No matter how prolific of a gear collector a musician might be, it would be difficult to reach Ritchie Blackmore levels of custom gear, which involved the manufacturing company swearing the Deep Purple guitarist to secrecy so as not to divulge the privileged information that made Blackmore’s Marshall amp the loudest amplifier the company ever made.
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After all, if you’re going to rock out, why not make it as loud as possible?
The Perks Of Being Friends With The Owner
A lot was happening in the English music scene in the year 1960. The Beatles were on their way to becoming one of the greatest pop-rock bands of all time. Future Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore had just dropped out of school to pursue a career in music and radio mechanics. Jim Marshall, founder of Marshall Amplification, ran a successful music store and drum studio while developing the earliest models of his soon-to-be ubiquitous guitar amplifiers. It was a fortuitous time in rock ‘n’ roll history that Blackmore recalled fondly in a 2018 interview with Guitar World.
“I knew [Jim Marshall] as a friend because I used to buy my guitars from him. He was a drum teacher, and he had a music shop in Ealing,” Blackmore recalled. “Jim was a very nice man. His office was down the road from [his amplifier] factory, but he would always come in when I was in there because he could hear me blasting away. He would say, ‘I knew you were here!’”
The friendly rapport between Blackmore and Marshall made the guitarist comfortable enough to make a specific request for Marshall: he wanted an amp made by his friend and colleague. But Blackmore wasn’t a fan of the mellow, muted tone Marshall amps often produced. So, the then-Outlaws guitarist asked Marshall to make an amp that could crunch and cut the tone while maintaining a booming low end. After a bit of back and forth and finagling on Marshall’s part, the amp maker agreed to oblige Blackmore’s request on the condition that he would swear himself to secrecy.
Why Marshall Swore Ritchie Blackmore To Secrecy
Despite his best efforts, Jim Marshall wasn’t able to create the sound that Ritchie Blackmore was after. And although the problems Blackmore faced weren’t singular (Jimi Hendrix supposedly had the same problem overloading and blowing transformers on his amp), Marshall gifted Blackmore a singular solution. “I wanted this Vox sound, which was very distorted and very cutting but seemed to have a bass resonance. They just couldn’t get that,” Blackmore explained.
“So, in the end, they said, ‘What we’re going to do is get one of our combo amps, and we’ll take out the innards and put in the Vox innards. So, you’ll actually be playing a Vox, but it’ll say Marshall.’ That was the big secret of the day.” On top of outfitting a Marshall amp with Vox innards, amp techs Ken Clegg and Ken Bran added an extra output stage on the 200-watt Marshall Major to create a 280-watt Marshall Major, effectively the loudest amp Marshall had ever created.
“They said if I told anyone, they would deny it because they didn’t want to have to make any more like that,” the Deep Purple guitarist said. “I think I caused them a bit of grief.”
Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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