It goes without saying that the sound of rock music would not be the same if it weren’t for Jim Marshall and his outstanding work over the past 50 years.

Godspeed Mr. Marshall. You have always been a hero of mine.

Brad Jackson

SAMPLE BIOGRAPHY FROM WIKIPEDIA.COM

Marshall was born in Acton, West London, in 1923, into a family which included boxers and music hall artists. As a child he was diagnosed with tubercular bones, and spent many years in the hospital. His formal education suffered as a consequence. During WWII he was exempt from military service due to his poor health. He became a singer, and then, due to the shortage of available civilian musicians, doubled as a drummer. In his day job as electrical engineer he built a portable amplification system so his light, crooning vocals could be heard over his drums. “I was making 10 shillings (£0.50/$0.75) a night and because it was wartime, we didn’t have any petrol for cars, so I would ride my bicycle with a trailer behind it to carry my drum kit and the PA cabinets which I had made! I then left the orchestra to be with a 7 piece band and in 1942 the drummer leader was called into the forces and I took over on drums.”

In order to become more proficient on the drums and to better emulate his idol, Gene Krupa, from 1946-48 Marshall took weekly lessons from Max Abrams. In the 1950s, Marshall became part of the English music scene and started teaching other drummers, including Mitch Mitchell (The Jimi Hendrix Experience),Micky Waller (Little Richard) and Mick Underwood (Ritchie Blackmore). Marshall commented, “I used to teach about 65 pupils a week and what with playing as well, I was earning in the early 1950s somewhere in the region of £5,000 a year (eqv. 2012 to £108,000/$170,000), which was how I first saved money to go into business.”

Marshall Amplification

From 1960, Marshall owned a moderately successful music store in Hanwell, west London, selling drums and then branching out into guitars. His many guitar playing customers (including Ritchie Blackmore, Big Jim Sullivan and Pete Townshend) spoke of the need for a particular kind of amplifier, with Townshend wanting something “bigger and louder”, and Marshall saw the opportunity. He recruited an 18-year-old electronics apprentice, Dudley Craven, who was previously working for EMI and, with his help, began producing prototype amplifiers, resulting in the foundation of Marshall Amplification, in 1962. It took Marshall six attempts to create an amp he was happy with, creating what later became known as “the Marshall sound” that revolutionized music. As the company grew, Marshall expanded his products, and unveiled the Master Volume Marshall amps and the classic JCM800 split channel amps. Soon after he started production, musicians including Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page were using his equipment. The “Marshall stack”, a wall of black, vinyl-clad cabinets, one atop the other, was seen as the physical embodiment of rock’s power, majesty and excess. A Marshall features in the famous amp scene in the mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap, with guitarist Nigel Tuffnel claiming his Marshall’s volume knob went “one louder” to a unique setting of 11 on the dial. In response, Marshall set about producing models that could be cranked up to 20. 

Awards and honours

In 1984 Marshall was awarded the “Queens Award for Export”, an honour bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in recognition of Marshall Amplification’s outstanding export achievement over a three-year period. In 1985, Marshall was invited to Hollywood to add his hand prints to the “Rock and Roll Walk of Fame”. In 2003, Marshall received an OBE honour from Buckingham Palace for “services to the music industry and to charity”, and he has donated millions of pounds to worthy causes including the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore, London, where he was treated for tuberculosis as a child.

Death and legacy

Jim Marshall died on 5 April 2012 at a hospice in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. Musicians including former Guns N’ Roses guitaristSlash, Megadeth guitarist Dave Mustaine, and Mötley Crüe bass player Nikki Sixx paid tribute. Marshall has been named, along with Leo Fender, Les Paul and Seth Lover, as one of the four forefathers of rock music equipment.

Enjoy!

Enjoy!

“How did you come up with the idea to start your own amp company?”

The idea to start Jackson Ampworks come where all good ideas come from; the hope to live a better and more meaningful life. It was around 1999-2000 when I was in college, working full time at a software company doing phone support and spending my summers, and all of my disposable income learning how to fly. I was gigging a lot and my tone quest had recently started so I was buying gear like women buy shoes. I was a huge fan of Eric Johnson at the time and was chasing his tone which lead me to buy a 1968 Marshall SuperBass which I was told at the time was dead mint with no mods at all! Great so I now have this major component of what I think is the Eric Johnson sound (later found that he plays Super Leads!) only to find that when I got it home it sounded bad. Not terrible, but bad enough that I couldn’t believe that people liked old Marshall amps if this was what they sounded like! Where was the singing overdrive and warm squishy goodness that I’ve been hearing about for so long?!?!

Well being the tinkerer that I am, I opened the cabinet up and looked inside the chassis. Now bear in mind that at this point in my life I didn’t know a resistor from a capacitor much less how a flux capacitor could generate the necessary 1.21 gigawatts of power necessary to make time travel possible. Even with my limited knowledge I did notice something odd. The circuit board was not the hand wired turret board that I had been told was the key to the plexi sound. It was in fact a single layer homemade PCB. Something was up! I took the amp back to where I got it and talked to the guy who sold it to me. He was really cool about it and swore that he was only passing along the information that he’d been given about it. The dealer offered to have the amp sent to Plexi Palace in Apple Valley, CA and have them restore the amp to it’s former glory. I took him up on his offer and waited for several weeks for amp to come back to me.

Once the amp came back I played it again only to find that it was still pretty cold and lifeless sounding. I checked the bias on the tubes with a bias meter I had bought only to find that the amp was biased extremely cold and the tubes were barely working at all. I rebiased it, and like a phoenix from the ashes the amp came to life! Every rumor I had ever heard about vintage Marshalls came true in this amp. Beautiful cleans that morphed into glorious overdrive, tight percussive low-end etc. You name every buzz word and it was here! I was totally hooked on the sound of vintage tube amps and would never return to anything else.

Once I stopped playing I had to open it up and see what Plexi Palace had done. Honestly it was art. The most gorgeous wiring you have ever seen in your life. I still had no idea what I was looking at and what it did, but I knew I felt connected to it. For the weeks, months and years following I started studying everything I could find on old Marshalls and what made them so great. I read every book I could get my hands on and tore apart schematics studying every component until I found exactly what every each part did either for performance or tone. I was insatiable and at long last decided I was going to build am amp!

After researching for a while I decided that a JMP50 would be my first project so I found sources for the parts off of the Plexi Palace Forum as well as the Hoffman Amps Forum etc. I finally got the kit assembled and of course it didn’t work until I worked through my own mistakes but once it did work it was glorious. Like a miniature version of the 100W SuperBass that I had since sold. I was able to gig with the amp a little and that was an awesome experience for me. To be able to make music with something that I had built with my own hands brought the experience full circle for me. Music. Tone. Building. My three loves had all met in one place and in that place I found my career.

I spent more time with that 50W Plexi modding it and learning as I went. I eventually sold it to finance another build; a JTM45 which I later sold to finance yet another build. This process went on for months as I would buy, build and sell all the while learning how to tune a circuit until the desired outcome was achieved.

Fast forward to late 2001 early 2002 when the dot com bubble finally broke and I found myself unemployed from my full time job and making a living playing guitar. It was a very lean time for me and I made a decision for myself that I would never again allow someone’s business or their decisions to dictate my life and finances. I was going to start my own business and if I succeeded or failed, the burden would rest with me. I can deal with that and having lived with that decision for years I can say it’s the only way I’m ever going to live.

So on January 1, 2003, Jackson Ampworks formally started with the objective of creating amps of uncompromising quality that place priority on tone, feel and reliability. I spent a couple of years thereafter developing circuits all the while making a living playing guitar and doing odd jobs. We released the business at the Arlington Guitar Show in 2005 with the Britain, Atlantic and Union Jack. These amps in their own right were glorious. Completely overbuilt with the most expensive components I could find. Each one weighed 47lbs thanks to the huge transformers and stainless steel chassis. They were big, heavy and unwieldy but they sounded incredible.

After the release at the show, orders started to trickle in and people slowly started to become aware of a small boutique amp shop in North Texas that was putting out high end amps. In fact the first Britain ever sold was to an A-list LA Session player named Michael Thompson. Our recognition was slowly growing but not to the point of being able to sustain myself on it so in 2006 I took a job as a corporate pilot flying a Cessna Citation Encore jet with my dad. We flew and managed that airplane for 5 years and it was an awesome season of my life. I learned a lot and got to see this entire country several times over, not to mention building memories with my dad that I know I’ll cherish long after he’s gone one day.

During this time I was still building the amps when orders came in but it was still a hobby for me and I was quickly losing my fascination for flying and wanted to pursue Jackson Ampworks full time. In 2008 I had a great conversation with a good friend of mine, Aaron Brown from Brilliant Recording. The conversation went something like this. Aaron: “Your amps sound killer but they are too big, too heavy and too expensive. If you make a smaller amp that is more affordable and sounds killer, your business will explode.” Aaron was right. I spent the next few months redesigning everything and making the amps more space efficient, lowering the costs and adding some of the features that users had been requesting for years. The culmination of this was the Britain 2.0 which we released in late 2009.

Version 2.0 of the Britain was 17lbs lighter, 8″ more narrow, 3 times as powerful, included a second channel, FX Loop, boost mode, switchable power and cost $1000 less. Aaron was spot on. Once we made these mods the amp took off like wildfire and to date we’ve never been able to keep up with orders. I was very fortunate during this time to have gotten in touch with Robbie McIntosh from John Mayer’s touring band and after we chatted a bit he agreed to try a Britain 2.0 in Manhattan as John was starting rehearsals for the Battle Studies world tour. Needless to say Robbie loved the amp and became our first artist endorsement. This was when Jackson Ampworks really came into its own and entered the global market. Robbie’s support, and the exposure afforded us by the world tour had guitarists all over the world asking, “What’s the tiny little amp that Robbie is using?!?!” That question is one of the many reasons why I am sitting here answering your questions; and feel very privileged to be doing so.

As luck would have it, in 2011 after working for a local family as part of their flight crew for 5 years my dad and I found that we were being let go as the company was declaring bankruptcy. Remember that promise I made to myself about not letting other people’s company or decisions effect my life or finances? Well I’m glad I made it. You see, during the time that I was working as a corporate pilot I was burning the midnight oil designing circuits and studying as much as I could. I would lock myself in a hotel room while I was out of town and use that time to do design work in CAD or make connections with people when I was in other cities. As it turned out this was the best thing I could have been doing because as the flying job was winding down, Jackson Ampworks was winding up so when I lost that job I didn’t even blink; I just changed directions when I pulled out of my driveway in the morning. Instead of driving to Love Field in Dallas, TX, I drove to my shop in Haltom City, TX.

Since that time, Jackson Ampworks has been growing steadily and I’m very happy to say that since we relaunched the company in 2009 with the introduction of the Britain 2.0, we have always had more orders than we could fill, and even during one of the worst recessions in US history we are still growing and expanding. At present date we are very proud to have 14 US Dealers and 16 International Dealers in 13 countries with more being added all the time.

So that is the story of how Jackson Ampworks became Jackson Ampworks. It’s been really good for me to sit down and think through all that we have been through to get to this point. It’s very humbling and I feel incredibly grateful to my family and friends for their support along the way, and I can only thank God that I GET to do this job for a living. Sure there are good days and no-so-good days, but any day that you get to do something that is meaningful, something you love and make a living doing it, that is a good day. And I have a lot of good days.

Here’s to more good days ahead!

Warmest regards,

Brad Jackson

This is Question #1. The remaining questions will be featured in further blog posts.

I’m an aspiring amp builder.  I’m going to start my first build in March. What advise can you give me give as my goal is to become a competitor of yours?

I like this question and I appreciate the honesty of it.

First off, if you are going to build an amp, I would learn the rules first. By that I mean learn what can and will kill you. Electricity can be a dangerous mistress; take her for granted and she will bite you. I’ve been bit really bad before and it was only luck that kept it from being worse than just a shock and a few high volume expletives. That being said, I strongly recommend that you get the following books:

Tube Amp Talk for the Guitarist and Tech – Gerald Weber

This is a great book with tons of good information that is presented in an easily digestible format.

Tube Guitar Amplifier Essentials – Gerald

Get this one first and read it cover to cover. After you’ve read it, read it again. This book takes years of lessons I had to learn the hard way and again presents them in an easy to understand way. I could not recommend this book more.

The Ultimate Tone Volume 3 – Kevin O’Connor

All of Kevin O’Connors books are incredible and present a wealth of information. These are the kinds of books you’ll read over and over and every time you’ll pick up another tidbit of information that you can use later. I think at this time Kevin has 6 Books in ‘The Ultimate Tone’ series and they are all worth getting but start with Volume 3. It’s the most relevant to you now.

For your first amp, I would strongly recommend that you build a kit amp. There are a lot of companies out there that sell complete kits with all the parts and instructions etc for building your first amp. Once you get a feel for what goes into an amp, you might try sourcing the parts for your second amp yourself as that is a huge part of the process as well.

Some of the more popular kit companies are:

CeriaTone, Tube Depot and MojoTone

All this being said, you need to build the following amps. Fender 5E3 Deluxe, Fender Deluxe Reverb, Marshall Plexi, Marshall JTM45 (very similar to the Plexi), Vox AC15, Vox AC30. Each of these amps is considered an iconic sound and you need to be familiar with each of these at least for the simple reason of being able to relate to the tone each produces. Each one will show you something different and you need to stock your bag of tricks with all the tricks that make these amps sound good. In truth, 95% of all guitar amps are either clones of or variations on these amps. Once you build these I STRONGLY recommend that you build a Trainwreck Express clone. This is one of those amps designs that is so on the edge of stability that it will be a great exercise in layout, component selected and placement. This is one of the designs that will make a man out of you so to speak. After the Trainwreck, try building a Dumble circuit. Again it’s a very iconic sound and should be in your arsenal of tones. There some really cool tricks to be learned here too.

Once you get your head around these designs and get working/gig-able amps made from then, then you can start thinking about cooking up your own recipe based on the ingredients you have collected.

Okay so now you have a pretty good idea of how guitar amps work and you want to carry on and make your own contribution to the industry. My first piece of advise. Don’t start a business that simply clones the amps you cut your teeth on. There are countless guys building 50W Plexi clones with each one saying, “this is the best sounding, most vintage correct amp ever made.” It’s been done so much that it doesn’t matter anymore. If you want to contribute to the industry, then by all means contribute to it and bring something fresh to the table. Companies like Divided by 13, 65Amps, Morgan and Jackson Ampworks have done well because each of them brings something unique to the table. It could be killer tone with a great look and vibe or something totally fresh sonically. Whichever way you go, fight tooth and nail to come up with something that is unique and ultimately gives the guitarist a better user experience. Honestly the word experience is the perfect word for it. You need to create an EXPERIENCE for the player. Whether its the way the amp sits in the mix or the way the amp makes your pant legs move, create an experience for the player that he/she can’t stop talking about and you’ll be well on your way to building a successful company.

That’s my 2 cents on the design side of the business. For the business side of it, since I studied aeronautics in college and not business, I had to come by that stuff the hard way and as such would strongly recommend the following books.

Rework – Jason Fried

I love this book because it reinforces how to run and manage a small and nimble business. This book blows apart a lot of the ideas we have been fed for years about how a business should conduct itself. It’s very guerrilla and perfect for small businesses.

Guitar Lessons – Bob Taylor (yes THAT Taylor!)

I read this book in two sittings because I couldn’t put it down. As I was reading it, it was like Bob Taylor knew the specific problems I was facing and was giving me the exact answers I needed. Building guitars and building amps are not that different. You need good designs, good parts and good people to put them together. This book is perfect for anyone involved in manufacturing especially in the Music Industry.

EntreLeadership – Dave Ramsey

Great book on starting a business and running it. You can tell this information was learned the hard way. Read it and absorb as much as you can. It will likely save your business or at the very least save you money.

That’s the best advise I can give at this point in my career. It’s certainly advise I wish I had been given early on. Best of luck to you as you start your venture and please do stay in touch if you need any help or council.

I’m pulling for you, we’re all in this together!

Brad Jackson

Jackson Ampworks
brad@jacksonampworks.com

http://www.jacksonampworks.com
1-877-4-AMPWORKS

After months of planning and preparation we are finally heading to NAMM 2012. We received word earlier today that our crate has made it to Anaheim and is sitting in our spot ready to be set up!

We cannot wait to unveil our new products so you all can see what we’ve been working on the past few months. This weekend at NAMM we will be showcasing the new and improved Britain 4.0 and Atlantic 4.0 as well as our two brand new models: the NewCastle and the Behemoth bass amp.

Our booth is number 2393 in Hall D (right next to IN-N-OUT!), so be sure to stop by and check out all of our awesome new products!

We’ll be posting on this blog throughout the week to keep you updated on events as they unfold at the Jackson Ampworks booth!

See you guys this weekend!

Brad Jackson from Jackson Ampworks discusses the history and future of Jackson Ampworks.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

In our first Video of the Week we are doing a verbal run down of the Atlantic 3.0 and it’s features. Hope you enjoy!

Check back with us every Friday for our latest in the Video of the Week series where we will bring bringing you videos about Jackson Ampworks products, ideas, tips or anything related to getting you the best tone you’ve ever had!