This is a Marshall MA Series Head

I’ve probably beaten this horse to death, but today I figured I’d give one more shot at saving kids all over the world from being convinced that a “budget” Marshall amp isn’t any good. If you’re here because you searched this amp, you probably know the reputation. It’s fizzy, doesn’t have enough gain, sounds thin, no balls, blah blah blah. You’ve probably also read that from someone who either doesn’t own the amp, spent a few minutes hearing someone else play one through a video on YouTube, or heard someone dime everything but the volume at guitar center and noodle on it.

I just don’t find any of those scenarios fair to this amp. Today I decided to put my money where my mouth was so to speak and make something for people to listen to that can judge the amp on fair ground.

The Test

First, this is not a song, if you look at the image below you will see that I literally have just over an hour invested in this. I opened up a jam drum track in Superior Drummer, set cycle record on 8-bars at a time, and made up a rhythm track as I went. I double tracked each 8-bars, and then went to the next. When that was finished I laid a bass track under all of it and then hit record for the whole length to noodle some leads. You are reading that right, 1 hour and 10 minutes from playing the first note to exporting the MP3 from Logic.

Second, the guitar tracks. I had two pedals on this amp. The first is a Maxon OD808 set up as a boost going into the amp.

The second was a BOSS Delay in the MA100h loop to give me a little delay when I recorded the lead on top.
That’s really it. I had the amp set up as pictured:

With all of that out of the way, the other details are as follows:

• Ibanez RG1527 Prestige guitar with Dimarzio Crunchlab in bridge for Rhythm sounds
• Ibanez RG1527 Prestige guitar with Dimarzio Liquifire in the neck for Lead sounds
• Carvin Legacy 4×12 Cabinet with Vintage 30s.
• Sennheiser e906 on axis just to the left of the center of the speaker
• Focusrite ISA One Preamp into Tascam DM3200 to Logic via FireWire card

A couple interesting notes about mic placement. Usually I would not have used this mic, I’d have used an SM57 because the e906 is a big bright for really high gain stuff for my tastes. I also would have put something looping through a DI box into the head and went out into the live room with some headphones and found the true “sweet” spot for the cabinet. My SM57′s were occupied on drums and a couple other guitar cabinets that I couldn’t really risk moving just now so I used the e906. As I was doing this to quickly prove a point, I placed the mic about where I figured it should go and just started recording without trying to really optimize it. I figure that’s also a plus for this test because you can really help an amp with perfect mic placement, just like you can wreck it with bad placement/phase issues.

Finally, I used absolutely NO processing on the guitar tracks in Logic. I doubled the Rhythm guitar part, assigned the left and right to a buss, and that’s it. I didn’t compress or EQ any of the guitar tracks at all. I added a touch of compression, eq and distortion to the bass track to solidify the mix and did a quick reverb and psuedo master on the master buss.

I’d say that makes for a pretty fair test to show what the MA100h head sounds like. If you would like to disagree or claim it sounds like garbage, feel more than welcome to in the comments. The reality is in a real world I would EQ the guitars to tailor the mix, high and low cut them to get them to sit in the right places, possibly compress them at tad, etc. The sound I am betting I’ll get comments about for “fizzy” or “bright” is the same 6khz+ that I would have low pass filtered out of my Mesa Mark V or Peavey 6506+. Given that none of this was done, and that I’ve heard some horrendous recordings with $3,000 heads, I’d say this isn’t a bad little head for the money.