James demos the Marshall 9004 Preamp

I've had a Marshall 9004 preamp for years, but never used it. I recently pulled it out of storage and was surprised by how it sounded. Somewhere along the way I misplaced the original power supply, so I ordered a new one, fixed the broken input jack, and put in some fresh power supply caps. It's actually a pretty rockin' preamp but I have lots of other options to use. So I'm putting this one up for sale.
Signal flow in this video:
Epiphone Les Paul with Gibson 498T/490R pickups into a Voodoo Lab GCX buffer, into the 9004 preamp. The 9004 Preamp is feeding the DI input of an ADL600 tube microphone amplifier and that goes into my DAW (Reaper) via an Antelope Orion32. In a somewhat awkward loop, I send the ADL600 signal through a Mooer Radar to use it's power amp emulation and IR loading. The IR is one I made of my Mesa Boogie Oversized Rectifier cab with V30's.

[@AudaciousAce1989]

My jaw dropped when the high gain came on!!

[@jamesgreenlee7033]

Right?? I was genuinely shocked when I fired it up.

[@guzzis3]

Thank you for doing a good demo. So many of these have 1/2 hour of talking about their dog or their mother in law and even when they actually do the demo they drown the equipment in effects and completely ignore the clean tones. You did a great job thank you.

[@russiangoose7053]

I wasn't around in the 80s or 90s to be nostalgic about this old rack gear but something about this old stuff is so damn cool. Thanks for doing a heavy playing demo with this unit, I might have to consider picking one up haha

[@kraid80]

Nice video! I love the 9004 preamp, even if it's a small solid state circuit. Imo sounds very organic and actually very close to a proper marshall! Throw a delay pedal effect in the chain and you're in 80s shred heaven!

[@jamesgreenlee7033]

Thanks man! I was honestly really shocked about the 9004. I didn't expect it to sound as good as it did. Fun stuff!!

[@zandig666]

I sold a couple tube amps now I'm picking up killer Solid state amps for a fraction of the cost

[@AndreiGrozea]

Great demo James! Really looking forward to getting mine and playing some filthy riffs through it :D

[@Steve_the_Bastard]

Sounds awesome man

[@rocketpigrecords3719]

The 9004 is close tonewise to the Shredmaster, think the big ca-CHUNK on Radiohead's Creep. My ADA MP1 was microphonic, and the shop I bought it off of lent me a 9004 they had while they had it looked at. Band and I preferred the sound into the Marshall VS8080 I had, sold the goofy MIDI footswitch the ADA required & never looked back. The older SS Marshall stuff was serious gear - recently got a Master Lead 30 again, love it.

[@pitthefrit6292]

Great demo. I wanted to know how it may sound like with an overdrive or eq in front. Thanks dude! Sounds pretty cool, btw! As some of the other solid-state Marshalls from the 80ies/90ies.

[@zandig666]

I'm running a solid state amp with a ds-1 right now guys asking me what my rig is all the time I say it's a $175 amp 😋😋🤟😏🤟🤟🤟🤟

[@SK3RED]

Hi Man, love your demo. I bought this pre-amp used after seeing your demo but after a month of using it I still can't make it sound nearly as good as yours. I was taking into consideration the idea that some components were unsoldered but from what I could see after opening it there doesn't seem to be anything out of place. My chain is: Jackson JS22-7 Dinky> Marshall> SSL2 +> Neural DSP Archetype Gojira just with the cab sim on compared to your demo my tone sounds fuzzy, muffled and with less gain What do you think I could be doing wrong?

[@jamesgreenlee7033]

Hey SK3RED, I can totally understand where you're at. I think there are two things to look at based on your post: Overall gain. Overall tone. I checked out your guitar on Sweetwater's site and being a Jackson, I would expect it to be pretty good. The specs look solid and their "high output humbuckers" sound like they should be giving the preamp enough juice to make things happen. It's possible that the pickups have too much low-end to make crisp, gain-y attack happening, but again, being a Jackson, I would assume they're "voiced" for gain. The pickup height relative to the strings could also cause weak output. I would adjust the bridge pickup height to have about 1/8" of gap between the top of the pickups and bottom of the strings. You might need more space on the 7-string, but that's a good place to start. You could maybe have some sort of wiring issue in the guitar as well. A partial short in the output jack? Maybe something up the volume pot? Not saying this is the case for sure...But it's stuff to look at. Assuming the guitar is all good and is setup well, you should be getting good signal into the preamp. If you're not getting sufficient gain then there could be a problem with the 9004 itself. These things are about 30 years old now and it could have some issues. A bad input jack, a bad pot, maybe something in the actual gain stages of the preamp. I don't recall seeing anything too crazy inside the unit as far as repairing it goes, so if it's not happy, you should be able to get it repaired pretty easily. As for the overall tone being "fuzzy and muffled" I should probably point out my use of the "power amp" part of the Mooer Radar. Without the power-amp emulation, the preamp is a bit "flat" sounding. At 9:12 in the video I show a (bad) pic of the Mooer power amp settings. I wasn't using any of the EQ in the Mooer, nor any EQ in the DAW. The power amp emulation though did have a pretty hefty presence boost (6.0) and was cranked up pretty high (lots of input drive and a fairly high output which is what you do in Marhsall land). I do not recall the power amp section adding much, if any "grit" or "gain" to the signal, but it did add "life" and "sparkle" to the signal. For you, I'm not sure if the "power amp" is still emulated in the Neural plugin if you're only using the cabinet emulation. I would think not but some modellers tie the power amp output to the speaker/IR portion. There might be a "power amp only" setting in the amp block of the Neural plugin. If so...Turn that on and see how it goes. It should bring the "life" and "sparkle" to the sound. If the power amp emulation isn't an option in the Neural plugin, I'm sure there's something out there that can do it (and maybe for free). Check out Emissary from STL Tones if you haven't already. I use it's NadIR IR loader in the DAW when I'm doing serious recordings. The Mooer is used for real-time monitoring of the sound so I have an ultra-low latency sound to play with. The last piece of the puzzle is the IR. That's my Mesa 4x12 Oversized Recto straight-front cab. That particular IR I think has an SM7, an ancient Oktava ML16 ribbon, and I think an AKG C12 clone I made combined to make the IR. It's a micing setup I borrowed from John Petrucci during the recording of the Distance over Time record. He was using the SM7, a Shure 313 Ribbon, and a Mojave 201 condensor I think. I just used what I had as the closest variants of those mics and tried different positions and blendings until I had a combination I liked and rendered that to an IR. Let me know if you make an progress on things and if you're in the States, I could maybe take a look at your 9004 and see what's up.

[@thelespauldude3283]

Hi man, how much is this Amp used? I found one on eBay for $75 and thats kinda sus being so inexpensive, but i dont know what it usually goes for so i dont know if i might gonna get scammed?

[@jamesgreenlee7033]

These preamps usually go for $2-250 or so. If you can get one for $100 or less I'd consider that really good. Bear in mind, it uses a wall-wart power supply to make it go. Getting a replacement isn't hard to do. I want to say a replacement power supply is about $20 or so. Good luck with it!!

[@thelespauldude3283]

@@jamesgreenlee7033 its in really bad shape when it comes to looks, because the dude used it since he bought it new. Thats probably why its so cheap, but it works

[@AudaciousAce1989]

Is this still for sale?

[@jamesgreenlee7033]

Unfortunately not. It sold awhile back.