Clips of my new amp - MJW Bantam

[mcgraham]

I thought some clips might generate some love for the local builder - MJW Amplification in Derbyshire - who built my guitar amp for me!



http://soundcloud.com/mcgrahamhk/mjw-bantam-amp-clips

Clean, then crunch, then saturated crunch. I can give you some settings if you're interested.

2x EL84 output section to give 18W, single 12AX7 in preamp, 12AX7 for phase inverter. Gain, tone, volume knobs on front, and power scaling knob on back. Recorded through a matching (can you hear it? ) 1x12 with a Tayden High Brit speaker, which is like a bright Greenback, close mic'd with an SM57 1" from dustcap on-axis. Straight to garageband.

In any case I think it sounds awesome

Do leave some comments here or on there!

[andycaster]

Sounds good! Seems like it does those Voxy cleans and that Marshally grind well. What guitar did you play here, and how do you like it with different guitars/pickups?

[mcgraham]

Thanks Andy! Glad you like it.

I'm using it with an Ibanez JS1200 - so it's got two humbuckers splittable to single coils.
-The clean clip was middle position in single coil mode set as clean as possible (full 18W).
-The crunch clip and saturated clip were exactly the same settings as the clean except power scaled down to about 8 oclock, so about 1-2W. So what you're hearing is more or less totally output stage distortion.
-The difference between crunch and saturated was the saturated had a Beano Boost into the front just to tip it over the edge.

I've got an Esquire that I've used through it but not been spending much time with that guitar of late, so relatively little to say on that one. I also have a Vigier Surfreter which sounds great through it.

I think the best characteristic of this amp is the clarity it has at all gain levels. The tone control is relatively neutral at about 3 oclock, after that it seems to let through more of the initial pick attack so it retains this clarity - even on the saturated clip you can hear the pick attack.

There's another sound I've been playing with using this amp, and it gets clean to raging with even volume throughout, all just with the guitar's volume knob. With the power scaling you can get this at any volume, and you can control the amount of power stage distortion you're getting really easily. I'll see about doing a clip of that too.

[mcgraham]

Incidentally one of the cool 'boasts' this amp can make is that it is so simple it doesn't even need a turret board. There's only about 10-15 components inside the chassis (hence why it's so small) so everything is genuinely 100% point to point.

EDIT: Martin of MJW Amps has added the YT vid to his YT page so wanted to stick it up here for you to see how awesome it looks.