Well it was certainly surprise to see the Marshall Joe Satriani signature amp, the JVM410HJS, finally unveiled at Musikmesse 2012 although I think everyone actually expected to see it at NAMM earlier this year. So what has Satch had Marshall tweaking for the past 2 years, well first of all he has switched the 4 chanel reverb controls out in favour of noise gates, one per channel each with their own threshold control. Also there is an additional ‘Mid Shift’ button that can be used for both OD1 and OD2 channels moving the mids from around 650khz (Mid Shift off) to around 500kliz (Mid Shift on).
The Clean channel is based on the Marshall 6100 when on the green mode, with the orange and red modes being hotter variations of that tone too. The crunch channel takes the original JVM410 crunch and adds some of the popular Marshall AFD circuit to it. The two OD channels are both voiced identically based on the JVM410 OD1 but with the gain scaled back slightly and a smoother transition between modes. There are two master volumes and the supplied footswitch enables you to switch between channels, modes and the 2 masters, FX loop and now also the Noise Gates and Mid Shift too. There is also full MIDI implementation on the unit.
No info on Marshall’s website as yet but I’m sure this will be updated too as will Joe’s website.
I’m looking forward to hearing this amp in action at the Sydney G3 concert in a few days time.
