2003 Splawn Modded Marshall 1987x

Overview

I spotted this online at Guitar Center - again - and I’m not sure who would trade something like this in but I jumped at the opportunity. Finding Marshalls modded by big names is pretty rare, especially since the vast majority of the big modders have their own amp lines and have either phased out their modding or only do it for special clients.

This particular amp is a 2003 Marshall 1987x Reissue, and while I can’t find a date stamp of when the amp was modified, it has an upgraded Mercury Magnetics brand output transformer with a 2003 date code - so I wouldn’t be surprised if this amp was purchased brand new and sent immediately to Splawn for modding (or possibly, sold directly off the shelf in Scott Splawn’s shop in North Carolina). This amp predates the amps Splawn is most well known for now, such as the Quickrod or Nitro, and at the time “Splawn Guitars” was a small, brick and mortar guitar shop that specialized in shreddy guitars and amp repair. They were an official Marshall dealer, so they’d take some brand new amps and modify them to be sold in the shop side by side with stock factory models, which led to more interest in creating a custom amp line. The first amps built from the ground up with the Splawn name were released in 2004.

Using the 2-button footswitch, you can switch between two different “modes” and engage a solo volume control. If you’ve played a more modern Splawn amp, this format is pretty familiar - amps like the Quickrod and Streetrod have an “OD1” and “OD2” setting which can be footswitched, and if no footswitch is plugged in, it defaults to the higher gain setting. This amp predates the “gears” of later models, but it’s easy to hear the lineage when playing the amps side by side. The amp has the trademark, pushed forward mids of Splawn’s design, with a healthy amount of gain on tap with a relatively small amount of sweep - you get a similar amount of gain at “5” as you do at “10",” and I actually find the setting around “4” to be the most well balanced when switching between the two modes. It doesn’t really do the bright, vintage Marshall mid-gain crunch thing, it’s really a high gainer through and through, but not a scooped kind of gain. Some call the mids on these amps “honky” and I can see that, since the upper highs are rolled off rather rapidly, and the lows don’t reach as deep as amps like Rectifiers or Uberschalls. The resulting sound is extremely focused and cutting, with the spike a bit lower than the traditional Marshall voicing, bringing forward the fundamental notes of the guitar in the mix.