Marshall 8100 amp settings for big crushing tone...?

[junjuniam]

Need some advice on dialing in a great heavy tone with this amp. Any advice? Looking for a big Death, Rob Zombie, Prong etc kind of tone. Just big and crushing metal tone. For instance, what gain setting would be recommended for high gain on OD2? Etc...

if you used a boost with this amp, which one and why?

Any advice would rock!

[WRGKMC]

Do you really think its just a matter of setting knobs and bingo, you magically sound like some artists you like? Humm.....

 

Truth is its not that simple. Even if you had the amp set with exactly the same settings, the chance of sounding like anyone else truly is a million to one.

 

If that thought process worked, everyone who owned a Marshall, Fuzz Face and Strat would sound like Jimmi Hendrix. And those who do own that gear and have attempted to get those tones know just how difficult it is to capture another artists artwork, which is really what its all about. You can hand the same set of paint, brushes and Canvas to two different people and one can produce finger painting of a 3 year old and the other Leonardo da Vinci quality portrait. Same thing goes for music.

 

Now, Having the same mix of paint colors may allow that beginner to achieve many of the half tones the da Vinci used, "if that was his weakness" However that does absolutely nothing to guide his brush strokes which really is the key item. In music, I'd say 95% of copying someone else's tone is about the players skill, not the gear he uses. But lest say you have that 95% down pat. You still have to have a guitar that matches the artists you're copying. You'd also have to have the same stomp boxes tweaked the same way. The mics used to record that artist, the mixing and mastering techniques for those albums need to be the same. Everything down the entire chain needs to match to even begin to sound the same.

 

Some musicians do a very good job at copying others. They don't even need the same gear to achieve it in many cases. One thing they all do is have trained ears in dialing up those tones. I know very few guitarists who rely on preset settings built by others to give them their tones. Most of those use programmable modeling amps or effects units. Even then they have to tweak those settings to their guitar pickups and pick attack to make them sound realistic.

 

There are so many pickup types now that change tone and gain settings, advising you on what preset might sound like a particular artist is useless. Add to that the rest of the guitars wood, playing style, room acoustics cabinet type, the best you may achieve is landing some place in the ball park and that's usually far out in left field. You want to stand on the pitchers mound, you have to navigate yourself to that position using your own ears and developing the skill to dial up those tones and take mastery over the amp, and not the amp take mastery over you.

 

In some Marshall Manuals they often give you some ball park settings based on single coil and Humbucker pickups. Those can be used to get you close to several styles. It should have settings for your basic genre of country, Jazz Classic Rock and Metal. Just dial up the Metal settings and tweak it from there. Here's a manual for the MG series Valve State manual that has several suggestions.

http://www.marshallamps.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/mg10cf-mg15cfr-hbk2.pdf

 

I looked at the settings and compared them to what I use with my Valvastate 100 head and they are pretty useless because I use a Vintage 1960 slant cab with Celestion 75 speakers which aren't the same as the stock cab so those settings are all going to be shifted.

 

 

The easiest way to set up is to just set everything at 12:00 and take it from there. Chances are you will eventually find the settings which best suit your ears and your skills as a player. Marshall settings are mild in comparison to most amps and even if you have a knob set way off it doesn't make a huge difference in tone changes.

 

Working with other musicians helps allot too. Playing solo is very different from playing in a band where you carve out your own space in the mix to sound good. When you play solo, you often dial up tones that sound much broader and driven to make up for the other players who aren't there. Chances are you dial up allot of bass to make up for the bass player that isn't there and dial up treble where a snare and cymbals should be. When you play in a band with those settings, you'd piss those players off because you'd mask their tones.

 

Each player in a band has his own real estate within the frequency spectrum. Everyone wants to be heard and sound good. The guitar is only one midrange instrument in that mix. His range is between 200~5Khz in most situations and he carves out his tones within a vary narrow range usually between 1K and 4Khz. If you play other peoples music, all musicians have to target their own piece of real estate within the sound spectrum. If say the bass player isn't using the same gear, same instrument and everything I mentioned above, you would need to shift your own tones to compensate for his so they overlap properly and not leave odd gaps or masking.

 

In other words, to sound like another band requires a team effort and many sets of skilled ears familiar with the music and even then they all have to match the playing skills of those artists. But that's exactly how you do get good at it. Its all trial and error. Best I can suggest is play back that music and play along to it with your amp. When you have the tones dialed up just right, with an unbiased ear that tends to make your guitar sound better, you should match the album exactly to the point where its difficult to hear a difference between you playing and the guitar on the album. Make your guitar sound like an echo to the album and then it comes down to playing skill trying to keep up to that artist. Chances are you will be using a tone very close to that artists.

 

Problem is once you mic that amp and record it, you then have to tweak that amp to compensate for the mics coloration, so the tones you may be hearing without using headphones, may sound totally different then what you get as a final result on that mixed recording.

 

As you can see, its all very complex. Best you can do is get what "you" think sound close then just go with it. If your notes begin to loose tonal definition, back off on the gain and get some clean tone back. The more drive you have the smaller you sound. The less the bigger. Its just the opposite of what your gut wants to do, but learn to use it all well.

[80z]

I don't know about the others but from my brief time hearing Death, it sounded pretty obvious that they were double tracking the guitars.

 

Amps rarely sound the same live and recorded. Some of the definitive "huge" tones in the '80s were brittle solid states, layered to desired thickness (Rockmans) and the result was probably better than any "real" amp at any price could sound live. So it's all the best tool for the mix.