Marshall expanded the Jimi Hendrix 60th Anniversary Collection on August 25 with a JMH Studio bundle — head and matching 2x12 cabinet, £1,749.99, shipping September 9, US pricing to be confirmed. Built in Bletchley. Twenty watts from a pair of EL34s, switchable down to five. Black Tolex under a purple-and-black oil-on-water swirl, purple LED, and an all-seeing-eye badge that Marshall says nods to Hendrix's interest in the third eye.
The anniversary is 1966 — sixty years since Hendrix first plugged into a Marshall Super 100 at the shop on Charing Cross Road. That meeting is the reason half the amps in this industry look the way they look.
What This Amp Actually Is
Read the control list and it tells you immediately: presence, bass, middle, treble, and then High Treble and Normal volumes, bridgeable.
That's a 1959 Super Lead. Two channels, two volumes, and the whole tone living in how you blend them. Marshall's Studio Vintage line is their 20-watt version of exactly that circuit, and this is that amp in a party dress. Series effects loop, 16/8/4-ohm outputs, DI, and the cab is a 2x12 loaded with Celestion V12s.
So before anybody gets confused by the badge: this is not a new circuit. It's the SV20 platform, which we've already put through the wringer against the rest of the Studio line, against the Origin 20, against the SC20 Studio Classic, and in head-and-cab versus combo form. If you want the 2x12-versus-1x12 cabinet argument specifically, that one's here.
I say this without any sneer. A Super Lead circuit you can actually turn up is a genuinely good product, and Marshall has been selling it for years. What's new here is Tolex, a badge, and a name.
The Part Nobody Will Say Out Loud
Hendrix's Marshall tone is a 100-watt story.
The Super 100 stack, run flat out, into a Fuzz Face, in a room. The power section wasn't a tone control on that rig — it was the instrument. The sag, the bloom, the way a note swelled instead of decayed, the feedback that arrived on cue because the speakers were moving enough air to drive the strings. All of that happens at a volume the JMH Studio is specifically engineered to never reach.
That's not a flaw. That's the entire point of the Studio series, and it's why these amps exist: 100 watts of Plexi is unusable for approximately everyone alive. Marshall scaled the circuit so you can hear power-tube distortion in a room with a ceiling. Good engineering, honestly done.
But be clear about what you're buying. You're buying the preamp voicing and the channel-jump interaction at a survivable volume. You are not buying the mechanism that made "Voodoo Child" sound like that. Anyone who tells you a 20-watt Plexi at bedroom levels gets you Monterey is selling something.
How You Chase This on a Modeler
Here's the useful half, since most of you aren't spending £1,749 on a purple amp.
Start with Brit Plexi Jump. On a Helix, that's the jumped 1959 Super Lead — the two channels bridged, which is the JMH Studio's whole front panel rendered as one block. Not "Brit Plexi Nrm," not "Brit Plexi Brt." The jumped model, because the interaction between those two volumes is the sound. Our amp model cheat sheet has the rest of the family mapped out.
Settings, on the Helix 0–10 amp scale:
- Master 8–10. This is the whole ballgame and it's the setting people get wrong. On a modeled amp the Master is your power-tube saturation. Running Master at 5 gives you preamp gain with a sterile, static power section — the exact thing the real amp's volume is supposed to provide. Crank it and level-match on the channel volume afterward, per our level-matching guide.
- Drive 7–8. A real Super Lead has no master volume; drive and loudness are the same knob. In the model, drive is the preamp and Master is the power amp, so you push both.
- Bass 3–4. Plexis get woolly. The 4x12 or 2x12 is going to give you low end back.
- Mids 6–7. Do not scoop. This family is mids.
- Treble 6. Then finish with Presence 5–6, which on a Plexi does more than treble does.
- Cab: 4x12 Greenback, off-axis. The real bundle ships V12s in a 2x12, which is a tighter and more modern voice than a Greenback — if you want to match the bundle rather than the era, go 2x12 and stay closer to on-axis.
Then put a fuzz in front, because without it you're not doing Hendrix, you're doing Marshall. A germanium Fuzz Face into a cranked Plexi is the recipe, and the ugly part is impedance: germanium fuzz wants to see your pickups directly, and anything buffered ahead of it changes the circuit. We wrote up why fuzz hates buffers, the germanium-versus-silicon difference, and the full Hendrix fuzz tone build. On a modeler this matters less than on a pedalboard — but block order still does, and a fuzz block after a compressor or a buffered wah will not behave.
The guitar volume knob is a required control, not an optional one. Hendrix cleaned up that rig by rolling back to 6 or 7. If your preset only sounds right at 10, you built it wrong.
Is the Bundle Worth It?
At £1,749.99 for head and cab, you're paying a meaningful premium over a standard Studio Vintage stack for the finish, the badge, and the anniversary. That is a completely legitimate thing to buy — I've spent twenty-five years watching people pay for exactly that, and I've never thought less of them for it. A commemorative amp is allowed to be a commemorative amp.
Just don't buy it thinking the circuit inside is rarer than it is. It isn't. It's the Studio Vintage, and the Studio Vintage is very good.
The collection also picked up an Emberton III Bluetooth speaker at £149 and Royal V headphones at £129 in the same swirl. Those are consumer audio, not guitar gear, and I have nothing to say about them except that the finish looks better than it has any right to.
