Inventor Jim Marshall, 'Father of Loud'
asavin writes "The founder of Marshall Amplification, Jim Marshall OBE, has died at the age of 88. A tribute to the man known as the Father of Loud was posted on his official website, praising the man whose name became iconic for electric guitarists." Reader LizardKing points to the Guardian's coverage of Marshall's passing, and adds : "A former drummer, Jim Marshall initially became involved with guitar amplification as an importer of Fender equipment, until he eventually decided to branch out and make his own amps. The trademark Marshall sound evolved alongside the requirements of such luminaries as Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton. The Marshall stack has since become a ubiquitous symbol of live rock music in particular — so much so that some bands perform in front of veritable walls of Marshall branded speakers. In addition to his lead guitar amplifiers, Jim will also be remembered for his great bass amps (as used by Lemmy Kilmister in particular) and the much sought after Guv'nor distortion pedal."
Never met a Marshall amp I didn't like. Met many I couldn't afford, but none that I didn't like.
I'm not sure "Rest In Peace" is appropriate here ;-)
What does it mean?
Well, he owned a music store and was selling Fender amps from America. He took them apart and inspected them and figured he could make them cheaper and sell them for a better profit in England than he could by importing them from America. He used British variations of tubes that gave his amps a different sound than Fender amps. He happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right product.
By the end of the 1960s, rock amps had achieved enough power to reach the threshold of pain. From then on, much of the "wall of amps" thing was fake. You just didn't need that much speaker area to hit the threshold of pain.
A friend of mine was a roadie for metal groups years ago, and she discovered this when setting up for Metallica. Most of the "amps" were empty boxes. At least they were enclosed boxes. In the picture above, the low-budget metal band just used fake fronts.
So... electric guitars bad? What, you think if it's not written for harpsichord it's not music?
Amazing that one would even attempt to attribute the travesties of the Loudness Wars to one of the pioneers of modern music... I assume you exhibit a similar disdain for the late Les Paul?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
That's a thought. Must amend my will:
To go along with the music requests that include Killed By Death by Motorhead, And no, I'm not joking about the music, as that's what my will really does insist on being played.
Chill out bro. Keep tryin' to b a millionaire. Now you didn't say what you did or what your angle on the market was .. but it's been always well known that hard work alone isn't enough -- you need good ideas, a marketing strategy that works, and smart practices. If wealth was based solely on how much hard work you do, people working at a fast food place or on a farm would be earning double what a CEO makes.
Anyway, ..according to wikipedia .. this guy owned a record store .. he understood music .. and people had told him there was a need for a decent amp .. so he formed a company .. hired some engineers .. and produced one.
Btw, most of the time.. by the time the Chinese copy your invention .. you'd have presumably made a chunk of money already (or how else would they know your invention even exists .. let alone that its worth manufacturing).
As for "little guys who made it work" .. there are plenty of millionaires that made smartphone apps -- individuals who had good ideas, implemented them the correct way, and worked hard -- with almost no money or capital investment. Also your cloning theory is false. How come twitter clones didnt make it? Twitter is a fairly simple website that wouldn't have been difficult for any of the big boys to duplicate .. same thing with youtube. Anyway .. just cause you failed 3 times doesn't mean you should give up.. many people failed a lot more times than that before they made it.
What does it mean?
Well, he owned a music store and was selling Fender amps from America. He took them apart and inspected them and figured he could make them cheaper and sell them for a better profit in England than he could by importing them from America. He used British variations of tubes that gave his amps a different sound than Fender amps. He happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right product.
And that's in a time before someone who had never made an amplifier in their life would turn up with a patent for "amplification giving a pleasing sound" and taking both fender and Marshall to court.
...and don't get me started on equal temperament!
Yes but they are absolutely related. Different techniques that both similarly diminished the art-form of music by making it louder.
You haven't got the faintest idea what you're talking about. The criticism of the loudness war is concerned with clipping and a lack of dynamic variation thanks to over use of compression, not increased volume per se.
Wrong loudness.
The "loudness war" is really a "compression" war. And not data compression, but dynamic range compression (the difference between loudest and softest).
A good amplifier should have a huge dynamic range - it can make your ears strain to hear that soft tap, and a split second later blow them out when someone plays a riff. (The usual limiter is the noise floor).
The loudness war is basically taking soft sounds making them louder to compete with the loudest sounds, so it's all one level. (Some older albums may have you twidding the volume knob because of this).
Digital compression techniques like MP3 and AAC will reduce the dynamic range out of necessity (it takes a LOT of bits to have a wide dynamic range and still record soft and loud sounds accurately).
And none of it has anything to do with an amplifier. Heck, distortion effects often need wider dynamic range, especially in solid-state amps. A tube amp will distort when overdriven, which generates many harmonics that are often nicer on the ear. A transistor, when overdriven, clips and that generates nasty harmonics that ound terrible and grate the ear. Digital signal processing can emulate tube distortion and sond like many classic amps, but they have to avoid clipping which requires that the input amp and ADC stay below clipping even when applying heavy overdrive.
Fix the title please. Jim Marshall based his designs on Fender amps (basically "hotrodding" them). He didn't invent them. Having said that, I have no wish to diminish the impact of the Marshall amps, much the contrary. Music wouldn't be the same today without him/them.
Actually, making an analog guitar amplifier sound "right" is probably more difficult than building a rocket. I have a (digital and somewhat modern) VAMP3 and it's not possible to make it sound anything like a real Marshall stack with tubes.
It would sound a hell of a lot better than a Yamaha if the sound you were after was a heavy rock'n'roll sound. I've had Marshalls, and I've had a Yamaha, it was godawful nasal sounding. Not bad for clean, great for jazz, but it didn't distort well at all.
... screaming feedback! Okay, so we would still have Fender, possibly Mesa, and Vox, (unless Vox was a Marshall clone? Admittedly I don't know the history of Vox), and maybe some others, but it wouldn't be the same. Marshall seems to have been the primary catalyst behind the harmonically distorted guitar.
If you like the sound of early Van Halen, that was a 100watt Plexi model (albeit run through a variac and -possibly (though it's contested) modded some).
RIP Jim Marshall, rock would not have been the same without you. I give you a moment of
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
"Did you want a list of all the eleven gazillion people who ever used a Marshall amp? "
Only those who used one which goes to eleven.
A Steve Jobs, but humble.
An amplifier's "signature sound" is a combination of many things; circuit design, component selection, even cabinet design, material, and construction has a role. As has been posted above, a big part of "the Marshall sound" came for the unique characteristics of the tubes, or "valves" as they're commonly referred to over there. As any "hollow state" aficionado can tell you, different types of tubes all operate on same basic principle, the way they perform varies greatly from one design to the next, and to a certain extent, from one manufacturers implementation to another on any given design.
Yeah, fine, but what is that (Marshall) sound? That's tough to pin down. It's like trying to describe the difference between "red" and "blue". They're both colors but they are decidedly different. FWIW, the Fender amps of that era were prone to a certain kind of distortion when driven at all hard. This the very characteristic that is prized to this day by blues guitarists who use it as just another part of their style. The problem Marshall solved was that there were limits on how loud you could make an amp with those characteristics before that distortion lost it's unique charm. To be sure, the Marshall gear had it's own type of "crunch" but it could be delivered at much higher levels before turning ugly.
His amps weren't just about being louder. The tone of Marshall amps is stellar.
But in his defense, Pete Townsend of The Who is the one who demanded louder amps for their concerts. Most amplification systems at concert halls back then were seriously lacking for rock n roll, so you had to have a loud amp. Pete begged Jim to make a louder amp, and he came up with the 100-watt Marshall. Then of course every band wanted one, and I guess you could say there was a concert loudness war for a while (parodied by Spinal Tap's moniker "England's Loudest Band"), but as others have said that had nothing to do with the loudness war of the recorded music (which was indeed detrimental to the music itself).
I play the pedal steel guitar, one of the few electrics that doesn't sound better through a Marshall. Steel guitarists mostly rely on Peaveys like the Nashville, Session, and Vegas models. Peavey is a privately owned company, and Hartley, its founder, is now in his 70s. Maybe because he's a Mississippi boy, his company has produced amps for us since the '60s, even though we're very much a niche market.
When he's gone, I will mourn Hartley Peavey as much as I do Les Paul, Leo Fender, and Jim Marshall.
Dad? Is that you? I didn't know you had a computer! Gees, I'm 60 and have been listening to rock and roll since the '60s. If it ain't loud, it ain't rock. If it's too loud, you're too old.
Have you ever been to a Mozart concert? Have you ever heard Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture, with cannons? have you never in your life been to a parade? Loud music has been around for centuries. GOOD loud music. A live acoustic guitar playing with a live drumset is subaudible. Most non-amplified musical instruments, especially horns and drums, are DAMNED loud.
Hell, try listening to Zepplin's "Immigrant Song" at low volume, it's like drinking watered down beer. You've been listening to WAY too much canned music and WAY too little live music.
Free Martian Whores!
A minor addition to the previous responses: most of the not-electric-guitarist (normal?) kind of people I talk to don't realize that most of us are getting our overdrive or distortion by overdriving the pre-amp, and the differences among the main amplifier types are much more obvious when they are lightly distorted from slight overdrive than when they are clean or in full metal mode. Many of the better distortion pedals are designed to emulate a particular type of amplifier's distortion, e.g., Rothwell Hellbender to sound like a Marshall Plexi or Lovepedal Les Lius to sound like an old Fender.
wisnoskij complained:
There is no comparison to the modern day rock and role singer (some smuck of the street who is willing to scream until he vomits blood) and a professionally trained opera singer who can actually control his voice.
Which is to say that you love opera, and rock music is not opera.
Well, duh.
Check out my novel.
Classical music has to be loud, at least sometimes. What makes it difference is that is equality loud and quiet. The classical song writers understood the significance and beauty of a whisper as much as that of the bang of the cannon. Modern music is the exact opposite, it is 1 volume (loud).
And considering that you where alive, let alone going to concerts in the 60s you are orders of magnitude older then I am. Good taste is ageless.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"It's actually pretty simple if you know what you're doing."
No shit.
Is there anything that isn't easy for you know what your doing?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on