Marshall's Greatest Pedals

In this article, I'm going to break down one of the most influential pedal lines ever made.

The BOSS Compact Series? No.

The DOD Lamb Series? Negatory.

The Guyatone Box series? Nope.

I’m just going to tell you: it’s the Marshall Black Box series. Yeah, Jim Marshall, the guy better known for amps and drum kits, developed one of the most foundational guitar pedal series in history, and the people– that’s you guys –need to know.

How It Started

James Charles Marshall (who preferred to be called Jim), also known as the “Father of Loud,” was born on July 29, 1923, in West London, England. He opened a drum shop in 1960 on Uxbridge Road in London and started importing Fender amplifiers for local musicians soon afterwards. Being a shrewd businessman, he eventually decided to cut out the middleman and make his own amplifiers with the parts available in England. Thus, he created Marshall amps.

In 1963, Jim Marshall released the JTM Head amplifier (also known as the JTM45), which he had created while trying to clone the ’59 Fender Bassman, and within three years, he’d released the 410 combo, 212 combo and the Marshall Super Lead model 1959. Clearly, the man had a flair for amps.

But he wasn’t content just to stick with amplifiers. By 1966, Jim decided that Marshall needed to get into the fuzz pedal game, so they released their first pedal ever: the Marshall Supa Fuzz. The Supa Fuzz was basically a Tone Bender…made by Sola Sound…for Marshall. For those who are new to the pedal world, that’s pretty par for the course. Just because a brand name has been slapped onto a pedal, it does not mean that said company actually manufactured the pedal. Very likely, they paid someone else (often a competing pedal company!) to do it instead.

Jim Marshall branched out further with the Marshall Supa Wah (their first wah pedal) and the Park Fuzz Sound (a clone of the Tone Bender MK3) in 1966 and 1969, respectively, but the specific pedal series we’re diving into didn’t actually come along until 1989.

The Guv'nor

If you were around in 1989, you know that it was a weird time to be alive. The Billboard 100 had Milli Vanilli, the B-52s, Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, The Cure…you could charitably call it “a hot mess”. If the music was weird, the pedals were even weirder. Pedals weren’t really popular, like they are today, so the options were more limited. Although the most popular pedal at the time was the Ibanez TS9, BOSS pretty much ruled the industry with pedals like the SD-1 and HM-2.

This is the moment that Marshall assigned their head of engineering, Steve Greenrod, to design a guitar pedal that they could sell, a pedal that has the sound of a Marshall stack in a box.

Now, at this point in guitar history, amps in a box are not a thing, when Marshall releases the Guv'nor in 1989, it changes everything. BOSS, Ibanez, none of the big players had anything in their product lines that did what this circuit did. This speaks a lot to Steve Greenrod's ability as an engineer that he was able to really capture the sound of a Marshall stack in a stompbox. The secret was a style of circuit called hard clipping. Coincidentally, they chose to name the pedal “Guv'nor” because that was Jim Marshall’s nickname around the factory.

One of the big selling factors for the Guv'nor was its robust metal construction, which is a commentary on the era more than anything. In the late eighties, most pedal enclosures were made of cheap plastic, but Marshall came along and released a pedal with a heavy metal enclosure (no pun intended), which set it apart from the competition in a big way.

The GV-2 was released later on, marketed as an updated version Guv'nor, but in my humble opinion it doesn't reflect the original very well. Don’t get me wrong, it's a good circuit, it's just not the same circuit they used in the OG Guv'nor.

This pedal was and should be seen as Marshall’s great experiment, to see if they could make a pedal that would compete with brands like BOSS, DOD, Ibanez, etc.

Bluesbreaker

We have now left 1989. Marshall knows that there’s a market for guitar pedals, so they come out with a concise three pedal release: the Black Box series, all which are designed by Steve Greenrod. The first pedal they release is the Bluesbreaker in 1991. As the name suggests, it was based on the sound of the 1962 Marshall Bluesbreaker amp, with the bonus that it was much, much easier to lug around.

The Bluesbreaker is a soft clipper, whereas the Drive Master is a hard clipper. Like the other two pedals in the series, it’s released in a black enclosure and should not be confused with the later version in a silver enclosure. Even so, the Bluesbreaker is shaped a little differently from the Drive Master and Shred Master. The different design was meant to make the knobs harder to break/stomp on when a player was turning the pedal on and off.

At the time, the Black Box series wasn’t very successful, so the Bluesbreaker was discontinued just seven years later. In fact, nobody really cared about them until 2006 when John Mayer released Continuum and put guitar back on the map. The Bluesbreaker was clearly visible in his rigs at the time, and they have become very, very desirable (read: expensive) vintage pedals. It’s also no secret that the JHS Morning Glory overdrive was originally created by modding a Bluesbreaker pedal in 2007.

Drive Master

The second pedal in the Black Box series is the Drive Master, which– and this is the honest truth –is just the Guv'nor with a better name and a cleaner look that matches the Bluesbreaker and the Shred Master. Am I complaining? Not at all. It still sounds fantastic.

The circuit for this pedal is slightly more aggressive than the Bluesbreaker, but a little more gain, which produced a tonal quality to make it sound a bit more like a JTM800. It was released in 1992, and stayed in production through 1998.

Shred Master

The last pedal in the series is the Shred Master, which was originally called the Drive With No Name. It was released in 1992 alongside the Drive Master, and was discontinued in 1998 only to be replaced by the Jackhammer (which is still in production today).

You’ve almost certainly heard of this pedal, because it ended up being used by Radiohead on Jonny Greenwood’s pedalboard. He added it to his board in early 1997, around the time that they released Okay Computer, running it through a solid state amp. Simply put: it sounded glorious. If you want to try to pull off the Jonny Greenwood sound from this era, this is the pedal for you.

Ironically, the Black Box series was discontinued right at the beginning of the boutique pedal boom in the late nineties/early 2000s, but it’s still important to acknowledge just how much this series influenced pedal history. Steve Greenwood designed a series of pedals that influenced literally thousands of stompboxes that came after it, and I have to tip my hat to him.

This just proves what I always say: companies don't make things, people do.