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Marshall's great sleeper amp - the Artist 3203/4203
Possibly the best Marshall
deal out there? The Marshall Artist 3203
(head) and 3204 (1x12 Combo). Great Marshall
crunch, superb Fenderish cleans, and best of all, they can usually carry a very
reasonable price tag.
Photo courtasy of Elderly Instruments
If you’re like me, you love the amazing crunchy power that only a full Marshall stack can
deliver, but how often do most of us wind up on a stage where we can crank a
JTM 45 through a full stack? In my case,
nearly never! That, my friends, is why
I’m so crazy about the 3203; read on and I’ll make my case for this little
sleeper amp.
The Artist 3203, and it’s combo cousin the 4203, were made in the early
eighties. Like Leo Fender’s Music Man
amps of that time, they are a hybrid amp with a power section that consists of
a pair of EL-34’s with a 12AX7 phase inverter and solid-state
rectification. The pre section is all
solid-state, but I gotta tell ya, it sounds friggin awesome. The amp is rated at 30 watts RMS, which makes
it perfect for club gigs, plus the 34’s are running so cool that they last
forever in this amp.
The boost channel has only controls for tone, gain, and volume, but that’s
all it needs. This channel produces pure
Marshall crunch
in spades, and what’s really amazing is that it can do it at any volume. This is the holy grail of Marshall crunch tone; sounds like a full
stack on the bleeding-edge, yet at a volume that is perfect for a club gig, or
for recording!
The clean channel is equally surprising.
In addition to a gain control, it sports a full bass-mid-treble tone
stack. I’m a died-in-the-wool Fender amp
guy, and I can honestly say that this channel can deliver some very nice
Fenderish clean tones. Bring this amp to
your next gig and you will have a single amp that does Yankee clean and British
crunch with aplomb.
The amp is rounded-out with master controls for volume and Reverb, which feeds
an actual long-spring Accutronics tank. There is also an efx loop, a
line-out, and multiple output impedance taps come standard; all in all, a well equipped
little amp!
I usually run my 3203 through a Marshall
1965B 4-10 cabinet. I’ve also tried it
out in my Burriss 1-12 cab, and I really love it with the Vet 30 in closed-back
mode, although open-back is also very nice.
The 4203 1x12 combos came with Celestion G12’s stock, which don’t sound
too awful, but I’d say that if you picked one up and put a Vet 30 or Retro 30in it, you would have one very cool little Marshall combo for clubbing!
Let me know if you want me to post some sound-clip vids... otherwise there
are already plenty of clips on youtube, check
them out!
Hi everybody! I decided I needed to post this update to my earlier
blog about wiring a four-speaker cabinet. Sometimes a man has got to
admit when he's wrong - and this is one of those times. An extended member of
the WGS family has done a fantastic job of dissecting the pros and cons of the
two methods of wiring a 4-speaker cabinet ... and I want to share it with
you! In a few days I’ll be bringing you the
best Marshall sleeper amp of all time - this is the amazing deal you all want! Until then, read on for some valuable, and extremely well
thought-out info on setting up a 4-12 cabinet.
Okay gang, I’ve been keeping my wandering little artsy-fartsy brain in check
and doing a pretty good job of keeping this blog on the topic of speakers,
tone, guitars, amps, and that kind of stuff.
But it is Thanksgiving this week after all, and Dave just posted a blog
on Hash brown Casserole ... so I figure I deserve a little poetic license to blog
about whatever in the heck I feel like this time around. I feel like talking about Thanksgiving. Let’s go!
You may not be aware that a very dear member of the WGS team is our
production manager Dean. He's a great guy and we wanted to introduce
the blog readers to him. Dean has decades of experience cooking up
great speakers like all the WGS crew. As it turns out, he also has a
few tricks up his sleeve in the kitchen! Last year about this time I
convinced him to share his hash brown casserole recipe with all the WGS
staff. Everyone went home and made some for their family's Thanksgiving feast. This year I twisted his arm even harder and convinced him to share this awesome dish with our blog readers. If you end up trying it, drop him a line, Dean@wgs4.com , and let him know how great it turned out. This is how you get great tone through osmosis! ;-) Here is the recipe.
Hi fellow tone seekers!
This week I received an email from a WGS devote who was putting together
a cabinet with a 12" and a 10" driver; he wanted my input as to which 12 to pair up with the G10C he planned to use in the cab. That question really got me to
thinking! Now, we often respond to questions about
loading up 2x12, 4x12, 2x10, and 4x10 cabinets and combos, but I
hadn’t thought about a more unusual pairing like this in a long time. In the golden amp days of the 1950’s and 60’s
there were a number of 10/12 combos made, and even a few 10/15 models. I owned a Gibson GA30RV for a
little while, which is probably one of the more well known of the 10/12 amps
out there. As I remember, the amp was
very sweet sounding, but I think the actual drivers were Chinese cheapos; too
bad I didn’t know about WGS back then, I might still own that amp today! I’d like to share my e-conversation
concerning the 10/12 match up - sound good?
Okay then, read on!
Hi amp lovers everywhere!
This week I want to start a discussion about "sleeper amps". This is the crusp of what WGS is all
about. We are folks who really love to
take the road less traveled, and we are often rewarded with aural nirvana not known
to the masses. We’re not going to waste
our time saying all the same old stuff about all the same old amps - no way,
baby! We’re talking about
diamond-in-the-rough amps that can really deliver some serious tone, yet have
largely managed to fly under the tone radar up to this point. I hope this will become somewhat of a regular
feature on this blog, and I welcome your suggestions on other sleeper amps. Okay, ya ready for this weeks sleeper amp? Drum roll, please ... Presenting the Randall
RG80ES. Okay, let’s dive in.
So, this week I received an email from Scott, a WGS
aficionado who was inquiring as to how he should wire his Marshall-style 4-12
cabinet. To be honest, I hadn’t given
that one any thought in a couple of decades, and it made me think. In essence, there are two ways to wire up a 4
speaker cabinet that both wind up with the cabinet having the same impedance as
any one of the individual drivers, or in other words, a cabinet with four 8-ohm
speakers that ends up with a total cabinet impedance of 8-ohms.
The two main methods of arriving at this means are as
follows:
Okay, so let’s talk about the difference between the two.
Hey ya all! This week
I’m doing something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, audition the G8C in myFender
Champ Amp. I’ve been excited
about this speaker ever since I found out that WGS was making a speaker
specifically for the Champ. I tell ya
what, I won’t waste any of your time, lets get right down to the video! I hope you all appreciate that I set up some
good mics for this little shoot-out.
Panned to one side is an AKG 414 as a distant mic and on the other side
is an Audix D1 close up to the grill. Read on for the video shoot-out!
For more than a few weeks now, I’ve kept this blog pretty
much on the topic of speakers and guitar tone.
I warned ya all that every now and then I’d be off on a wild tangent, and
I think I’m overdue. Let’s talk about
American vs. World manufacturing, and just so as we don’t stray too terribly
far, we’ll keep it in the arena of guitar and amp manufacturing. This will be kinda like a David and Goliath
story; pitting a huge multi-national company against an American
micro-manufacturer (what we in the guitar biz like to call a boutique manufacturer). Playing the part of David will be the Burriss
Amp Company, and Goliath will be embodied by the giant Samick Corp. Sound
good? Well, let’s get going!
Hi everybody! Several
of last week’s testimonials were by folks who had purchased modern
reproductions of classic amps. As folks
warm-up to the sound of vintage tube amps (sorry, couldn’t help the pun), both
Fender and Vox have re-issued some of their most sought after models. As long as we don’t get into a big discussion
on point-to-point hand wiring and stuff like that, I think we can all agree
that the modern repros are some pretty decent amps. The weak link, as is usually the case these
days, is that they cut corners on the speakers included with the amps. I want to start out with a testimonial that
emphasizes just what I’m talking about.
Jacob Pidduck's very cool Vox/Ric rig.