Marshall Guvnor build

[cdwillis]

Build Rating

4.00 star(s)

I've never played the original Guvnor, so I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. Kind of expected Gary Moore to scream out of the amp a little I guess lol. It does sound Marshally, but a wider gain range than I expected. You have to crank it up to get that saturated sustaining distortion tone. I don't like how dull it sounds, especially at lower gain settings. This is remedied by turning up the treble knob, but I think the Crunchbox use of 1m/100pf in place of the 680k/220pf in the second gain stage would be a good mod for this. That should raise the low pass filter to around 1.5khz, vs 1khz, for a little more brightness without being too harsh plus increasing the gain in the lower sweep of the knob. Using a 50pf cap there with another 50pf cap in parallel via a bright switch could be a nice tweak as well. Since I just got this thing sorted out I'm not in the mood to go modding it just yet.

This was originally going to be cream with black knobs and a red knob for distortion, but Tayda sent me the wrong color enclosure. I decided to just roll with it rather than deal with the hassle of getting another.

Has anyone looked at the tone stack in this circuit? I assumed they used a regular TMB tone stack with Marshall values. It's still a passive tone stack, but something else as far as the design.

 

[BuddytheReow]

The tone stack is a little different than the M800, but not much.

 

[cdwillis]

I assumed it had a similar response, but maybe modified for the pot values and taper? I've recently been learning about that traditional TMB style tone stack, but the setup on the Guvnor is a little beyond my understanding right now.

 

[HamishR]

I built a Guv'nor recently and aware of the dull sound I just left C12 off. Sounds good to me.