Marshall Amp Beer Box Amp

ICBM · January 2022

Some of you might have spotted this in the 'Amps that put a smile on your face' thread... well, this one was meant to

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Before Christmas a friend gave me these Marshall beer boxes. Although they were empty by that point!

(For those not familiar, Marshall sell beer - it's made by a small brewery in Scotland, and comes in these cardboard boxes - eight cans in the head and sixteen in the cabinet. I haven't actually tried it...)

At some point in the conversation the idea of what would happen if it was possible to fit a real amp and speakers into them came up, and when I mentioned I had an old 8" speaker baffle from a Squier 15 amp which looked just about the right size to fit into the cabinet box, it was too tempting to resist! I decided to have a go over the holiday.

Sure enough, it was very nearly a perfect fit. I did have to trim one end down slightly, but the height was exactly right anyway. A quick test with a Celestion (what else?) Eight-15 jammed in showed a major problem, which was that the cardboard flaps which form the bottom of the box did in fact, flap - horribly. So the first job was to glue them up firmly. Then the baffle was glued into the box - I decided to leave the cardboard 'grille cloth' intact as I didn't want to spoil the appearance, and cardboard is actually fairly transparent to sound anyway.

The jack is the only clue from the outside!

I tested it with my Peavey, and it sounded not too bad, considering it's made from cardboard! Albeit rather, er... boxy

. Actually, it reminded me a bit of a cross between Mick Ronson's Ziggy Stardust cocked-wah tone, and Brian May's 'Deacy' amp which he used for all the layered sounds on Queen records - quite a reedy sort of sound.

So then the next problem was the amp - I had intended to put a little basic amp kit or something in there, with just a jack on the front and control it all from the guitar, but when another friend also gave me a broken Marshall MS-4 (the little plastic toy stack thing), that also seemed like too good an opportunity to miss, given that it's an actual Marshall... my original idea was just to put the whole thing inside, but then I realised that the spacing of the four knobs wasn't too far off the graphic on the box, and the little knobs were almost the perfect matching size too! So, after a surprisingly small amount of work with a hand drill and a taper reamer, the insides of the MS-4 and a couple of spare jacks were transplanted to their new home, with a battery tucked in - the flap design is the same one that caused trouble in the cabinet, but here is useful.

Citrus - gain, Riffs - volume, Sparkle - tone, Brightness - on/off. The point of the drill wandered slightly making the LED hole but it's not too bad...

And... finished!

So what does it sound like? Well, inspired by the sound, here's my appalling playing with a bit of Ziggy and some random noodling...

"Just the beer light to guide us"

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2v1814zjvg3c7th/Beer Box Amp.mov?dl=0

Terrible! Although in an interesting way. A lot of that is due to the limitations of the tiny 0.5W amp, but I also suspect that cardboard isn't quite as transparent to sound as I thought when you're down at that sort of power level. I think it sounds better than the MS-4's original speakers though - not as buzzy.

One of the biggest problems is that the cardboard head box is so light that it falls off the top of the cabinet unless you use a right-angled lead and make sure it's properly supported... I think I might have to use some velcro, or just tape them together. But just a bit of fun really - there was surprisingly little work in the whole project, in fact - probably only about an hour overall, spread over a couple of days.

So there you you have it! Amped Up Lager boxes, actually amped up

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