sah5150":2x1p3c7y said:
AmpliFIRE":2x1p3c7y said:
Chubtone":2x1p3c7y said:
But that's another story. A sad, sad story.
I'm always up for a good story...do tell
Yo Curt - You need to save a text file of this story so you can quickly cut and paste it into posts when it comes up. It's gotta suck having to write the story over and over again...
Steve
Thankfully I found my story on the Metro board. Phew! Here it is:
Joe Holmes has two killer sounding '72 Jose modded Super Leads. Those things are his prized possessions. He used them forever around the LA clubs and used them when he played with Ozzy. His tone with Ozzy live was one of the best tones I have ever heard. Just monstrous.
Also as mentioned, Sykes's amps he uses in the current Thin Lizzy stuff sound killer.
I heard a lot of Jose modded Marshalls in Hollywood back in the mid to late 80's. Most of them sounded like crap, but was that the amp or the players fault? A few of them were awesome. The thing is, there were quite a few different "Jose mods" that he did. Some were higher gain than others.
Brian Jay from Keel had a great Jose modded Marshall. SO good in fact that when Keel got their record deal, someone from Peavey used Brian Jays amp to make the VTM series amp. I never played a VTM series but Mark Cameron tells me if you get all the dip switches set right that they sound pretty good.
Here's a very interesting Jose story that I experienced first hand. My buddy owned a guitar shop in Huntington Beach. Mark Cameron worked for him and I was already having Mark work on my amps. This was probably 1997 when his store opened. In about 2000, my buddy bought the entire Jose collection of amps from Jose's family after Jose passed away. They took the truck down to pick them up and I left my store I own and drove to their store to wait with Mark for the delivery. The truck gets there and we start unloading Super Lead after Super Lead after Super Lead (almost exclusively metal panel amps). Someone noticed that taped to the bottom of almost every single amp was an invoice. We started turning all the amps upside down and reading off the names on the invoices: Neal Schon, Mick Mars, Bruce Bouillet, etc etc I don't even remember all the names but it was a who's who of LA rock guitarists.
All these guys had sent Jose amps for mods and then Jose passed and they never got their amps back. Well Mark and I start weeding through the amps and going for the ones that we could tell from the exterior were already modded. Very soon we found an amp that had the name ATOMICA stenciled across the front where the Marshall logo should have been. It was a '68 Super Lead and was beat to hell. This was THE amp guys seriously. It was that sound, in a box, right in front of us. Mark was playing through it and it was just that tone I had always wanted. We switched off playing it and I decided I HAD to have that amp. I went to talk to my buddy, the owner who was one of closest friends at the time. I offered him $1500, he said no. I offered him $2k he said no. Now $2k was about what a very nice plexi was selling for at the time and this was a beat to hell metal panel. $2500? No. $3000!!!!!!!!! No.
He said, just let me sort through this stuff and I'll sell you the amp once I figure out what's what. Mark loved the amp so much, and there were so many Super Leads there that Mark took it and hid it in his pile of amps to be repaired in his repair room. For months, Mark would pull it out when I came in and we would play it then he would hide it again. The owner and I had an agreement that it was mine when he decided to sell it, but by this point he didn't even remember he had it. Then my buddies shop started having severe financial trouble.... severe. Mark kept telling me the amp is still there. You better get it soon. I said don't worry it's mine, your boss promised.
About 3 weeks later Mark called me..... "did you get the Atomica amp?" No, I said...... Mark said, "WELL IT'S GONE. I've torn the whole shop apart!" I called the owner and when he finally got back to me he confirmed he had sold a "bunch of broken stuff that Mark was never going to fix to another competitor". HOLY CRAP!!!!! I called that shop and he said, "Oh yeah, the Atomica amp? I had ******* fix it and return it to stock and I sold it". Now ******* was the biggest electronics doofus you could imagine. He was a keyboard player and didn't have the slightest clue about tone. Just a schematics guy but a guitar "tonal" moron. The ATOMICA amp was gone, but thankfully Mark Cameron poked around inside that amp for months and knows every little secret as to why that amp sounded so good. How much of the Atomica amp inspired Marks's "Jose" mod? More than a little I'd guess.
