Marshall has unveiled a special commemorative collection to celebrate Jimi Hendrix plugging into its guitar amps and changing the course of music history – and the fortunes of the brand itself.

The Hendrix 60th Anniversary Collection comprises a hand-wired 1969 JMH Super Lead-style tube amp head, partnered with a matching hand-wired 4x12, featuring a commemorative badge and a black-and-purple cosmic swirl finish, to which you can put a matching limited run Dunlop Fuzz Face fuzz pedal in front of and have at it.

The collection also includes a special cosmic purple swirl Hendrix signature edition Acton III Bluetooth speaker.

“We built the amps, Hendrix made them scream,” says Marshall. “From the moment Hendrix plugged into a Marshall guitar amplifier in ’66, they became an unstoppable creative force.”

Look at any archive footage of Hendrix – at Woodstock, Maui, Monterey, Atlanta – and behind him would be a this black tower, the Marshall Super Lead head sitting on a pair of 4x12 speaker cabinets.

It is an indelible image, and it helped put Marshall on the map.

“Jimi was a formidable musician, a real force of nature,” says Terry Marshall, co-founder, Marshall Amplification. “He took everything to a new level and carried everybody with him. When he played, it was an emotional time for everybody because everyone was thinking, if he can do it, I could maybe do it.”

Seeing Hendrix inspired new players to pick up the electric guitar. Seeing Hendrix with banks of Marshall stacks behind him, well, that made players want a Marshall, and Terry Marshall believes there can be no questioning how important Hendrix was to the Marshall story.

“It was a really special time for us all and there’s no doubt that we grew with him and his fame, it was a natural tie-up,” he says. “The rest is history as they say.”

The tones (and the volume) coming out of the 1959 JMH and its matching speaker will be familiar. It is built in the same spirit as the original Super Leads that Hendrix et al played back in the day. But it looks very different.

The black-and-purple swirl on the control panel and matching grill cloth speak to Hendrix’s psychedelic sound (and his love of psychedelics). The LED even illuminates purple.

“From his fashion to his lyrics and of course, his music, there are so many different stories we could tell when it comes to Hendrix,” says Emma Rydahl, senior industrial designer, Marshall Group. “We started with materials and pattern exploration, looking at different fabrics and running test prints with a psychedelic track in mind. We spent a lot of time adjusting the final design to get it just right across the whole collection.”

The Acton III speaker, which is officially available to order from 14 May, priced $299, even has a plush crushed velvet covering – it's like they made it out of an old jacket from Jimi Hendrix's wardrobe.

The rest of the Hendrix 60th Anniversary Collection is available to now, with the half-stack and Fuzz Face bundle priced $4,999. See Marshall for more details.

Jared James Nichols wasn’t looking for a new guitar amp but the amp found him anyway. A longtime endorsee of Blackstar, with whom he had worked on a range of signature amps, he had no complaints.

“The thing with the Blackstar stuff is there’s literally no – how do I say this right? There’s no drama,” says Nichols. “No, like, ‘Oh, I’m going to leave!’ I’ve had an amazing relationship with Blackstar for almost 15 years, which is crazy.

“It’s crazy to say! And those guys, before I was doing any touring, they were letting me play amps, and they were letting me borrow stuff, and then eventually giving me amps. So, like, my whole tone, truly, was built with these Blackstars.”

And yet, lately, Nichols had been curious. He had been curious about Marshall amps. He felt there was “a taboo” about even speaking about this with friends. Blackstar, after all, was founded by Marshall alumni. Maybe it felt like cheating. But he couldn’t escape the fact that when presented with a vintage Marshall tube amp – specifically a non-master volume (NMV) 100-watt 1959 Super Lead ‘Plexi’ that he used alongside its contemporary descendants to record his latest studio album, Louder Than Fate – it brought out something in this playing that he hadn’t fully heard before.

“I was trying other things, and in my heart, every time I would plug into a Plexi, I’d be like, ‘God, man, this is just that thing,’” he says. “Because, as a fingerstyle player, and as someone that plays this dynamic range, I could always hear my fingers with a Plexi. No matter if I put on a Tube Screamer, or a Klon, or a wah, or a fuzz, I could still hear my fingers under it.”

It also got him thinking about electric guitar tone in 2026, when there are so many options available to us, many of which are great, and this great agglomeration of stuff, transparent this, high-gain that, multi-channels with different modes, onboard cab sims and MIDI-controllable electric toothbrushes. It all gets a bit much.

“In my gut, I kept going back to these old, non-master volume Marshalls, because there’s just something so pure, and they’re so raw,” says Nichols.

And they really are so raw and so gnarly. These amps were originally designed as public address systems. The volume is… Well, let’s just say, the vintage Plexi is not for everyone. They are a challenge.

“They’re almost scary in a way to a lot of players, because it’s like riding a fucking bronco, man! It’s like you really have to harness this amp,” says Nichols, who gets noticeably louder when talking about the Plexi. “It’s not an easy amp to just plug into and be like, ‘Oh yeah!’ It’s bone clean, and then it’s like you have to figure out how to almost be at one with the amp in order to make it really work.”

Amps like that are like an MRI scan. Nichols found the Plexi articulated every detail in his playing, good and bad.

“When I started to really dig into it – like I said, when I got that ’68 – I just noticed that something changed in me as a player,” he says. “Something was being a little more honest, something was not shying away from any note I was playing – it wasn’t shying away [from anything]. Even when I’d hit something wrong, I’d be like, ‘Oof!’

“Even when I’m simply hitting a single note line with the band, it’s just the physicality of it and the weight of the tone. It does something to me psychologically as a player where it puts me somewhere else. When I’m playing through these amps, I can’t lie, because I always have to deliver, because it’s not like I have this über-delay setting, or, there’s this built-in reverb.”

Such amps reward expert players and punish sloppiness. Not all are like that. There are some amps – and every experienced player will have a preference – that flatter your playing, with a natural compression and a feel that is forgiving. A little spring reverb can be the elixir you need, a way of letting a bit of air into your playing. There is nothing wrong with that.

It was only when Nichols went in for a session with Joe Bonamassa that he realised he might have been hiding behind his amp, and he was paying the price.

“With the Blackstars, man, I got so used to, playing with so much reverb and so much compression,” he says. “I remember, one time I was playing – and I was playing with Bonamassa – and he plugged in, and he was playing a Dumble-modded Twin, but he just plugged it in, and he hit a low E, he went ‘BONK!’ And he went, ‘WAH WAH WAH’. And then I hit something, and it was almost like his amp was punching me in the face, and it felt like mine was in the corner in the back.”

So, Nichols bit the bullet. He made the change. And when he rocked up to record Louder Than Fate under the watchful eye of producer Jay Ruston, he had the ’68 Plexi, and he got to work, and it was a learning curve.

There is a golden rule of recording guitars in the studio that small amps are worth their weight in gold. Turn them up, stick a good microphone in front of them and it can be the sound that unlocks the session. You will find a Fender Champ in every recording facility for this very reason.

Nichols was recording an album titled Louder Than Fate. He went in the other direction.

“Ooh, man! [Laughs] It’s funny. I’m smiling and I’m laughing because I’m thinking about the absolute domination of big amps I used,” he says. “It was so insane. Okay, so here’s the thing. I’m with you; a Champ, a Supro, a Deluxe, a little Tweed, whatever it is, you turn those things up, man! You put a good compressor on in the studio – even live, man – and there’s nothing you can’t do with them. They’re just incredible amps, right?

“But what I noticed, especially for this record, was I had this ’68 Marshall Plexi alongside these newer Marshall Modified Super Lead Plexis. Dude, those are my jam, man. Those are the amps. Out of all the new stuff that I was able to try – and Marshall’s been amazing letting me try all this different stuff, a lot of great stuff – what hit me right away was those modified Plexis. So a lot of this record, you hear a ’68 and these Modified Plexis.”

There are a few key differences between the original late ‘60s vintage tube head Nichols was plugging into and their modern counterparts. The new models ship from the the factory with Clip and Bright switches.

The biggest difference, however, is the addition of the master volume. Nichols’ ’68 belongs to a more innocent time, the NMV era, and it was a real grizzly bear in the studio. They had to take two of the power tubes out the back to run it at 50-watts and it was still, to use a technical term, “insanely loud”.

“I mean, all the amps I used were huge, 100-watters, man!” says Nichols. “We had to kick the ’68 down because it was so rowdy, bro. It was so rowdy! We had it in a room, like, in a booth, and it was shaking the walls so bad that you were able to hear it in the tracking, and I was like, ‘This amp is a monster.’”

This is the kind of anecdote that will have digital advocates showing up in the comments, reasoning – not unreasonably – that the amp modeller can put a choice of tube amp tones at your feet and it won’t take the paint off the walls. Nichols gets that. Totally.

But he’s looking for a very particular experience. He’s like a storm chaser hauling ass in a pickup across an Oklahoma highway in pursuit of a twister.

He believes there’s something magical, quasi-epicurean from all this volume

“There’s something really, really beautiful that happens – especially when you’re using unpotted pickups, old-school stuff guitar-wise,” he says. “And I’m not saying just vintage guitars, but when you have volume, and you have these pickups that are reacting to what’s coming out of the speaker that’s hitting you.

“Obviously, we know there’s this whole debate of digital versus tubes. The thing that I feel is the digital cannot produce in a certain way is that power of a tube amp absolutely screaming through a speaker, just hitting you and hitting your guitar. And in turn, that’s making these guitars react and do different harmonic stuff that they wouldn’t do at a lower volume – or with a smaller amp. A lot of these tones I’m getting, and these overtones, did come from the amp.”

And that takes us back to why Nichols made the switch and nailed his colours to the Marshall mast.

“When I hit these Marshalls, man, it just literally gets me closer to the sun, if that makes sense,” he says. “It’s closer to the sounds that literally keep me up at night, which is, honestly, it’s exactly where I want to be.”

And even in this day and age, of sound limits onstage, in-ear monitors, all that pro audio stuff, Nichols argues that the old-school ways – an amp that turns 70 in a couple of years – still has a place in the modern rock player’s backline, and it still has the power to make guitar playing an act of transcendence.

“I played a Plexi onstage with the band. I’d already been playing it in the studio. I’d already had all of this knowledge of the way it was going to sound, so there was no surprises,” says Nichols. “And I’m telling you, man, I felt like I was levitating off the ground, because I was just going for stuff. I felt like I was in Cream in 1968. Like, the tone was so raw, and I just said, ‘This is exactly where I want to be. And sometimes, what’s the phrase? The heart wants what it wants. That’s what I wanted.”

Louder Than Fate is available to preorder, shipping 5 June via Frontiers. You can read more from Nichols coming soon to MusicRadar.

Jared James Nichols has announced that he as officially joined the likes of Slash, Billie Joe Armstrong and Yngwie Malmsteen on the Marshall artist roster.

There had been rumours that the burly manger of electric guitar strings, the resurrector of vintage Gibson Les Pauls, had made the switch. When photos emerged of Nichols with the unmistakable sight of the gold-panelled tube amps behind him, video footage on social media too, the affable blues guitar maestro, took to his Instagram to confirm the news was true.

“Over the past 24 hours I’ve received hundreds of messages about my current amplifier situation,” wrote Nichols. “So yes, it’s official: I’ve made the move to Marshall amps.”

Nichols had hitherto been a long-time endorsee of Blackstar Amplification, developing a range of signature guitar amps with the British amp company, including the JJN-20RH MkII tube head and matching cabinet in racing green, and a combo amp version, then a signature JJN 3 practice amp, and the daddy of them all, the St James JJN50H, a 5o-watt head complete with Blues Power boost circuit.

Blackstar, which was launched in March 2007 at Musikmesse Frankfurt by alumni of Marshall amps, had been providing Nichols’ backline for over 14 years. And Nichols has always relied on the amp to be doing a lot of work. He’d close mic a Blackstar Artist 100, stick a Klon in front of it, add a little tape delay from an Echoplex and have at it.

Clearly, he felt the need for a change – or was it all that vintage gear he has been playing through lately that has turned his head

“Simply put, my heart beats for the roar of a cranked Plexi and a Gibson guitar,” he explained. “It just had to be.”

Time will tell whether Marshall is spec’ing him up a signature amp – but could there be a new signature guitar on the way from Gibson? A teaser video on Instagram suggests we might know the answer to that question on the 16th June. If it's not a guitar, it's going to be something coming soon to GibsonTV.

What we can say for sure is that Nichols’ new album, Louder Than Fate, will be out 5 June via Frontiers, and there are some smoking tones on it.

We’ll soon find out what he was playing through in the studio for, but judging by the video for Running Out, he’s got some sweet vintage Gibson electric guitars on the album. That three-humbucker Les Paul Custom with the Bigsby is a beaut.

And still, he’s ripping on them with no guitar picks. Nichols describes his fingerstyle approach – his brawny, ursine style – as akin to being a boxer.

“I came from that school of Leslie West, Stevie Ray Vaughan, early Clapton, all of that where it was very grab-you-by-the-throat guitar playing,” he said, speaking to MusicRadar in 2021.

In other words, it's going to get physical. Little wonder he took the Klon Centaur off his pedalboard.

Marshall has launched a membership scheme to raise funds to support grassroots music venues.

Sign up to the Amplify initiative, and the British guitar amp giant will donate 1 per cent of your order on its official web store to partner venues.

Amplify members get a number of benefits, including free shipping on all orders, plus priority support on customer service and early access to limited run launches and special offers. Marshall CEO Jeremy de Maillard described the Amplify scheme as a long-term model to support partner venues.

“For over 60 years, Marshall amplified live music, from local independent venues to the world’s biggest stages” says de Maillard. “Small venues are where the next generation of musicians turn first time listeners into lifelong fans. Through Amplify, Marshall is building a long-term model to support the future of live music.”

The scheme arrives at a time when grassroots music venues are struggling. In the UK, the Music Venue Trust’s annual report made for stark reading, describing the sector as “fragile” and just “one shock away from a crisis” – and independent venues face similar challenges across the world.

In the US, the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) says rising costs, such as artist fees, insurance and rent, are “eroding already razor-thin margins” and pushing many small venues to the brink at a time when ticket revenues are being threatened from “forced ticket transferability, unchecked secondary resale, and unfair platform practices”. Income from beverage and alcohol sales are “under pressure” too.

“When both of these primary revenue streams are squeezed, there’s no backup plan,” read NIVA’s 2025 report on the independent live sector.

Marshall says it will support grassroots venues by funding live events, providing backline and by establishing long-term partnerships, with partner venues selected for their contribution to local music communities and emerging artists.

“Independent venues aren’t just part of music history - they’re where the future is written,” says Nick Street, CMO, Marshall. “Amplify is how we connect our community more closely to that future. As Marshall grows, grassroots music will grow with us.”

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Supersonic, in Paris, is one of Marshall’s grassroots partners. Its comms director, Cecilia Sparano, says its partnership with Marshall provides “genuine support for the fragile economy” of small venues, and is vital for the Parisian venues festival programming.

“This partnership represents genuine support for the fragile economy of small concert venues,” says Cecilia Sparano, communication director, Supersonic. “It plays a key role in allowing festivals such as Supersonic’s Block Party and They’re Gonna Be Big to continue to exist. It is a real pleasure to work with a brand that truly respects our DNA and places full trust in us when it comes to both the actions we lead and the programming we curate.”

Amplify is free to join – and you can sign up over at Marshall.

Green Day did not play for long during their Super Bowl LX performance but it was just long enough to set the internet ablaze – just what were those guitar amps behind Billie Joe Armstrong?

No, not the over-sized ones. They were just for show. We are talking about the blue Marshall 1959 Super Leads that all but confirm that – and some might say, at last – we have a new signature BJA amp, and upon closer inspection, these look like they will ship straight from the factory in Milton Keynes with the legendary Dookie mod.

These amps haven’t shown up with retailers, they are not on the official Marshall site, but the British amp brand isn’t keeping them a secret either, posting some more detailed pictures on its Instagram account, and even giving us a look, albeit a blurry look, at the back of them.

The brass plate on the front tells us that these are the Dookie 1959 / BJA Super Lead signature models incoming, with the Green Day frontman’s signature on the plating. The power-blue Tolex will pair nicely with his Fernandes S-style, aka Blue, i.e. the heavily stickered, heavily modded electric guitar that he has had since the start. It certainly pairs nicely with that fawn grille cloth, with white piping finishing the amp off.

As one Instagram commentator noted, ““Ah man I’m so ready to go broke. When are these launching?”

That, we do not know. But judging by the broadcast footage, they certainly sound ready. What we do know is that the Dookie mod is going to get the Green Day tonehounds all hot under the collar. It’s a BFD.

While the original Marshall Super Leads did not have a master volume, Armstrong’s Dookie mod, performed by the late Martin Golub, retroactively gave him one, repurposing his Super Lead’s High Treble volume for the master control, and turning the Normal Volume into the gain.

From the pics posted by Marshall, these mods are helpfully emblazoned in red above the original knobs.

Some might know it as the Crunch Mod, because that’s what you get from those cascading gain stages; and it’s the sound you hear on Dookie.

While tube amp mods are absolutely, 100 per cent best left to a qualified tech – the risk of electrocution is real – these kinds of mods for the NMV Marshall in your life are available on the market. There is no shortage of talented amp technicians out there, e.g. Chicago Amp Mods will do this for you, with prices ranging from $220 to $250.

Some modded Marshalls have entered the realm of legend, such as anything that the late José Arredondo worked on. Arredondo’s was friends with Eddie Van Halen, modded amps for Steve Vai and George Lynch. And James Hetfield used Arredondo-modded Marshall Super Lead from the late ‘60s, early 70s during the sessions for Metallica’s latest studio album, 72 Seasons.

But modded Marshalls straight from the factory? You have to be Billie Joe Armstrong for that. The question is when will we see his Dookie amp in stores?

We’ve all been there, turning up to a gig only to find out that all the guitarists will be playing through the same backline, cue the onrushing panic as we try to get a decent tone out of an unfamiliar guitar amp. It is some comfort to learn that the greats are no different – even Brian May has a war story to share.

In a recent interview with Guitarist, the Queen guitarist recalls an evening in the early days in which he had to play through a Marshall tube amp and the experience was so bad he sounded like “an angry wasp” and struggled to play a lick.

To make matters worse, Jimi Hendrix was the headliner that night at the Olympia, in London, and we all know how the Marshall stack and Hendrix’s unearthly style made for an era-defining electric guitar tone.

“We played one show at Olympia. Top of the bill was Jimi Hendrix and everybody essentially played through the same gear,” said May. “So I plugged into a Marshall stack with my guitar and treble booster. Turned it all the way up – and it sounded so awful. I could hardly play.

“I didn’t know what to do. It sounded like an angry wasp. It didn’t have any depth or articulation, I couldn’t play chords. It was a really hard experience for me.”

This was a familiar story for Queen back in the day – and it wasn’t just May who suffered. When recording their eponymous debut album at Trident Studios, Roger Taylor had to make do the studio’s drum kit and it killed his game.

Speaking in October last year at the launch of Queen’s rebuilt and restored debut, retitled Queen I, May said he could see Taylor struggling.

“I remember Roger getting angry because he was in such an unfamiliar situation,” said May. “He has been drumming for years, and he’s pretty good as a drummer, he can do a thing or two! Instead of playing in a room with his kit, which he knows inside out, suddenly he is in a tiny little room with a foreign drum kit, which was tiny and transparent as I remember.

“It was plastic, all covered in tape, literally covered in all this tape. They’d taken most of the skin off the bass drum and it’s got a cushion inside. He’s trying to play this thing and he hates it!”

“Yeah, there was no resonance or anything,” replied Taylor. “Not what you want.”

In 1971, Taylor had used his own drum set to record the demos for the album at De Lane Lea Studios, and though nothing fancy – his kit was cheap, too – they sounded much better. The drums sounded like Taylor. And that sound matters. Just as May was thrown by the Marshall, Taylor couldn’t play with his usual freedom.

“We were told: ‘This is the Trident sound’. But we didn't want the Trident sound. We wanted our sound,” said Taylor. “I really had a bad time playing that kit, which is why, actually, if you listen to the demos – which I played on my relatively cheap kit in De Lane Lea – it's a higher standard of drumming. It’s quite busy, but it makes sense. And it’s just better to listen to.”

Queen ultimately swapped out every single one of Taylor’s drum beats for the Queen I reissue. And May, well, he too made his choice, finding his sound with the Vox AC30 combo. With that, his treble booster, and his home-made Red Special, he had his tone. And Hendrix sure had his.

For the avoidance of doubt, May assures Guitarist that Hendrix and the Marshall did not disappoint.

“After we’d played, I stayed behind backstage and I looked through between the amps as Jimi came on stage, plugged into that same amp – and it sounded like a cataclysm,” said May.

You can read the full interview with May in the latest issue of Guitarist, available now via Magazines Direct.

NAMM 2025: Marshall has put the classic drive tones from its most legendary guitar amps into a new series of overdrive pedals that arrive resplendent in the iconic British amp brand’s gold and black livery.

For the Marshall amp fan who has not got space in their lives for a full stack, the ungodly power of a 100-watt tube amp too impractical, these offer a convenient way of putting some of those sounds on your pedalboard.

The range reads like a greatest hits of Marshall designs – 1959 Super Lead, JVM distortion and noise gate, JCM900, JCM800, and the DSL (Dual Super Lead) – and that was the idea says the brand’s director of amplifier R&D, Jon Magill.

“These pedals bring the sounds of some of the great Marshall amps of history onto the pedalboard, recreating the sonic character of the amps and enhancing functionality on some to meet the needs of players.” he says.

And there are some lovely design notes here – the amp-style knobs, the LED ring around the footswitch to let you know when the pedal is engaged, the fuss-free four-knob layout of the enclosures. These look like very user-friendly drive pedals with something for everyone.

The 1959 Super Lead is for all your Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton needs. Stick it alongside a wah pedal or a Uni-Vibe chorus/vibrato and you’ve got Jimi Hendrix. We could go on; the list of players who used the archetypical Plexi is long and distinguished.

It is arguably the ür-rock guitar amplifier, and the pedal, says Marshall has the same “dynamic range, clarity, and rich tonal character that defined the vintage roar of the original 1959”. It presents you with gain controls for both treble and normal channels allowing players to blend in the sound and really shape the gain, giving you classic end of the ‘60s tones all the way through to late ‘70s, early ‘80s hard rock heat.

Loads of players have included the Marshall JVM in their backline at some point. Joe Satriani has looked to it for its juicy high-gain. The JVM pedal promises all that same harmonic-rich electric guitar tone and there is an onboard noise gate to tidy your sound at higher-gain settings.

The JCM800 is the quintessential ‘80s hard-rock and metal guitar amp. It is NWOBHM in a box, the choice of Slayer’s Kerry King, and with so many guitar effects pedal companies having tried to capture those sounds in a compact pedal, it is only right that Marshall got in on the action too. Again, it’s a four-knob design. A simple drive. You have dials for Gain, Sensitivity, Tone and Volume.

Its closely related and oft-overlooked sibling, the JCM900, has also been immortalised in pedal format, swapping out the Sensitivity controls for a mids-shaping Contour control.

Finally, there is the DSL, the Dual Super Lead distortion, aka the JCM2000, an amp that in typical Marshall fashion caters to players on varying degrees of the gain stage. Joe Bonamassa has been known to use them (though we would associate his Marshall use to the Silver Jubilee). .

So too have death metal pioneers Nile, Matt Bellamy of Muse, Gary Moore, Iron Maiden… Well. It, too, is 100-watts of loud volume so, again, the DSL pedal is a more house-trained option for that wide range of gain. Between the DSL’s Deep control and the Tone knob, you’ve got a lot of scope for shaping your gain.

The Marshall Amp Series Pedals are priced £119/$149. See Marshall for more details

There's a reason Rob Marshall makes connections with iconic musicians – they recognise his immense talent. That's why when Depeche Mode were gearing up for their Momento Mori world tour earlier, Dave Gahan reached out to the guitarist and creator of Humanist.

They already had history – the Depeche Mode vocalist guested on the first Humanist record with the driving Shock Collar, after being introduced by Rob's then-collaborator Mark Lanegan. Through Gahan's patronage, Rob found himself and Humanist's live lineup as the support act for Depeche Mode in European stadiums.

"I don't take that kind of thing for granted – it was amazing," marvels the Burnley-born musician as we recap on the highs (and crushing lows) of the last couple of years. "There were about 25,000 every night, and I honestly thought when we went on it would be a very sparse crowd, and it wasn't. Depeche Mode fans are hardcore – they literally sleep outside the venue overnight to get to the front. By the time we went on I was thinking it was going to be fairly quiet but it was about 80% capacity – it was just mental."

Rob's project was received rapturously as a live outfit – even by the notoriously partisan Mode faithful, and I can't help feeling his towering guitar sound and broodingly anthemic songs belong in those kinds of cavernous venues.

He first caught my ear with his previous band Exit Calm – a four-piece whose 2010 self-titled debut is one of the finest indie debuts of the last 30 years for my money. It marked Rob out as a singular guitar talent in the lineage of other mavericks; Squier, McCabe and Marr. Song-driven players who also created singular worlds with their sound. While the world never elevated Exit Calm accordingly, Rob's proved since he's delivering on that early promise outside of a traditional band.

On The Edge Of A Lost And Lonely World is his second album as Humanist and follows 2020's acclaimed self-titled debut. Again, Rob has assembled the great and the good of vocal talents to help deliver his compositions – from Ed Harcourt and former Midlake singer Tim Smith, to Black Rebel Motorcyle Club's Peter Hayes, US indie songwriter Rachel Fannan, the return of Gahan on the song Brother and appearances from fellow Lanegan collaborator Isobel Campbell. But while the album title may sound bleak – Rob's music is a much more nuanced reflection of his life. It's the only way he knows how to write, and as well as the light, it touches on the loss of close friends and his own personal challenges; including overcoming cancer during lockdown.

"I don't want to make the big thing of it, because I am alright," he tells me with typical humility. "Obviously it was a tough minute, and it combined with other things that were happening around me – [losing] Lanegan and my close friend. But everybody has stuff going on, don't they? I guess everything I feel that I do in music and in life, I can't disconnect them. I'm sure it's like that for a lot of people.

"So the album feels very reflective in terms of what was going on in my life, it's almost like I can map it out as I'm listening to it – where I was."

Rob points to the harrowing pitch-black mood of The Presence Of Haman – a composition that features an otherworldly treatment of his own vocals under the name Madman Butterfly – as music that was made during his lowest point. "It reminds me of a period of time when I felt like the walls were caving in," he admits. "The placement of that before the last track, which is The End, felt totally necessary and right for me, because no matter how dark things get, I know I just have to get through it. It's always with the belief that there's something better at the end of this. Just keep going. This album is about life – it's about survival. It's not about giving in, it's the total opposite of that."

This cuts to the core of why Humanist's music is so consistently engrossing to hear – Rob balances soul-bearing reflective music that also allows space for his vocal guests to shine. But the confidence to finally track his own voice on record alongside the other singers was born out the encouragement of working with Mark Lanegan – a figure who still looms large in Rob's creative mind. Rob contributed to two excellent solo albums (2017's Gargoyle and 2019's Somebody's Knocking), while Lanegan guested on the first Humanist album, but he was also a friend who consistently encouraged him.

"About six or seven years ago, I was doing a lot of writing for Lanegan and occasionally I would just I would map down a vocal," remembers Rob. "I didn't really think anything of it because I was thinking of it like an instrument. So sometimes I just throw it down and I was thinking that it might be a guitar line.

"So I sent something across to Mark and normally one in every three tracks I sent him he'd reply, 'Yeah, that's great – I'll have that one', but then I had a couple in a row where it just didn't seem to be hitting.

"And then I just had this one track that became the song Gazing From The Shore on Somebody's Knocking. I sent him it and he replied, 'Wow' – and he would always say 'God dammit' if he liked something. I had all these different countermelodies going off, but the melody that's pretty much on that entire track is my melody. And he was like, 'We're hitting new territory here. Any vocal maps you've got, send them through.'

"He thought I had a really good voice, he encouraged me a lot to sing, and he was like, 'You need to do some vocals', but I said, 'I can't, I'm not that guy. I haven't got the thing that you've got, I haven't got that confidence'. I'm happy where I am – stage left with the guitar, that is my comfort zone.'"

Lanegan passed away in 2022, but his presence is keenly felt on the sublime Brother, sung by Gahan and featuring Isobel Campbell with lyrics by Ed Harcourt; fellow musicians from Lanegan's musical inner circle.

"Brother is a tribute to Mark – a very gentle, respectful tribute to him. Ed was already on the record at that point. Ed wrote the vocal and lyrics and I just wanted to add to the weight of the tribute in a gentle way by having Isobel play of there. And Mark had worked with a strings player called Sietse van Gorkom, and I got him to replace the string parts I'd done. It felt like this united front of comrades.

"Mark introduced me to Dave, so that in itself felt like a tribute because I wouldn't know Dave without Mark. He was such a big character, and obviously massively respected. To fall into that circle… it's really quite touching for somebody to open their arms and allow you into their world, then make you feel totally on the same level. Mark never, ever spoke down to me in anyway – the opposite way in fact."

As we discovered when we spoke to Rob in 2020, he recorded the first Humanist album with a minimal Pro Tools LE setup. And it wasn't broke, so…

"I just kept everything the same," he laughs. "Nothing is different. The only thing that's different in terms of this record is I didn't mix it. I got a guy called Chris Sheldon to mix it who's worked with Biffy Clyro, Foo Fighters and Oceansize.

"He was so good. Sometimes when you work with mixers and you point out things you might not like with the mix, they get really defensive. And Chris wasn't like that. I said to him, 'Look, I've got the mixes as far as I can get them.' And I felt like they were in pretty good places. But I just didn't want it to feel like it was the same sound as the last record. I said, 'I just want it to feel a bit more polished. And just to elevate and take it a bit further, or as far as you can, but not rewrite what I've done.' And he did that every single time.

"He wanted me to be happy, he really did," adds Rob. "He wasn't trying to make his own record. He was trying to make the record that I wanted to make. I'd work with him again. I'd recommend him to anyone – such a nice guy. So supportive. It's great working with people like that."

Rob's guitar sound is easily identifiable to fans of his previous band Exit Calm – haunting and drenched in the ethereal sounds of an original Roland RE–201 Space Echo.

"The Space Echo has always been part of my live setup – I use it all the time. I took it on the Depeche Mode tour, and with Jane's Addiction. It's never left and I can't imagine ever replacing it. It would be like losing a finger now if I lost the Roland tape machine – I've had it for 24 years."

Again, if it ain't broke… but more than that, it's part of what a lot of players search for; it's Rob's sound.

"I spent about five years tearing my hair out with sounds – particularly with getting the sound where I wanted it with the gear I had," he reflects. "I got so anal about it I could tell the difference between plectrum weights, strings and leads. But I've done all that now, so why would I want to f**k it up? Stick to what you've got if you've put all that history and time into that."

Rob isn't sold on making the switch to digital amp modelling for convenience either…

"I've got a friend in a band actually – I won't mention who it is but he's in the same studio as me – and he's replacing all his gear with the Kemper," Rob notes. "He's in the process of doing all that, and I know [Nick] McCabe did that actually. I know it's easy to transport all this stuff around, and it is much more convenient but I would rather be lugging a 4 x 12 round, and my battered gear, knowing that I've collectively pulled all these elements together and I've made this thing. And it might be a bit rough around the edges, the handle might be hanging off the cab, and there might be gaffa tape and screws missing, but that's my gear – it's been with me and it's part of me. I don't want to replace it – it's history."

While he may track guitars initially at home with AmpliTube and Guitar Rig, Rob replaces them later in his soundproof studio space using his live rig. "There are tracks like Holding Pattern where it's just got to be loud," he explains. "Those screechy wah parts – it's got to be it's got to be full throttle.

"It's just the shake of the cabinet, the speakers, the guitar, the microphone and everything," he enthuses. "And it might squeal a little bit in places but I like all that stuff. I don't want to clean it up. I don't want to take it out. When you do it doesn't feel the same. You can do guitars at a lower volume but I've always been a loud guitar player, as you well know. And there's just something else you get when you crank it up that you just don't get the lower volumes. I think that about the Kemper stuff – yeah, it might replicate it but it's not the same – it's not, and it never will be."

The core of the Rob Marshall sound is the dark horse of the Marshall lineage – the fantastic JMP-1 preamp into a power amp, Marshall cab with a rack unit and Space Echo on top. Out of that main amp it goes into an Alesis MIDIVerb 4 rack effects. "I push the decay up pretty high on it," Rob explains. "That goes through a Marshall bass amp, and I use that to provide the low-end warmth. And essentially it's the same signal I've got going through the main amp, but it means I can have the main amp quite dry and the bass amp totally wet. And I just balance the two together, so whatever I'm doing I've got this really nice bassy reverb cushion of sound that sits underneath."

Rob will also create loops in real time via the now-discontinued Lexicon JamMan rack unit. "There's a lot of foot tapping and pulling my hand away from my guitar and twiddling knobs quickly and going back to playing," he says. "But I've just got so used to it now – it feels natural now. It's second nature."

It's inspiring to hear Rob speak about his sound – and when other players might be condensing their rigs, he's loyal to his trusted rig. It's part of what he's taken from the experience of seeing his own guitar inspirations.

"When I used to go and see guitar players like John Martyn or Vini Reilly, I loved to see the gear from magazines that I'd read years ago. You'd walk to the front of the stage and you'd know it was their gear because you'd seen it in pictures. There's history there and nostalgia. When I used to go and see Killing Joke and I'd see Geordie's guitar – that's the guitar I'd seen in pictures, and I love that."

Humanist's Rob Marshall: 9 albums that changed my life

The Beach Boys – 20 Golden Greats (1976)

"I was jumping in the car with my dad and driving around. My dad would put the cassette tapes in – and this is where my love of volume probably came from because my dad would crank up car stereos and we'd be driving around and just hearing those tracks at full pelt. It was unbelievable listening to songs and on side two I remember in particular God Only Knows, Good Vibrations, Wouldn't It Be Nice, Heroes And Villains, I Can Hear Music… I mean, they're just some of the best pop songs ever written.

"I haven't seen my dad for 25 years and it's a very broken, fractured relationship that I've had with him. But one of my fondest memories is jumping in the car with him, driving and listening to the Beach Boys. In particular, I remember listening to the Beach Boys for a good period of time because he loved it and just the sound that you could sing along to it full pelt and it was just great, man. Those songs are so good."

The Waterboys – This Is The Sea (1985)

"I think I heard it when I was about 15. My mate from school, I went round to his mum dad's house one time and he put it on. There's a track on there called Spirit and he cranked it up.

"It's only about a minute and a half long but its lyics, 'Man gets tired, spirit don't / Man surrenders, spirit won't / Man crawls, the spirit flies / Spirit leaves, when man dies'…and it goes on like that. It's very just a gentle piano thing. But it's just about, again, belief, which is something that has stayed with me – all these little kind of things that have stayed with me over the years.

"It was a massive album and I just love the sonic sound of it. In particular, there's a track that I love, which is the title track This Is The Sea. The sound of the layered acoustics all drenched in reverb. But the main thing was the energy and the spirit that oozed out of Mike [Scott]'s voice. He was young, innocent, full of hope but a man also wise beyond his years – still looking out at his life before him. It was reflective of that kind of desire to live.

"I really associated with that feeling because I was in Stockton-on-Tees at the time, and I wanted to get out of that town. The upbringing that I had, I had a huge desire to break away from it and do something different. When I was, and I would say again, probably between 15 and 16 and in the last year at school, I had a cassette tape with it on. I used to set it up at nighttime and wake up first thing in the morning, half asleep, I'd put the headphones on, I'd crank it up and I'd listen to This Is The Sea at full pelt. It's about six minutes long and there's a bit of the end where he's like, he just repeats, 'That that was a river / That was a river / That was a river / And this is the sea!, and it just sent shivers down my spine and my hairs standing up.

"It made me feel that I wanted to get up and do something special and profound that day. I knew that whatever it was in that music was having a profound effect on me so wanted to keep repeating it. I thought, well, if I just do it first thing in the morning it's going to stop me putting me in the right place every day. So did it for about six months every f*****g day. I just kept on listening to it, over and over again. It was a massive, massive record for me."

Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland (1968)

"It's Hendrix – this could have been any of the three albums. Electric Ladyland probably tips it. It still sounds so futuristic – it's from a different planet. Was Jimi even a human being? It's so weird for that time. The structures, they sound so natural but at the same time some of them are slightly freeform and not typical structures.

"In particular the track Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland) – just stunning. I'd never heard anything like it, even now. Jimi's voice sounds godlike. And Voodo Chile, it feels like you're in the room with the band. It's so live and you can tell it's a band jamming and playing together.

"Voodoo Child (Slight Return)… where does that even come from? Who's even done anything on a scale like that? It's just insane. The production on the record is just incredible. Burning Of The Midnight Lamp is one of my favorite trucks. It definitely had a big influence in terms of like just feeling like there was something to want to strive towards. I love the song structures and I've always loved Jimi's intricate guitar playing – not so much like the big noodly solo stuff, but all the other kind of gentle things.

"A friend gave me a Jimi Hendrix tab book as well. One of the first tab tablature books I ever had when I was 14/15. And I remember it because there was a track I wanted to learn, Little Wing, and it was right in the back. The guy ripped out the f*****g pages for himself. The one track that I really, really wanted to learn. I could see the first page with the Little Wing heading and the lyrics but the the two pages for the tab he'd just torn out. I thought, you bastard!"

The Verve – A Storm In Heaven (1993)

"The production on it, from John Leckie, it just sounds so good. I listened to it again recently and some of the songs I'd jump towards now are actually things like Blue – so good and it's one of the songs I used to skip by.

"I sounds like rock and roll. Now when I listen to it, it's just got a really powerful strong vibe about it. As a whole band, they were just phenomenal alone there. Everybody just kind of sat in their own little pocket perfectly. And it was just a beautiful sonic mashup of a sound. And Nick McCabe obviously – totally at the top of his game really.

"I've always loved Pete Salisbury's drumming. He always had this way of making things sound like they're moving all the time and rolling along with the way he played his toms and snare. It always feels interesting to me.

"That was such a big record and one that influenced just in terms of the sound. I thought, I think I know how to do something like that and I feel like I could be a part of that. I like the idea of being a quarter of something.

"It wasn't like I was listening to Eleanor Rigby or Strawberry Fields, thinking I don't know how to do that. When I listened to A Storm In Heaven I kind of understood it and I felt like I could be a part of whatever it was."

Vini Reilly – The Durutti Column (1989)

"I know I got it about 20 years ago, I think I bought it in a shop in Sheffield, and one of the main things to remember about it is when I pulled out the cover, I'd heard the name The Durutti Column, and I knew they were on Factory Records, but I saw his face and his haircut – Vini looking very kind of reflective and quite somber. There was just something about it, and I think I'd just got a record player at the time – I was pretty new to the vinyl thing. So I just bought it on a whim and then just fell in love with the record.

"The main thing that struck me and still stays with me now is Requiem Again, which is this beautiful gentle track but it's huge. It's like a symphony and so poignant and delicate. When I listen to it, it just almost makes me cry. Even if the album only had that one track on, it would still be on this list – it's that powerful for me."

John Martyn – Inside Out (1973)

"I love all of his '70s records. Inside out is quite an experiemental record, but it's almost like the brother or sister to Solid Air. It feels similar but more experimental. Outside In being the equivalent of I'd Rather Be The Devil.

"From the first track when Fine Lines comes in and you hear his vocal – he's talking off mic and he says, 'I think it felt natural' and he starts singing with his acoustic and it's just beautiful. I fell in love with that first track and then the rest of the record.

"Beverley is a really gentle acoustic track that's just a beautiful instrumental. John's personality comes through in a track called Glory Of Love, which is like very kind of cheeky John Martyn. And Ways To Cry, which is like a typical John Martyn pulling at the heartstrings. I mean, that guy probably serenaded many women over the years.

"It's weird, isn't it because he was an obnoxious kind of drunk but at the same time you just know that could probably just turn on the charm and suddenly, with a few little kind of flows across the strings and his beautiful voice, have people falling for him back then. That's all very intriguing in its way.

"That floor-mounted Echoplex he was using in the '70s too – just amazing. What an incredible guitar player, so innovative. Nobody like him whatsoever."

The Chameleons – Strange Times (1976)

"I remember my mate phoning me up. This is about 2002, maybe 2003. I was living in Sheffield and there's a place called The Casbah. He said, 'What are you doing tonight? Let's go down to The Casbah, there's a guy playing who used to be in a band called The Chameleons. He's called Mark Burgess and he's doing an acoustic gig. I thought nothing of it, went down and f*****g hell man, it was so good!

"What I loved about it was as soon as I got down there it was the crowd – it was the people that were down there. They just seem to have this cult audience of really kind of beautiful, odd or unusual people in leather jackets and boots – all part of this huge gang. Everybody seemed to know everybody. Yet nobody was from Sheffield. It's like they were following this leader around.

"I remember Mark came out. And he said, I'm pretty sure he started with an acoustic version of Swamp Thing. And it was just like, wow! I remember in particular, he did a track called Time, The End Of Time [singing] 'Don't waste your time'. There's a bit where he sings. 'Time slipping away – have to make the most of your time', and everybody's just singing along with him. And I was like, 'F** me!' Because his voice… it was quite unusual. It wasn't like a Jeff Buckley or Freddie Mercury or whatever. It was quite odd, and he looked quite odd. But there was something about it that was just amazing.

"I went on and got the records, and I love the record – Mad Jack and Seriocity… all of is just great. And I know Dave [Fielding], the guitar player, he's a big fan of Humanist. Reg [Smithies, guitar] and Dave used to come and watch Exit Calm occasionally if we were playing Manchester. Stuff like that is really lovely – the feeling that these people are all part of this history, and you're a part of their history now as well.

"But that was a powerful moment in a gig where it really transported me somewhere else and I never forgot that gig. Then that record kind of stayed with me and still stays with me now. You can't not want to shake your hips so Swamp Thing when it comes on."

The Autumns – The Angel Pool (1997)

"A huge beautiful cinematic soundscape of tunes. A little bit like The Chameleons, but much more ethereal than that. They had this really powerful, strong vocal, it was almost like opposed to the music, but somehow worked. His vocals are really dramatic but it's also got like a really lovely tenderness, heightened by this kind of occasional falsetto.

"There's two tracks actually on that record especially. One is the first one which is The Garden Ends. And the second one Embracing Winter – those two tracks had a huge influence on on an Exit Calm song called We're On Our Own. In terms of the guitar playing, you may not even hear it but there's something in the chords and the power and the kind of dynamic of these two tracks that I really embraced. I felt like they became part of my DNA.

"I remember listening to that record a lot. And they had three guitar players and I envisioned me making that sound as one guitar player."

Dark Star –  Twenty Twenty Sound (1999)  

"Essentially Dark Star were the aftermath of the band Levitation, which basically folded with [former House Of Love member and frontman] Terry Bickers quitting live onstage. The remaining members, including the drummer Dave Francolini, Christian Hayes who was the guitar player and bassist Laurence O'Keefe, formed the band Dark Star.

"They just sounded huge. Christan had this radio mic and normal mic with this massive guitar sound, and Dave is just a powerhouse of a drummer., Laurence was amazing bassist and sometimes you couldn't tell if it was the bass doing something or the guitars.

"I didn't know they were a three-piece band until I watched some of the footage on Jools Holland and I was just blown away. I couldn't believe it was the three of them making those sounds and doing it in the studio then making it sound better live than it did on record. That was a big record for me and I love the tracks I Am The Sun, Graceadelica was a massive track too… they were all brilliant.

"I became friends with Dave and ended up touring with his band after Darkstar, called Dragons. He called me up and said he needed a guitarist for a tour. I had a great time, really enjoyed it and I'm still friends with him now."

• On The Edge Of A Lost And Lonely World is out now on Bella Union. For tour dates visit Humanist

Tom Morello and Joe Bonamassa - two modern-day masters of the guitar. What they have to say about the instrument is usually worth listening to and indeed they’ve each been dispensing some sage advice this week.

First up Tom Morello has been talking about his acoustic folk rock project The Nightwatchman on an edition of the Poltrocast podcast and how singer songwriter-style material can be just as forceful as metal.

"I was always drawn to hard music,” he said. “And first, that was metal, and then it was punk, and then it was hip hop. And it wasn't until, really, my 30s where I discovered those first couple Bob Dylan records and (Bruce) Springsteen's 'Nebraska,' and digging back into Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill and Phil Ocks."

"And I was just like, 'This music is hard as anything, man.' Like, you don't need a wall of Marshall stacks in order to really be dark."

Meanwhile Joe Bonamassa was a guest on the Zak Kuhn Show. The blues maestro was reflecting on the urge that many guitarists have incorporate larger and more elaborate rigs. In his eyes you don’t need tonnes of gear to find the right tone.

"You're gonna sound like you,” he told Kuhn. "You don't have to spend a lot of money. A Peavey Classic 30 will get you home. It doesn't have to be bourgeois."

“I'm the king cork sniffer, I'm telling you that. And I've seen Robben Ford play rented Twins and sound like Robben Ford. You're gonna sound like you. I've also seen him use the Dumble and it sounded amazing. But he also sounds amazing to a rented Twin. He's Robben Ford. And that's really the bottom line."

He then went on to talk about the abundance of online advice when it comes to gear and how for many newer players it may be confusing. "My thing is, don't read…” he insisted. 

“You could read, but don't take as gospel internet information written by people that don't have gigs to play. In my experience, those are the loudest voices and also the most uninformed because the people that don't chime in are actually too busy gigging and figuring it out.”

"And there's no right and wrong," he added. "You do whatever you want, however you want it, when you want. That's the beauty of this all. And it's all subjective."

"If you're happy with your sound, you're happy with your playing, and you're inspired, and you're making music and you're playing - what more to life is then at this point?"

In other words, block out the noise and just listen. To yourself... and your guitar.

There are all kinds of ways the American guitar player can mark Independence Day. Some may choose to set off a box of fireworks. Others will invite the neighbours around for a barbecue. Or you could partake in an even more noble tradition and dig out a pair high-volume British tube amps, crank them up and play The Star-Spangled Banner.

That’s just what the two YouTube gear enthusiasts behind the Weekend Warrior Creative Lab channel did, but they took it stage further, setting up their rigs in huge expanse of a 250,000 sq ft warehouse, wholly empty save for some stand-up lights, their guitars, and two full-stacks.

Okay, the tube amps were British, which seems a little off-message for the 4 July, and the whole America breaking free from the Empire, but when you consider that it was Jimi Hendrix that really make the Star-Spangled Banner a work to be reinterpreted on electric guitar, and that he used a Marshall stack, that all seems legit.

Since Hendrix’s performance of the anthem at Woodstock, The Star-Spangled Banner has become a rite of passage for high-profile guitar players. Some are old hands at it. Metallica's James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett have performed on many occasions, likewise Joe Satriani.

If there is a high-profile ballgame or NFL match on the calendar, chances are someone is getting booked in to do the honours. Just last year, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks performed it before the Jacksonville Jaguars play-off match, with Tedeschi doing the hardest job having to actually sing it.

As for the amps, one was technically not British, a CeriaTone reproduction of a 100-watt 2555 Jubilee Marshall. The other was a 50-watt 1979 Marshall JMP 2204. And these went through a a pair of Marshall 4x12s, one a 1976 loaded with Celestion Greenbacks, the other a 1960B Cabinet from the ‘90s that houses four Celestion GT12s.

“We had both amps cookin’ pretty hard – not totally flat out, but just below the point of squealing and oscillation at idle,” write the pair. “From the player’s perspective, this was an amazing experience. It is not every day that you can crank an amp as loud as you want.”

Amen to that. This is something we have always wanted to do, that surely every guitar player would want to do, because there is something fundamentally appealing about finding a large, empty space and a guitar amplifier that is too loud to be cranked up anywhere else. 

These, after all, are de facto public address systems. Just imagine the air pushing out of those speakers.

Check out the results of this magnificent experiment above. You’ll find Kevin playing a Charvel Pro-Mod So-Cal FR loaded with EMG-85 and SA electric guitar pickups, and Matt on Fender American Vintage Reissue ‘59 Stratocaster. You'll find us looking for an empty warehouse...

Marshall is giving its recent Studio JTM tube amp a new look to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Celestion speakers with an "artisanal" 12-inch speaker. 

The UK-built Celestion 100 amp marks the long-standing collaboration between the two iconic brands and is limited to 100 units worldwide. The 20W head features a pair of ECC83 preamp valves, two 5881 power amp valves, along with an ECC83 phase splitter.

The ST112C cab also features the new limited edition 30W Celestion 100 Alnico speaker, which Marshall says offers a "classic low-end grunt that eloquently complements the warm and vocal midrange crunchy upper tones".

“The tone of Celestion 100, is very much based on those really early Alnico guitar speakers and we spent a lot of time listening to several of them just to get the right tonal benchmark," says John Paice, Marketing Communications Manager at Celestion. "Designed to look and sound as close as possible to those early Alnicos as we could possibly make it, and a real tribute to the original, we believe we made these hundredth-anniversary speakers into something truly special.”

The cream-covered Bletchley-built Celestion 100 features finger-jointed cabinets, hand-welded chassis, hand-soldered potentiometers and valve bases. "Celestion has been part of the Marshall family right from the very beginning, and more than six decades later that union is still thriving," said Steve Smith, Product Expert for Musical Instruments at Marshall Group. 

"Over the years we have cultivated a truly genuine relationship built on our shared passion for British craftsmanship and world-class sound. It is this foundation that allows us to make really great amps, and the Celestion 100 is no exception. I can’t think of a more iconic way of celebrating this 100-year milestone."

Celestion 100 head and cabinets availability is so limited, no more than 15 will be available in the UK through select retailers for £2,059.99.

More info at Marshall. The Celestion 100th anniversary speaker is also available separately to preorder at Andertons .

Polyphia’s Tim Henson and Scott LePage are two of guitar’s most digitally literate players, early adopters of the amp modeller and guitar plugin, with LePage telling MusicRadar that discovering the POD Farm was “honestly life changing,” but in a recent interview with the German gear retail giant Thomann, they explained why there’s always a tube amp when they play live – and why, for over a year now, it has to be a Marshall.

“We have gravitated specifically towards the JCM800,” LePage says, which, of course,  would make perfect sense. Not only because a JCM800 is a superlative metal guitar amp, but this is indeed what the pink amp from Henson’s signature Archetype plugin suite from Neural DSP is based on. 

As they explain in the video, they once used Orange, then tried a few different Marshall amps before settling on the JCM800, sending the signal from their Quad Cortex units through the amp’s effects loop, allowing them to run their stage volume loud and give their sound a sense of, well, something physical.

“There’s nothing quite like the warmth of a tube amp, right?” Henson says. “Even though we are still using the modellers, through the power section, the way it pushes air is just another feeling entirely. I’d say it’s a big monitor, ‘cos we’re fuckin’ blasting those, and we have the massive stacks. We love that wall-of-sound sound.”

While they both use in-ear monitors onstage, LePage says running a silent stage was a step too far. There was something missing without the volume being pushed out from the amps.

“We tried not doing stage sound for a while, and we’re like, ‘Dude, it doesn’t feel right,’” LePage says. “There’s no girth to it,” Henson adds.

Running a hybrid rig like this is definitely a choice for today’s player. There are plenty of options for those looking for a powered FRFR speaker to complement their modeller. But sending the modeller in through the effects loop, bypassing the amp’s preamp section and leaning into that analogue mojo of transformers and power tubes worked hard gives your electric guitar tone a certain heat, presence and body.

“I don’t know what it is about the 800s,” LePage says. “There is something specifically about that one, the JCM800, that just feels really good. We’ve tried other ones and they didn’t feel that good.”

At home, LePage has been known to break out a loud tube amp head and get physical, having bought himself a Fortin signature Meshuggah head. Speaking to MusicRadar in 2022, LePage said it blew his mind.

“When you buy someone’s signature thing, you always have to expect, ‘Okay, it’s not going to sound exactly the same.’ It is not going to sound exactly like Meshuggah,” he said. “They have the equipment, the amp, the guitar, the wood in the guitar, the pickups in the guitar, the room, the speakers, fucking everything, right? Everything is different. But when you plug that thing in, it’s like, ‘Holy shit! I actually sound like Meshuggah!’ [Laughs] It was the first time I plugged something in and it was exactly the fucking sound. They really nailed it.”

In other Polyphia news, LePage recently teased a new signature guitar, an Ibanez seven-string based on the aggressively shaped Xiphus, and they just mooted Zakk Wylde as a potential guest for their next album.

The ship just might have come in for all those tonehounds out there trying to nail Eric Clapton’s mid ‘80s electric guitar sound, because a Marshall JCM800 that was used by Slowhand during his legendary 1985 Live Aid performance is up for sale. 

Clapton’s Live Aid set, which featured Phil Collins on drums, was one of the highlights of an event that would become the standout pop-cultural moment of the decade. It was watched by an estimated TV audience of 1.5 billion people, with Clapton’s performance of his Derek and the Dominoes standard Layla bringing the house down at JFK stadium in Philadelphia. 

On the day, Clapton wore a white shirt, played his ‘Blackie’ Stratocaster, with a red guitar strap, and in in his backline that was this 1984 JCM800 Super Lead MKII, and this is the amp that is now being sold via London’s Denmark Street Guitars – send your enquires via email to justin@londonvintageguitars.com. 

The guitar amp is being sold as a half-stack, with a matching 4x12 straight cabinet. Clapton had a number of JCM800s during this period, having moved back to Marshall after favouring Music Man amplifiers such as the HD 130 Reverb on account of them having a master volume. 

Clapton used a couple of JCM800s that day, and while there are no further details on the listing – Denmark Street Guitars just posted it to its Instagram page – this looks it was part of the consignment of JCM800s that went under the hammer in 2011, when Bonham’s hosted a charity auction to raise money for the Crossroads Centre, Clapton’s addiction recovery centre in Antigua.

Marshall’s naming convention is a little arcane. Two of Clapton’s JCM800s were 1987 models, 50-watt tube heads. The other two were Super Lead MKII 1959s, which is the amp that is up for sale. It is a 100-watt tube head with the four-inputs configuration on the front. 

Clapton acquired these JCM800s in 1984 when he was working with Roger Waters, and they would feature on Waters’ debut solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking. They would be his main go-to amps until he switched to his dual Soldano SL 100 setup with the Pete Cornish switching system, though he reportedly still used one of the JCM800s to power his Leslie rotating speaker system.

Marshall’s naming convention would confuse anyone but the simplicity of the control setup would have been just what Clapton was looking for. He favoured that in an amp – just turn it up and let it do its thing. 

“I don’t like too many options in an amplifier,” Clapton told Guitar World. “The simplicity of an early Fender is what I want. If I want it to distort, I’ll just turn it up full volume, and it will do that. But when you’ve got all these permutations, you just spend too long fiddling around on the knobs.”

Today in guitar amplifier worship we are going to look at something that seems just too rare to label a “holy grail”, simply too bespoke – the Dumble Manzamp preamp and 200-watt Odyssey power amp that once served in the master of the Stratocaster and tone connoisseur Eric Johnson’s backline in the mid ‘90s.

The setup, which also includes a pair of Dumble 2x12 speaker cabinets loaded with vintage Vox Alnico Blues and Hiwatt Heavy Duty drivers – both added to the rig by the subsequent owner – is up for sale via Techno Empire for a cool $399,999.99 – and Vertex Effects has just shot a demo video for its YouTube channel to show us what something like this sounds like. 

Just what do you play when have a rig like this to demo? Well, first off, you get yourself a Strat. Cliffs Of Dover is a choice that is no less correct for it being obvious. But, quite honestly, this is the sort of amp rig that that would get you a standing ovation for simply playing an open A chord. 

As Vertex’s Mason Marangella says, this Manzamp/Odyssey combo has all the Eric Johnson tones you need; they’re all right there. Gabriel Bergman is playing a Strat, and there is a greatest hits of Johnson-style pedals. 

• Eric Johnson: the 10 greatest guitar tones of all time

There’s a TC Electronic chorus pedal and a Boss delay pedal, and it’s blowing Marangella’s mind with a sound that already “has a mastered quality” coming out of the speaker. There is a Fuzz Face, ideal for comparing the clean tone and Fuzz Face into clean tones of Desert Rose.

Bergman and Marangella take us through the different tones, how it sounds with delay, with chorus, and most intriguingly, how it articulates the complex chord voicings of the classic Eric Johnson tune Friends. 

There are still some mysteries surrounding the rig. How exactly did Johnson set it up? Well, the best clue comes from the May 1996 issue of Guitar Player, which published a diagram of Johnson’s triple guitar amp setup, and explained the this custom setup replaced Johnson’s Dumble Steel Stringer. Johnson favoured a Marshall 4x12. 

Now, there is backline, and then there is an Eric Johnson three-amp backline. The three amp setup allowed Johnson to run a separate amp for rhythm, ‘distorted rhythm’ and lead guitar tones.

Johnson’s main rhythm tone was handled by a pair of Fender Vibroverbs. The lead was handled by either a Marshall or a Dumble Overdrive Special, with ’Distorted rhythm’ incorporating this Manzamp/Odyssey rig. 

This is not the sort of amp you see every day, and it might be some time before we see it again. “If you are a fan of arguably the best clean tone ever, arguably the best lead tone and dirty rhythm ever, Eric Johnson, this is the amp,” says Marangella.

It could, of course, be yours if this year's amp budget is comfortably six sigures. Eric Johnson's Dumble Manzam/Odyssey rig is listed on Techno Empire and Techno Empire Reverb’s store for £331,333 / $399,999. All the components are original besides the custom footswitch.

• Up close with the ultimate Dumble Overdrive Special Jason Isbell calls “possibly the greatest amplifier ever made"

A lifelong Marshall user, Dan Hawkins knows what makes a great amp. "I can hear every detail in the tone of that," he says of the new Marshall JTM in the video below. "That's a really difficult thing to do with a Marshall that's still got that crunch on the front end."

The Darkness guitarist and co-founder came well prepared to Marshall Amps' HQ with his Les Paul Custom Black Beauty (originally built for Jimmy Page) and his touring pedalboard to put the Studio JTM ST20H through its paces. 

"The really great thing about this amp is it's a pedal platform if you want it to be but the sound of this amp on its own, when it's dialled in, is absolutely unbelievable," Dan notes of the Studio JTM's versatility. "It's not to be messed with, really." 

A new classic, the UK-made head and Studio JTM ST20C combo reproduce the legendary tones of the original JTM that inspired generations, including heroes Jimi Hendrix, Angus Young, Joe Bonamassa and Gary Moore. 

Players can craft everything from warm and smooth to chiming, jangly and raucous sounds  – as Dan ably demonstrates. 

"It's got that throaty growl… but you can get a real chime out of it," says Dan. "You can add a pedal to that and it just doesn't sound like it's overloading. This JTM Studio is amazing for taking pedals."

The new amps are handmade by Marshall's engineers in Bletchley, England, and carry the JTM legend onwards for a new generation of players. 

"The beauty of having this particular amp is having that growl, because that's what the old JTM45s do better than anything else," adds Dan. 

Shining on stage and in the studio, this compact and iconically-styled 20-watt model features a 5-watt mode for home-friendly volumes that's accessible at the flick of a switch. 

The '60s JTM lineage continues with these amps' classic Creamback Celestion speakers. And just like the original JTM, players can explore further versatility by jumping channels with a patch cable to blend between the Normal and High Treble voices.

The new Studio JTM offers the additional advantages of an FX loop for getting the most from your modulation, delay and reverb pedals, plus a DI out for recording and additional stage options.

The Marshall Studio JTM ST20H head is £1075 and ST20C combo is £1279. The ST112 cab is £565, while the 2x12 ST212 is £765.

Find out more about the Studio JTM at Marshall Amps 

Marshall has welcomed the latest addition to its ever-popular Studio series as it marks late founder Jim Marshall’s 100th birthday with the launch of the Studio JTM.  

Read our review of the new amp here.

The Studio JTM is a compact, 20-watt tube amp that’s available as a standalone head or as a combo, with a matching 1x12 and 2x12 speaker cabinets rounding out the release.

The year might be 2023 but stylistically – not to mention tonally – this is an amp that turns the clock back to the early ‘60s, and a febrile time for popular music, electric guitar tone, and the amplifiers behind it. 

The JTM45 was Marshall’s first guitar amp, taking its name from Jim and Terry, Jim’s son and co-designer’s name, and the amp’s 45-watt output. The Studio JTM is built and designed in the same spirit as the original. 

The aesthetic is uncanny, with the fawn-coloured cloth used on the amp’s front and speaker grille, and the red enamel poured ‘coffin’ logo – the black text on gold that became the Marshall trademark had yet to be designed in those days. Terry Marshall says the proof is in the sound.

“When I was demonstrated the Studio JTM it took me back to my original JTM45,” he said in a statement. “It was my sound…I feel like it is going to be something special.”

It is also going to be lighter. The JTM45 was not an amp you would relish carrying up two flights of stairs at a venue. 

And in this era of quieter stage volumes, and at-home practice settings not quite getting the best out of a tube amp, it is good to see the Studio JTM has some onboard power attenuation, and can be run at a more housetrained 5-watts. 

There are more modern appointments, such as the amp’s speaker emulated DI output for going direct when recording. Pedalboards weren’t really a thing in 1962 but they are now, and Marshall has them covered with an effects loop.

Under the hood, the Studio JTM has a similar configuration of tubes to the others in the series, with a pair of ECC83 valves in the preamp, a pair of 5881 power tubes, and a ECC83 phase splitter. The combo and the accompanying cabinets are loaded with G12M-65 Creamback Celestion 12” drivers.

The front panel has your usual power and standby switches, four inputs for the MKII JTM's two High Treble and Normal channels, each with their own volume knob, plus Bass, Middle, Treble and Presence controls. 

The Studio JTM is Marshall’s first gear release since being sold to Swedish speaker company Zound in March. Back then we asked the question, ‘What next for its amp line?’ Not it looks like we have the answer, and it looks like business as usual. 

This is the company’s second major release of the year, following the return of the launch of its Vintage Reissue pedals in February. The amps are made in the UK at Marshall’s Milton Keynes factory, and are available now.

The Studio JTM ST20H 20W head is priced £1,075/$2,350, the ST20C combo is £1,279/$2,650, while the ST112 1x12 and ST212 2x12” cabinets are priced £565/$1,480 and £765/$1,850 respectively. See Marshall for more details and read our Marshall Studio JTM ST20H 20W head & ST212 cab review.

After over 60 years of family ownership, the iconic British guitar amp brand Marshall Amplification has been sold to Swedish speaker company Zound Industries in a deal that will see both brands trade as the Marshall Group.

The brand first collaborated on a range of Marshall-branded headphones and Bluetooth speakers for the consumer market under a 2010 licensing deal. It was a deal that was hugely successful, taking the Marshall brand identity onto the streets, with its appeal extending beyond guitar players and reaching people who had never picked up the instrument before. Other brands such as Orange and Fender diversified accordingly, launching their own ranges of bluetooth speakers and headphones.

In agreeing to the takeover, the Marshall family will remain the largest shareholder, owning a 24 per cent stake in the Marshall Group. Zound will acquire Marshall Amplification, plus its subsidiaries Natal Drums, Marshall Records, and Marshall Live Agency.

With double-digit profitability and combined revenues of over $360 million, the Marshall Group is in a strong position to compete in both consumer and musician markets. But the big question for musicians is what will the move mean for the future of an amplifier brand that changed the face of popular music in 1962 with the launch of the late Jim Marshall’s first amp design, the JTM45, and provided the sound and the power for a new generation of players including Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.

The most-recent high-profile launch from Marshall was its Vintage Reissue Pedals, which saw the return of the cult classic Guv’Nor, Drivemaster, Bluesbreaker and Shredmaster drive pedals. New amp designs, however, have been thin on the ground.

Jim Marshall’s heirs, his daughter Victoria Marshall and son Terry Marshall, will sit on the board of the Marshall Group, and said in a statement that the move will extend the brand’s appeal.

“Since my father and I created the original Marshall amp back in 1962, we have always looked for ways to deliver the pioneering Marshall sound to music lovers of all backgrounds and music tastes across the world,” said Terry Marshall. “I’m confident that the Marshall Group will elevate this mission and spur the love for the Marshall brand.”

Victoria Marshall said the Marshall Group would preserve the brand’s legacy in an “ever-modernising music industry”.

“Having worked alongside my father during his later years, I know he would be excited at this direction and the potential to reach a larger worldwide audience with innovation and passion which he always had in spades,” she said.

The FT reports that there will be no immediate change in operations, with amps continuing to be made in Bletchley, England, and at their factory in Vietnam. Jeremy de Maillard, Zound’s chief executive, told the paper that by consolidating its concerns in one company, the Marshall Group was well placed for “faster innovation and a deeper connection with musicians and music lovers”.

“We’ve always made sure that the acoustic department at Marshall was satisfied with the quality of the products created by Zound for the past 12 years,” said de Maillard.

Time will tell where the Marshall Group will take its amplifiers. But if the innovation that de Maillard speaks of is brought to bear on amp design, there is plenty of room to manoeuvre. Marshall has yet to debut a floor-based amplifier, and its range of tube amps remain largely unchanged despite the onward march of digital technologies and IR cab cloning technologies being integrated in the design of their competitor's products.

The news that Marshall has officially launched its reissued range of drive pedals – the hallowed Bluesbreaker, Drivemaster, Shredmaster and The Guv’Nor – deserves a drum roll. Everyone knew they were coming and yet that somehow only makes it more exciting to know that when you rock up at your local music store you’ll see Marshall’s ‘Fab Four’ in the pedal cabinet.

Fair play to Marshall. The British guitar amp icon might not be able to keep a secret but it can see the funny side of things, admitting on the video thumbnail for their demo that this was indeed their worst kept secret.

The rumours, the leaks, the denials that these pedals ever existed, none of that matters now, because the pedals have arrived, they are widely available, and they present guitar players with four options for putting genuine Marshall drive tones on their pedalboards. 

As the YouTube demos, and various leaks will have told us, these reissues are very much following the design template Marshall used in the ‘90s for their MkI stompboxes. The only thing that tells you the Marshall pedal that you have in front of you is a reissue or a vintage model is the text on the manual and the box. 

Each of these pedals comes housed in a robust black steel enclosure, just like the old days. The Drivemaster, Bluesbreaker and Shredmaster enclosures are embossed with the Marshall logo, a single footswitch and control dials protected by a raised metal contour. 

The O.G. Marshall pedal, the Guv’Nor, has an angled enclosure with the controls facing away from the footswitch There is a simplicity to the design. 

The Bluesbreaker, by some distance the most sought after of these models on the vintage market, not least because that is what John Mayer used on Continuum, and Mayer remains one of guitar’s most influential taste makers, but also because it is a superb overdrive pedal, summoning tones that call to mind early Clapton, back in the days when you might spot him reading a comicbook in the street.

The Bluesbreaker [and we’ll go with these in all one word rather than ‘Blues Breaker’ because that’s how Marshall has listed them] has controls for Gain, Tone and Volume. 

Like all of the pedals in the series, its 1/4” inputs and outputs are mounted on the top of the unit, which should help a little when arranging them on the ‘board, and it is run off a 9V DC pedalboard power supply or a battery.

As for the Guv’Nor, its provenance dates back to 1988, with a circuit voiced for “smooth overdriven sound with a touch of compression”. It’s name? Well, that’s refers to Jim Marshall himself. The sound is unmistakably Marshall, but then what else would you expect.

There have been a few pretenders to the throne since but this is the archetypical Marshall-in-a-box, with its complement of controls very much like that of an amplifier: Gain, Bass, Middle, Treble, Level. There’s even a Y-insert send/return loop so you can add some effects after the EQ stage. You’ll have to buy that Y-insert cable separately. 

The Drivemaster appeared a little later alongside the Bluesbreaker and Shredmaster, and offered a streamlined take on The Guv’Nor. The effects loop was gone. The chassis was this new design. 

But it offered players a similarly amp-like and thorough control over shaping their sound. The drive tones had a strong JCM vibe, with low-gain crunch all the way through to gnarlier NWOBHM-friendly gain. 

The Shredmaster was a more high-gain sibling to the Drivemaster, and again, like the others in the series the circuit is the same spec – the only updates have been to pots and output sockets.

Here you have controls for Gain, Bass, Contour, Treble, and Volume, and while this pedal might suggest use with hotrodded S-style electric guitars with hockey-stick headstocks, it was arguably more famous for being included on Radiohead and My Bloody Valentine pedalboards.

Whichever way you use it, there is a little more heat on tap here. A lot more, and can be a hard-working distortion pedal if you regularly operate in high-gain scenarios.

The Marshall reissues are all made in the UK. They are out now – for real this time – and they’re priced £169 street. See Marshall for more details.

Hear the Marshall reissue pedals in action

Marshall’s reissue of its classic OOP Blues Breaker overdrive pedal is one of the worst-kept secrets of all time, and one of the greatest mysteries too, that so many players could have got their hands on one this week, before any official release has been forthcoming.

Well, we know the how they did; some retailers jumped the gun and put pre-sales links live and the people paid their money. But it’s bamboozling that there had not been a peep out of Marshall that any pedalboard reissues were in the air. The only statement the British guitar amp company made was to deny anything was happening. Is this reverse psychology at play? Well, who can say what the grand plan is. 

Among the players to get a hold of a Blues Breaker reissue was the player, builder and gear collector Luca of the Luca.Guitars Instagram account, where he said exactly a year ago today, 17 February, that Marshall was bringing the pedal back. That was the catalyst for much speculation, but he was proven correct, taking receipt of the pedal on Monday, and posted the unboxing videos. 

Here it was, a Mk I Blues Breaker ‘Vintage Reissue', complete with box, manual, a detail shot of the internal circuit, and an endorsement from Luca that it was worth the wait. “The pedal sounds amazing, and I hope everyone can get it soon!” he wrote, noting that the other Marshall guitar effects pedals – The Guv’nor, Shred Master and Drive Master – are to see a similar release. 

It sure looks like the original, which if in excellent condition, now changes hands on the vintage market for 600 to 700 quid. But how does it sound? Well, luckily British effects brand Pedal Pawn bought the pedal – via the German online retail giant Thomann, which is hardly the Dark Web – and its head honcho Chris King Robinson has shot a quick demo video that should add a bit more anticipation for the Blues Breaker’s return.

In short, it sounds like a Blues Breaker, giving a spanky Stratocaster single-coil that extra bounce and lo-gain juice. You can hear why someone like John Mayer would add it to his ‘board, why other pedal builders would clone them. And, surely, we’ll all be able to add one to our ‘boards without remortgaging the house or going to drastic measures such as trading in that Lovetone Big Cheese that's been gathering mould on your Metro 16. 

Pedal Pawn’s story of how they managed to buy one of the reissues, however, only adds to the intrigue. They were told the stock was on back order. Then it arrived. They had heard stories that Marshall were keeping something under wraps, but not sure what. Visitors touring the Marshall factory were allowed to take photographs wherever they liked, save for one section, Area 51 for stompbox nerds. The plot thickens.

If you’re curious about the long discontinued Marshall effects line and want to hear them in action, this explainer video from JHS Pedals is as good a place as any to start. 

It is also a reminder that some of the most important effects pedals of all time can be a relatively affordable mainstream line. When the Marshall pedals were first released, they were successful enough but no one knew they would be fetching silly money decades later.

And if you’ve added any vintage Marshall pedals to your watchlist, now’s the time to hang tight and see what happens in the coming weeks from Marshall. Maybe they’re holding on for NAMM on 13-15 April.

The Marshall Studio is a state-of-the-art recording and mixing facility in Keynes, and there are many reasons to book some studio time there. 

One reason might be its mixing desk, a restored Neve 8048 that the Rolling Stones used to track Some Girls. 

Another might be its collection of guitar amps, which, as you might imagine from a studio owned and managed by Marshall Amplification, comprises every model in its current lineup, a huge range of vintage pieces, and a number of super-rare amps available on demand from the Marshall Museum. You’re also allowed to bring your own.

Guitarist Magazine’s editor, Jamie Dickson, and trusted lieutenants Neville Marten and Richard Barrett were offered a guided tour of the studio in the company of studio manager Adam Beer and Blake Nevitt, a Neve restoration specialist who sourced the studio’s desk and made it seaworthy again. 

As Blake explains, the desk has enjoyed a storied history, having first been owned Studio Pathé Marconi in Paris, where the Stones used it while recording Some Girls with Chris Kimsey. But it was then was purchased by a Japanese bass player who wanted to use its EQ units, before it was found languishing in a warehouse in Burbank, California. Blake says he brought it to the country eight years ago and has been working on it ever since.

“I have just done loads of mods to it,” says Black. “I’ve speeded it up. It’s a lot faster desk than it was, so it sounds more like an 8068 in its speed. Guitars have that edge now, and drums have that speed where your overheads just sound incredible. You immediately want to put them on the kick and snare. It is making recording here so easy. You just bung up a nice pair of microphones in the right place.”

But to get a good sound you need some good amps, and to show you what’s possible when you have every Marshall available under the sun, Dickson and co grabbed a bunch of guitars and set about recording a track over eight hours that referenced key periods in nearly 60 of the brand's history. 

The first part of the track references Eric Clapton and Cream, with Marten using a Telecaster, a Fulltone OCD and Cry Baby Jr into a Marshall 1974X tube combo. The second enters into a Little Wing-style Hendrix section, with Dickson putting a Fender Custom Shop Strat into a hand-wired 1959 100-watt Plexi and out through a Marshall 1960BHW 4x12. 

“Obviously, the thing to do when you have got a studio like this, where you can turn up as loud as you like, is to dime the amp,” says Dickson. “Which is what we ended up doing.”

Dickson used a J Rockett Tranquilizer for that Phase 45/Uni-Vibe sound, but it was the pedal’s onboard preamp providing the secret sauce. 

And finally, part three brought those ‘70s Ritchie Blackmore and Thin Lizzy early hard rock sounds online via a Knaggs singlecut, a Keeley Modded Boss SD-1 Super Overdrive, a Marshall JTM45THW head and 1960BX cabinet.

Tune in for guitar harmonies, leads, some impeccable playing and sweet tones, and plenty of food for thought when it comes to your next tube amp purchase.

• Read more: 40 essential blues intros and outros to learn.

Pull out your diaries, calendars and over-sized jumbo marker pens, Marshall has announced a massive 50th anniversary show, '50 Years Of Loud... Live!', at Wembley Arena for 22 September.

UPDATE: Slayer's Kerry King, Andy Fraser of Free and Al Murray added to the bill!

Among those set to appear at the showwill be some of the biggest names in guitar land, including Joe Satriani, Paul Gilbert, Yngwie Malmsteen and Zakk Wylde, alongside a stellar line-up of Billy Duffy (The Cult), Nicko McBrain (Iron Maiden), Corey Taylor (Slipknot), Doug Aldrich and Brian Tichy (Whitesnake).

There are more names still to be announced and it's being supported by your favourite guitar mag (that's us, in case you didn't know) and this here web-behemoth, MusicRadar.

Paul Marshall, the firm's Head Of Artist Liaison, told TG:

"Artists play a massive role in the company, and are very much part of the 'Marshall Family'. Over the five decades of Marshall's history, practically every guitar hero has used Marshall, Richie Blackmore, Jeff Beck, Gary Moore, Slash, the list goes on…. This event is a celebration of the Marshall family and we are honoured so many artists want to get involved!"

Tickets for the event will go sale this Friday (9 March) at 9am from www.livenation.co.uk. Set your alarms, put an annoying reminder on your phone, or tattoo it on your forehead - just DO NOT miss this gig!