NAD: 3 Monkeys Zé (José style)

[Dave L]

I was definitely not looking for another Marshall-ish amp, but this was so cool I had to jump on it. 3 Monkeys is/was mainly Ossie Ahsen who made a nice name for himself in the Marshall/EVH world with Blockhead amps earlier, and he did a lot of work for Brad Whitford who also is/was a part of 3 Monkeys. Long story short they decided to poke around Whitford´s old actual José-modded Super Lead and came up with this sort of re-engineered version of it. The mod and the tone circuit is the same but it is all integrated from the get-go in a modern top shelf build instead of added onto a Marshall. Sort of what a production José might have been if he had gone the way of Soldano, I suppose.

It has both the typical José mods; the extra 12AX7 for added gain and the clipping master. The hotter bright channel has two volumes/gains in series and you can bring in the regular normal channel in parallel to it too. The master has two modes, normal and pull clip. In the push mode it is more or less a normal pre-PI master volume and when you pull the knob out it moves the master to somewhere earlier in the circuit (maybe between the channel volumes and the tone stack) and adds in the diode clippers. That way it gets pretty squishy and it works best when running the gain a bit lower to add some sag and compression to more of a typical plexi sound.

All in all it is a very nice bridge between the vintage Marshall sounds and the hotter, fatter stuff that came later in the 80s and 90s.

 

[mooncobra]

I have never seen this model. nice.

 

[SpiderWars]

Very cool amp! Does it have a loop or line out?

 

[fek]

That looks very clean! I like the art deco style font used on the front panel. Would love to hear that in person.

 

[Dave L]

I have never seen this model. nice.

As far as I've seen they only made about ten of them, plus a few prototypes. A hot Marshall-ish head is not really in the 3 Monkeys wheelhouse either, so it's a bit of an oddball.

It has a tube buffered loop with send and return levels and a hardwire bypass switch.

 

[cardinal]

Congrats! I always wanted one of these.

 

[Dave L]

Congrats! I always wanted one of these.

Thanks! I was circling another one a few years back but didn't get it and sort of forgot about it. Then I stumbled across this one a couple of weeks ago and decided to snag it

 

[John4021]

That's a great amp Congrates
I think Brad King had a Red one in his store years ago

 

[BeZo]

That thing looks neat.

 

[firejack]

I want one just for the awesome logo! That's so cool.
Any chance of a clip?

 

[Dave L]

Yeah, I´m thinking I´ll do some recordings this weekend if time allows, I´ve only played it an hour or two so far and need to spend some quality time with it.

 

[tpruitt]

You get some clips? I’d love to hear a play through of all the options

 

[thenine]

Oh man. Didn’t know about this. Sounds like the perfect amp for me.

 

[311boogieman]

HN3MD

Sounds like it checks a lot of boxes. Enjoy.