The Marshall MG 10cd Practice Amp: This Little Guy ROCKS!

Big, Big Sound from a Little Amp!

"WANG DANG SWEET THUNDER OF ROCK!" Those were my first words upon hearing the Marshall MG 10 cd amp, an inexpensive little guitar amplifier that delivers a BIG rocking sound.

Now, I already proudly own a full Marshall stack: a vintage 70's model JMP 100 watt head with two vintage 4x10 Marshall cabinets. I use the big guns for band practices and live gigs, and for at home low-volume jamming I have a small Marshall practice amp (the G15R cd) which I've been happy with for quite some time. However, a few years back I bought a guitar for a young guitar protegee of mine and he also needed a practice amp to go along with it, so I bought him the cheapest, smallest amp I could find at Guitar Center -- the Marshall MG 10cd. It was only $69 at the time (although they now go for about $79 new), was small and compact, light and easy to carry, plus it sounded pretty decent at the Guitar Center. But when we brought the amp back to my place for a jam session -- him on the MG 10cd and me on the larger G15cd -- I noticed that the MG 10 was just as loud as my larger amp and sounded TWICE as good! So good I had to run out and buy one for myself.

The MG 10 CD is a ten watt practice amp with a 6.5" speaker and has two channels -- the clean channel and the overdriven channel. There are only four knobs on this baby -- a volume knob for the clean channel, a pre-gain knob and volume knob for the overdrive channel, and one "contour" knob for the tone, which is basically the EQ. No reverb or digital effects on the MG 10, but it does come with a headphone jack for private non-obtrusive jamming and a line out/CD input jack which can be used two ways: you can plug in a CD player or drum machine or what have you and play along, or you can run a chord from it into a mixing board to record the amp without micing it. I like to plug my drum machine into it and rock along with the beat, it's a very nice feature to have, but I've never used the line out to record as I prefer to mic the amp.