Marshall Vintage Modern 2266C: Owen O'Malley Teaches You How To Make Rock Faces
Put on your rock faces for the Marshall Vintage Modern 2266C. Owen warms up the tubes on this single channel amp, but don't let the amount of technical channels fool you, you've still got footswitchable control over Dynamic Range and Reverb, which allows you to go from a gentle crunch to a neck-breaking distortion. Plus, this amp is very responsive to the dynamics in your play, so you can go from clean to crunchy at the flick of a wrist without fooling with any knobs.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
OWEN O'MALLEY: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I’m Owen O'Malley. We are taking a look at the Marshall Vintage Modern 2266C. The 2266C is the combo version of the Vintage Modern line. The line also includes a 50-watt and 100-watt head by itself. The combo is a 2112 combo. The combo version has four 12AX7s in the preamp and two KT66 power tubes in the power section.
The Vintage Modern is technically a one-channel amp. There is a switchable dynamic range between high and low but it’s not the same difference as a two-channel amp where you get one channel that’s really super clean and one channel that’s really super distorted or super saturated. This amp was really sort of designed more to respond to the changes in your guitar’s volume knob. So, let’s experiment with some tones in this thing.
Just a quick look at the front panel here, we have two preamp volumes here. We’ve got a body and detail. The body basically saturates the low end of your tone, the low to the low mids of your tone whereas the detail takes care of everything from sort of the mids and the high mids and up, so that’s a cool little tone shaping feature right there. Then there’s this mid-boost. This is the dynamic range switch which has a corresponding function on the included two-button footswitch. There’s our three-band EQ, treble, mid, bass, presence control, master volume, and then a nice little spring reverb here. So, a very simple amp.
Let’s bring the dynamic range down to low, and we’ll just play with the volume dimed on this guitar.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
You can see we’ve got our body and detail just about at 12 o’clock. Detail is a little bit higher. Body’s right about at 12.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
This is supposed to emulate a sort of more of a vintagey gain structure. So, if we really pump the body and the detail up a little bit more, and again the volume is all the way up on the guitar.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
You know, not a super metally, rocky sounding amp, you know, really that sort of like late ‘60s/early ‘70s distorted sound. Now, if we everything in the same and boost the dynamic range up to the high dynamic...
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
...very different sounding amp. Back down to the low dynamic range here, let’s just roll back the volume.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
It responds really immediately to picking dynamics too, so if I play really just gently here...
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
...that’s a pretty clean tone that you’re dealing with. But if I...
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
...jam on it, it distorts really sort of naturally and musically.
Let’s just take a listen to how the preamp volumes change the sound. If we take the detail out and put the body up...
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
...we get a lot of bass. We take the body back down and turn the detail up...,
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
...a more trebly sounding preamp section. Let’s keep both of them up a little bit here. We’ve got our bass up a little bit. Let’s just play with the presence knob here.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
Really, if you’ve played through any Marshall tube head, you know what the presence knob does and this is basically the same. Just real quick, let’s switch the reverb on.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
Nice subtle sounding reverb. We’re down at about 10 o’clock here. Let’s bring it up to right at about 3.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
Nice long tail on that reverb. Let’s switch back over to the high dynamic range. Turn the reverb off and listen to this mid boost. Now, here’s my one complaint about this amp. This mid boost button right here really changes the sound quite a bit, and it’s not included on the footswitch as a footswitchable function. So, here’s our saturated tone with the dynamic range up.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
Now, we engaged the mid boost.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
Sort of back off again.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MARSHALL VINTAGE MODERN 2266C]
The mid boost really gives it a ton of lower mid oomph, and it’s just -- I mean it sounds great. It would be a nice little thing to be able to, you know, switch on the fly in the middle of the performance, but I mean all in all it’s a pretty awesome sounding 50-watt combo from Marshall, the Vintage Modern 2266, also available in a 50-watt and 100-watt head. You've been watching Gearwire.Com. I’m Owen O'Malley. See you later.
PLEASE!
I've just had a wander through this site and all of the amp demos, though very informative, sound absolutely terrible. I think it's great that there's a site that can offer people demos of new gear coming out, especially if they don't have immediate access to any shops to try stuff out in. The problem is that if I hadn't already played through this amp and watched this clip to make a decision, I would've totally written the amp off.
I have a smokey amp that sounds warmer than this clip and that is just terrible. Please, for the sake of everyone using this site to make a judgement on future purchases, either switch to audio demos or at least crank the amp up so people get a true idea of its capability!
I know I sound like a dick here, but it's frustrating that such a good resource should be marred by lacking sound quality in otherwise excellent demos!
Cheers,
C
44100 khz
Chris,
Just to keep you informed, we do encode all of our audio at 16bit 44k in the final web quicktime and wmv files. I believe this demo was either run through a sound devices pre-mixer or bounced to a sound devices recorder (although I can't be 100% sure). In this video, the amp is being recorded with a shure sm-57.
Thanks for the feedback!
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