Captures of our Marshall Super Lead 1968

Watch capture demos and our intro to the captures of our 1968 Marshall JMP-100 Super Lead 12 000 series amplifier here:

CAPTURE DEMO AND PLAYTHROUGH

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Specifically the 12 000 series 1968 Marshall Super Lead is considered by many to be the epitome of the Marshall Super Lead variants. And besides that it is an amp that is surprisngly hard to get a hold of, as they are in rather small numbers and extremely desirable due to the Eddie Van Halen connection.

At this stage the preamp had received the full lead spec treatment with a large 5000pF bright cap, split cathode setup, both .68uF cathode bypass caps for V1b and V2a. Meanwhile the filtering is lower than on the later style 69 Super Leads and metal panel amps.

This results in a very unique spec in the Marshall history that only these amps had. It has a more fluid or spongy feel than the later Super Lead amps while it has more gain than it’s predecessors and an agression that none of the earlier amps had. The lower filtering makes that agression feel different than on later amps – it is smoother and more compressed, with a more fluid feel.

Obviously the one big name that is closely connected to this amp is Eddie Van Halen. Many other big acts played 68 Super Leads (Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Paul Kossoff), but it is not well documented, who might have had a 12 000 series specifically.

Our specific unit that we made captures of for this release is about 30 units away from Eddie Van Halen’s 12301. It is a specimen that was made for the swedish market, which is where we picked it up. Plugging it in made it instantly clear that this amp is a ruler and hence it got the name Ragnar – the infamous viking king.

It easily delivers those fluid, gainy tones with the abundance of mids and bite that is hard to match. Using the second channel it is also capable of delivering tones reminescent of ZZ Top’s first album, which seems to have been recorded with a similar spec’d amp, if not a 12 000, which has not been documented.

The second channel in combination with the right settings also delivers beautiful, warm cleans and edge of breakup tones that are not attainable on the channel the most users go for. As opposed to channel jumping it does not result in a mix of a tone that is too bright and a tone that is too dull, but in a very organic tone that is totally underutilised in these amps.

A truly iconic amp tone from the heyday of classic rock that is way more versatile than people give it credit for. Beautiful Marshall cleans up to singing leads – it’s all here.

The set features 25 full captures of the amp (cab baked into the capture). The amp was recorded through a 1968 Marshall 1982B 4X12 with Celestion G12H30 55Hz Pulsonic coned speakers, which are the most iconic 60’s Marshall speaker Used by Hendrix, Pag and countless others. The mics used were 2x Royer R121, a Beyerdynamic M160 and a Neumann U87. Please refer to the full list of included captures in the product photo section.

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