Marshall MF350 | guitars

Marshall 'Mode Four' MF350, 350W quad-channel hybrid head

My "guilty pleasure" amp. I run it in parallel to the JVM for extra "beef", but this does pretty much everything that I need by itself. This is a curious amp, with a valve preamp and a solid state power amp. The result is that all of the overdrive is from the preamp, which means that it is all available at low volume. This was a big deal for Marshall when it was released, and was used by a few big names. Interestingly, Alex Skolnick (Testament) has claimed that this is the best amp that Marshall have ever made. I wouldn't go THAT far, but its a cool amp. It certainly isn't to everyone's taste, but ... well ... screw them. I love it. Lots of folks on the net absolutely slay this amp in reviews. Maybe if they had spent more than a minute trying to dial it in they would have got decent results. When it IS dialled in, the sweet tones are there, on each of the four channels. The clean channel is SO clean and glassy with crazy headroom, and channel 2 (crunch) does JCM800-esque crunchy goodness. Channel 2 is where the cool crunch tones are. Boost the input with a Tube Screamer and THERE'S that tone! The second half of the amp is where the crazy gain is. If you're a little restrained, then the tones are cool. If not, because there's so much sweep to the tone (and gain) controls then its going to sound shit. But ... you know ... just take it easy with stuff, don't go full-out, keep the bass and resonance down, and all is well. The drives go from nice bluesly rasp through to the most crazy uber-gain. And before you start the flaming, I KNOW that uber-gain isn't big and isn't clever, but I like that stuff now and then, you know?

GREAT amps. In fact, I liked it SO much, I bought another ...