Marshall question

[Elmo89m]

A friend of mine purchased a marshall jcm900 recently. He required a fottswitchable cleanto distortion option and because the jcm only has one channel he uses his metal zone for distortion. This appalled me because i thought the reason for buying a marshall was for its distortion. He explained to me that it really was the marshalls distortion because the sound of the metal zone went the through the marshalls tubes and was being shaped by them. Is this true? Also i played around with the marshall trying to get distortion out of it and there is none. I heard from someone who worked on a silverchair album that on a marshall all setting turned to ten gave really heavy distortion so i did this and it just sounded like crackly boom crap. I tried everything i could think of but could not get an amazing marshall wall of sound type distortion out of it. I couldn't even get distortion as strong as my crappy crate gt-65..why? what do you all do with your marshall's? Thanks al ot

 

[wannabecomedeat]

i saw someone in a show that used a boss equalizer in front of the amp, considering the extreme dist he had i thought there was a sound emulator behind his amp, but no. He told me the eq was there to get the head working. Don't remember much, but i remember the bass was near 0 on the eq and plain 10 on the head. It was all about getting the tube saturated like crazy but having an incredibly great tone.

 

[Outlaws]

A friend of mine purchased a marshall jcm900 recently. He required a fottswitchable cleanto distortion option and because the jcm only has one channel he uses his metal zone for distortion. This appalled me because i thought the reason for buying a marshall was for its distortion. He explained to me that it really was the marshalls distortion because the sound of the metal zone went the through the marshalls tubes and was being shaped by them. Is this true? Also i played around with the marshall trying to get distortion out of it and there is none. I heard from someone who worked on a silverchair album that on a marshall all setting turned to ten gave really heavy distortion so i did this and it just sounded like crackly boom crap. I tried everything i could think of but could not get an amazing marshall wall of sound type distortion out of it. I couldn't even get distortion as strong as my crappy crate gt-65..why? what do you all do with your marshall's? Thanks al ot

Yes, pedals through tube amps will sound better than the pedal through a solid state IMO and many others also. That said...

I think your friend is full of shit because if you two cannot make that amp distort at all then it must be fucked up, and if its fucked up, then his clean very likely is also fucked up and that means your friend who likes the clean has some very wierd taste for tone.

Take that thing to an amp tech and see what they say.


Back to using the Marshall for clean and the Boss for the distortion, that is all subjective to personal opinion as to what is better. If it sounds good it is.

But a one channel 900 is the SL-X, more common are the two channel reverb models...model 4100 if I recall

 

[metalhead28]

He has a bad amp.....period.
I have a 900 and it has plenty of gain, even for extreme metal if you're so inclined. Those amps have an undeserved bad rap.

 

[Elmo89m]

metALHEAD CAN you give me the settings you use for that extreme metal so i can try it out.

 

[metalhead28]

You're thinking about this way too much.. ...If you put the gain on 10 and the master volume on or approaching 10 and it doesn't have any gain or any balls it is screwed up. When I've used that amp for high gain stuff I definitely turned it all the way up if that helps any. And at that the amp should ROAR with distortion. BTW - I have also had a JCM800 and the 900 had more gain.
The EQ section won't do anything to dramatically change the sound of the distortion of the amp. In fact the EQ controls on a 900 are pretty subtle at best. Don't use reverb if you've got the dual reverb model.
I would say that perhaps this amp has an electrical problem or bad tubes....I don't know.
And a metal zone through a tube amp still sounds like a metal zone.....

 

[Outlaws]

You're thinking about this way too much.

Amen.

The amp is fucked.