im thinking of getting a marshall head particurally the jcm2000 tsl100 i have read up on it and it sounds killer i went to my local guitar shop but they did not have one in stock have any of you guys played it? if so what did you think of it?

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YEAH!

that's one hell of an amp.

my guitarist has one, kickass distortion and its loud as hell!

I suggest you try one yourself, I was quite fond of the tube sound!

however I don't see the whole point in going TSL when you just need clean and distortion. I would probably settle with a DSL.

well i play lead so the lead channel in the tsl grabed my attention

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well i just bought it and the guy at the store set it up to a killer tone but when we got it in the car my fucking sister was messing with the knobs and im having trouble getting a good sound can anyone help me with the settings?? im looking for a thrashy death type sound

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what settings have you got it at now?

lol I meant the DSL has only the lead and clean channel, the TSL has an extra crunch channel that you won't use much anyways

if you're looking for a trashy sound, boost up the gain quite a bit, don't scoop the mids (mids=tone)
I usually have it with the deep swich on and a bit more bass (2 or 3'o clock) mids at 1 and highs at 3.. but thats an age ago when I played a DSL, just mess about a bit, thats the fun part!

holy shit def! your a magic man!! i put those in and maybe turned one or two knobs a hair and now its fucking kick ass

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hahah I'm surprised myself that I remember those settings

have fun man

the jcm 2000's are easily some of my favorite marshalls. but i've heard alot about most tsl's having problems with the footswitches malfunctioning.
i think the main difference is the tsl has a separate eq for the "crunch channel"(not quite clean not quite lead) while the dsl's crunch channel shares an eq with either the clean or lead.
congrats on it man.

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ive played several jcm2000s and i think theyre a waste of money.
the last one i played was a dsl100 thru a 1960 cab and i thought it sounded good, but then i found a jcm900 a couple of hours later and there was no comparison, the 900 had more meat (mids) and lower lows than the dsl. the deepswitch sounds good, but i kan drop the guts on the tone on the 900 no sweat and the distortion outguns the 2000 as well.
i was using the same guitar for both tests. needless to say, i purchased that shitty old 900 at less than half price what the shop wanted to sell me at their already bargain price.
im not knocking anyones decision here about them getting a jcm2000, but from my experiences i fail to be impressed.

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the 2000's are more "high gain" amps... where as 900's are a little more medium gain amps. totally different sounds.
everybody has their favorite jcm's.

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yea and its al personall prefernce aswell, iv never played through a 900 but for what i play the tsl is great

i heard about the footswitch problem too so im trying to take it a bit easy on it

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The last time i tried a JCM 2000 it sounded like arse but this i time i took more time to get a tone and voilá, NICEE!

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stupid question will it really only sound good when cranked up? i havnt cranked it yet, and it doesnt sound bad...but still not quite what im looking for maybe i just dont know how to set the setting right? defs settings sounded good at first, and did the head itself...im thinking the marshall may just not be for me

EDIT: i just sat down for a little over two hours tweaking with it and now its fucking badass

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the main thing aobut cranking amps is poweramp distortion which is really sweet for tube amps... but you have tons of preamp gain in the tsl so it isnt required, although if you do crank it, turn down the pre gain to rely more on the powertube saturation.

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ok dislexic you seem to know your shit so please explaine this what is the poweramp and the preamp?

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the preamp tunes your guitar sound, its built up out of ecc83's/ax7's, controls your gain and eq settings.

the poweramp just makes everything louder, in your marshall, run through EL 34's (4x) it has no tonal function except for the 'colour' of the sound, which you can change by getting different powertubes. (same goes for the preamp tubes, you can change them for a different sound but you do need to know what you're doing)

in my rack setup I've got a seperate power and preamp, in a head its combined, the preamp stage has 4 ax7's, the poweramp stage of my amp has some el 34's... its really that simple . (I hope you understood my english in my intoxicated mood )

i havent played on the TSL's, but shit, i played on the 900's, fuckin amazing amp

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well... say you're listening to your shitty car stereo really loud, so loud it "distorts" it's either the speakers can't handle the volume and or poweramp is breaking up....
it's the same with a guitar amp.. you dime your tsl on say the clean channel. and you'll hear bits and peices of a sweet overdrive because your tubes are being driven so hard they're distorting. it's very musical and articulate. but on s.s. amps it usually doesnt tend to breakup so smoothly, more like really harsh blobs of random overdrive thrown into your mix making it extremely shitty... i guess if NIN synth style muck distortion is your thing than you could use it....
so powertube saturation is highly desired in most medium gain amps... especially marshalls. say the jcm 800's and 900's... not exactly high gain amps... but with the added poweramp distortion it just makes it sound so smooth and rich. very common in alot of thrashy metal type bands like slayer to get dimed jcm800's for that rich solo tone...

some powertubes breakup earlier than others...
el34's(what most marshalls have),el84's, and kt66's
have an earlier breakup than say..
kt88's and 6l6's.
meaning you get more "tube tone" .

alot of amps have an insane amount of preamp gain so people don't have to go def to get that extra distortion....
like def said, the preamp is what shapes your sound.

or... alot of people get little gritt boxes like say the ibanez tube screamer to get more distortion out of their jcm 800's without cranking them...

but the jcm 2000's have lots of preamp gain so power tube distortion isnt neccisarily required, but still sought after...

if you can't always crank that baby up but you want to hear what it sounds like cranked all the time... a power attenuator will do the trick, it allows you to run your poweramp at max and play a whatever volumes you want.... only problem with that is a good attenuator will run you a couple hundred bucks and you're tube replace ment will be a bit more often.

hope that helped..

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