The best thing about the 50 watt as opposed the the 100 watt models is that you can open them up without bringing down the house. And by that I mean opening up the head until it screams sweetly.  As these old JMP heads  do not have a pre-amp channels, one needs to strike a balance between the master volume, eq and the presence knobs. Basically my tip is keep the master and presence close to maxed out. Scoop out the mids and balance high and low end according to what you have plugged into the head. Need a little more grain? Just drop a Tube Screamer pedal in front of the head and dial up a slight gain boost. Another tip when using these older 50 watt heads is to use low wattage speakers. The 25 watters are the best at helping a low gain head break up in a very pleasing manner.

The reason that these heads work is because they are such a simple effective circuit… there is really nothing to them, and that’s the secret to the clarity of tone… it never gets too blown out! A couple of years ago Vintage King asked me to write a piece about “gear I love” and this head was one that made my ten.

Getting huge tone for recording is a matter of “stacking” or blending between multiple heads and cabs running in conjunction which will get you away from that “one mic”-”one sound” tone that goes nowhere. This is a secret that I have used to get huge tones on records by MXPX, Less Than Jake and Pepper that I have produced.

This gets a little more complicated but I find that blending around a clean and present core tone like the simple 50 watt JMP makes it work every time.

I will talk more about these blending tactics and how you can make them work in my next post.

Turn it up!

SK

Our shy 50W JMP hides out behind the Watkins Copicat