[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

OWEN O'MALLEY: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I’m Owen O'Malley, and this is the Marshall MB4210. It is a bass amp from Marshall. T’s a 210 combo plus tweeter, and it puts out 300 watts in the configuration that it’s in right now, but if you add an extension speaker and bring it down to a 2-ohm load that you’re driving, this can handle down to 2 ohms, it then puts out 450 watts. So, it’s a pretty loud amp, definitely gig worthy.

It’s a two-channel amp and it is sort of hybrid design. There is a 12AX7 or ECC -- Right? Am I saying this right? -- ECC83 preamp tube, which is what they call it in the U.K., and it’s a solid state power section. Two channels, there’s one called modern and one called classic, and there’s actually a blend control over here too, so you can blend the two channels together. There is a two-function footswitch that comes with the amp for channel switching, and you can turn or off the blend control which basically overrides whatever channel you’re on. So, it’s sort of like a three channel amp really in that way. Let’s take a closer look at the modern channel which is it sounds a little bit more like sort of an SWR is a good sort of tonal touchstone. Touchstone?

So, first off, all the way on the left here, we’ve got our input and our impedance selector for either active or passive pickups. You got a volume control here. You can’t really get this amp to distort in the modern channel. That’s really what the classic channel is for but we’ll get into that. The modern channel just has bass, mid and treble with sweepable mid frequencies. Let’s just sweep those frequencies. Actually if we can, let’s cut out, you can cut out quite a bit of mid like you can take out 15 dB according to the dial.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

You can boost it obviously too.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

Quite a few different sounds just on that channel alone. That’s even without dealing with the treble. On this channel we’ve got a compressor that you can engage. This is one of the few things that I don’t like about this amp. It’s a very noisy compressor.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

It has a very sort of audible click when it engages.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

Especially on that lower -- those lower frequencies when you’re playing with a pick, it gets very clicky.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

Now I’m just playing with fingers and it’s still clicky. So anyway, not a great compressor on this thing. You’ll probably want to get yourself a front-end compressor pedal. That’s basically the modern channel though. Let’s switch over the classic channel now. So, here’s where we get some of our more distortion sounds here. Let’s switch over with our footswitch.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

It’s already overdriving. We’ve got our gain up. Well, it’s basically dimed right now. We got our volume down. We’ve got -- You can see a bass EQ right here and then there’s a voice shift, a sort of Ampeg style voice shift and then a voice control. Let’s bring it to one.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

And now here’s two.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

And now here’s three.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

So basically just accentuates the different parts of the top end, sort of different pre-shaped controls. We got our treble control over here. Now let’s turn on the boost and hear the distortion sounds on this guy. The boost is not footswitchable by the way.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

Just turn down the volume which we won’t clip.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

Put the volume back up.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

So, not a great distortion sound. It definitely gets -- it retains the low end and it gets very loud, so those are good things. It’s just, you know, probably not for everyone. Let’s move on from here.

So, here’s our blend control right here. Really simple, you’re just blending between the two channels. You turn on blend control with your footswitch, and now [PLAYS A NOTE] let’s turn it all the way. Here’s our modern channel sound.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

Here’s our classic channel sound

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

And here’s right in the middle.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

So, it’s especially nice if you want to get a boost sound on here but don’t want to lose all the fundamental.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH THE MARSHALL MB4210]

You can use your blend instead of your channel switch. Let’s take a look just real quick at the outputs on the back. On the back here, we’ve got our two combo Neutrik Speakon and 1/4” out, speaker outs, one of which is going to the internal speakers and then one which you can hook up to the cabinet of your choosing, and then over here on the other side we’ve got our footswitch out. We’ve got our direct out which is pre or post EQ switchable, or rather post gain stage and all that stuff, and then a mono effects loop, which is kind of nice.

So, that was the Marshall MB4210, a lot of different tones on this amp, a lot of different channel switching options, pretty versatile tone controls. The sort of downside of that is you do have to work a little bit to find the tone that you like, or at least I did, but it’s probably in there. So there you go, the Marshall MB4210. You've been watching Gearwire.Com and I am Owen O'Malley. True.