Just finished my new pedal!

[Chris McKinley]

Over the last week, I finished up my new Marshall-in-a-box pedal. I play through a Mesa Triple Rectifier half-stack, but wanted to make something that would let me get a classic Marshall stack tone for certain songs. I used to own both a JCM-800 and a Silver Jubilee from Marshall, so I knew what I was going for sound-wise. For my tastes, I've absolutely nailed it. No box is ever going to exactly duplicate the timbre of vacuum tubes driven hard, but this pedal run into the Clean channel of my Recto gives me the tone stack characteristics of a Marshall head along with the real tube warmth and immediacy of the Mesa head. The results are truly surprisingly good so far. Where it gets really fun is how insanely well this thing responds to putting my programmable graphic EQ just after the pedal. With just minimal tweaking, I can expand the tonal capabilities of the pedal dramatically, letting me dial in and program presets for a chimey-clean transparent JTM-45 tone (AC/DC, Zep, Cream, etc.), classic 70's Les Paul/Marshall Plexi tone, a pushed-Plexi Van Halen brown sound, or the fat singing lushness of a mid-80's hot-rodded JCM-800.

It also takes pushing its front end well. I've put various OD's, clean boosts and treble boosters in front of it and it likes most everything I have. I've never been happier with a pedal build. With a switcher hooked up, I now have the ability to go between Mesa Recto roar, Marshall stack tone, the Catalinbread RAH I reviewed recently for more dynamic and/or quiet blues passages, or purely clean tone for intros and such, all on the same amp. And I can switch between them in real time, which means I can play it live that way. Lotsa fun!