Paging Rick Lee

[stuartj]

Originally Posted by Superman

Ha! The guitarist of whom I spoke has the best guitar tone I have EVER heard, and recording engineers think this too. He uses a '68 Plexi, but there's more.... He turns all the knobs to "10," and runs the signal into a power soak, bringing the signal down to preamp-level. Then he runs that signal through a somple old tube amp (Peavey, I think), and out to two half-stack cabs, separated about ten feet. One of the cabs has a slight reverb/delay.

In other words, he uses a WOT '68 Plexi as a preamp. You should hear this.

That's an interesting approach. Its certainly true that those old non-master vol Marshalls only make "that sound" when theyre flat out. They don't actually get louder after about 4, but they do saturate. I used to run my 100w SLP on 10, usually with the cab facing backwards because theyre shatteringly loud. I found the Tom Scholz PowerSoak attenuator, the earlier days of such devices, did throttle volume, but killed the tops.

Never heard of one being attenuated down and used as a pre-amp tho. That's carting a lot of gear around.

[Rick Lee]

I have a Variac pot built into the back of my '69 100w clone and a Variac switch in the front of my '68 12000 clone. The switch takes it down to 70 or 90 volts. Both are still pretty clean with headroom for days. My '69 puts out about 136 watts. So I use them as pedal platforms and they sound amazing. My 1987xl is bone stock and gets pretty good break up with the volumes on 4, but will shake the fillings out of my teeth at that level. My attenuator makes it more tolerable.