Bareknuckle VHII Bridge - Modded Marshall Plexi, Guitar Shop Riff

shredaholic

New member
Guitar: My Custom Warmoth Strat (ash strat body, ebony/maple jackson neck)

Amp: Marshall 1959SLP RI (modded by me )
Marshall 1960A cab

Mic: Shure SM57 (dead center of bottom right speaker, approx 1.5 inch away from grille)

I thought I'd post a soundclip of the pickups as I've been messing around with this amp, the 100w plexi is at "loud bedroom volume" level, i.e. loud but not loud enough to annoy the family to make you turn it down. It's a PPIMV control I fitted to reduce the volume, not an attenuator.

The riff is Smoke On The Water, played a bit differently to highlight the sound characteristics of the amp/pickups. Hopefully putting the pickup through an all valve Marshall should help the natural tone of the pickups shine through a bit more. It's all I could think of playing right now as the guitar is missing it's B string...

If you put it on pretty loud, it sounds a lot closer to how it did in the room before it went through the SM57

click here to listen...
 
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Re: Bareknuckle VHII Bridge - Modded Marshall Plexi, Guitar Shop Riff

NICE MARSHALL CRUNCH!

pups sound great!
 
Re: Bareknuckle VHII Bridge - Modded Marshall Plexi, Guitar Shop Riff

:)

It's kinda funny...you always get annoyed cos every kid who picked up a guitar at age 12 and then stopped playing can play that riff on a single string "see , I can play guitar!"....it's kind of a "joke" riff...

HOWEVER

when ya hear that riff played right, by someone with some skill and good equipment..as simple as it is, it's EXTREMELY powerful, timeless and hella cool :D

sounds great..what did ya do to your amp?(mod wise, other than the MV mod)
 
Re: Bareknuckle VHII Bridge - Modded Marshall Plexi, Guitar Shop Riff

Other than the master volume mod, the mods I did were changing the preamp filter cap to a lower value, replacing the PCB circuit with a '68 era PTP one which I then modded with different values (eg. 100pf ceramic replacing the 47pf cap), 330uf cap bypassing the 820k resistor at the V2 cathode.

There's still a fair bit of tweaking I'm planning on doing to it, such as adding Sozo caps, replacing the output transformer and trying a 560pf ceramic instead of a 500pf silver mica cap for the bright cap when I reinstall the effects loop.

Possible mod's I've been contemplating working on are:

  • Extra Gain Stage switch
  • Adding 4th preamp tube (like Tim Caswell mod)
  • Switchable circuit boards between Plexi spec and JCM 800 spec

any of the above are easily done in this plexi chassis as there's space to fit another smaller circuit board in (I've ordered vintage red swirl stuff like the PTP board), and should be great fun to do!
 
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