Marshall Amplification
Established 1962Founded in 1962 by drummer Jim Marshall as a shop selling drums, Marshall Amplification is the world’s leading manufacturer of music amplifiers, and speaker cabinets. Among the shop’s regular visitors were guitarists Ritchie Blackmore, Big Jim Sullivan and Pete Townshend. They asked Marshall to make guitar amplifiers and told him the sound and design they wanted. The guitar amplifiers then on the market, mostly made by Fender, didn’t have the right sound or enough volume.
Marshall hired designers and started making guitar amplifiers, which would grow out to become the most recognized in the world because of their signature sound, the so-called Marshall ‘crunch’. Pictured above is Marshall’s first amplifier, the JTM-45, named after Jim and his son Terry Marshall and the maximum wattage of the amplifier.
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