Blackmore

Heya all...
Was reading an old interview with Ritchie Blackmore the other day and he stated that he used to use an old reel to reel Ampex deck placed before his amp to drive the pre-amp stage of his 200 watt Marshall Majors.
This reminded me that i used to use an old MiJ Coronet practice amp to add overdrive to my olsd Plexi.
I'd patch the Marshall's chanels and put the small amp before the Plexi.
I used that for a while til I got a '68 SG and the thing howled and whined like an air raid siren and I had to retire the setup.
Has anyone else ever experimented with their setup in this way?

I've read that interview as well. In the old days or even now for standard single coils it was pretty hard to get a lot of overdrive from a 100 watt Marshall even with it on 10 and he's using the tape deck sort of like someone might use a tube screamer as a preamp but the tube screamer can also clip (distort) the input signal to the amp before tube distortion takes place.
Like if the output from Ritchies single coil pickup was 50mv than the tape deck might have had a gain of 5 resulting in a 250mv input into the Marshall instead of 50mv and more tube distortion from both the preamp and power amp stages.
It's a very similar thing to high gain humbucker pickups.
I think he was trying to get the gain of a high gain humbucker out of a single coil using the tape deck preamp in the early 70's before high gain pickups started appearing.
And maybe the tape deck added to the tone as well.
Of course nowadays you can get pickups that have so much gain they never clean up no matter what amp you use because the mv level coming out of the high gain pickups (around 1000mv or 1volt) is just too big for any preamp to handle without distorting.

I recorded a track once where a guy ran his guitar into a Fender Princeton, and ran the output of that into a Marshall. I wasn't too impressed with the tone, but I think it made it onto the record. Seems like the same kind of concept as cross-patching, where you use one preamp to drive another. That can be kinda cool on an older Marshall or Hiwatt!
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Ford Sav

A lot of people I know have been using those smokies amps (the ones in fag packets) to dirty up the sound before it hits the amp. It does give a good 70s sort of sound.

I used to have an old Marshall that I cross patched as well.
I read that Hendrix did it so I gave it a go and used that for about 5 years til the Marshall was stolen.
Funny story bout that?
I replaced that amp with a Mesa Boogie courtesy of the insurance money.
about 3 months after buying the Boogie I walked into a music store 35 kms away from where the Marshall was stolen.
Lo and behold what do I see for sale in the amp room?...yep...my old Marshall.
The idiot running the store had had the amp repaired and serviced and it sounded brilliant...much better than when I owned it.
I approached the store owner about the amp and informed him that it was my old amp...provided the serial number and asked whether or not I should approach the police to let them know the amp had turned up.
His face drained of all colour and he said that wouldn't be necessary and that I could just take the amp with me
Needless to say I was skipping all the way home...
Not only did I have a new Mesa boogie...but I also had just gotten my old faithful Marshall serviced.
It was a great amp and was the next generation after the plexi series.
Sadly....'80's hair metal came into my life and the gain stage wasn't saturated enough for my Bon Jovi-ish/Ratt/Dokken needs and I traded it for a Laney Linebacker(another amazing amp).

Laney Linebacker? i hope you dont mean those solid state amps from the early 90's? if so my definition of great amp must differ.

Nah...this was most definately valve...
Maybe it wasn't a Linebacker...it HAS been 20 years.
It may have been LANEY Pro Tube Lead 100.
Coz all the Linebacker models I've browsed on the net have a transistor pre-amp and this was definately valve.