Watch demos and our introduction to the 1967 Sound City One Hundred captures here:

Axis Bold as Love tones

The Who inspired tones

Playthrough

STORY TIME: History and background information

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The 1967 Sound City One Hundred (model number SC100 or L105) might be the most unsung hero of the late 60’s amps. It was played by 3 of the biggest acts of the time – Jimi Hendrix (Jimi Hendrix Experience), Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) and Pete Townsend (The Who) and can be heard on some of the most iconic albums of rock history.

It is all over the place on Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love album, it is the amp used by Pete Townsend on Live at Leeds and Jimmy Page played lots of early Led Zeppelin gigs on these amps before transitioning to Hiwatt and later on to Marshall. 

This has been a very personal journey for me and along with REX, this is to me one of the most important amps in my collection.

The MKI Sound City One Hundred was built only for two years in 1967 and 1968 and due to Dave Reeve’s exceptionally high quality standards, not many were built. So it has become an extremely rare amp. Further it looks like these rarely were sitting around – they got played a lot by their lucky owners and hence they rarely come up in good shape. 

This one won’t get a collectors award, as it has been used a lot, but it sounds simply glorious and it easily nails all those iconic tones mentioned above. 

The tone of the Sound City One Hundred can be described as extremely punchy, raw, with an incredible bite and definitio nto the tone, but without any harshness. It is very dynamic and will clean up from proper crunch levels a crystallene clean tone just by rolling back the volume control on your guitar. 

It offers some of the best clean and edge of breakup tones, as well as some of the most ferocious crunch tones that are the incarnation of the term “kerrang”, when you play some big chords. 

It takes pedals also incredibly well thanks due to the special Sound City / Hiwatt fixed bias phase inverter design, which makes this stage exceptionally clean and well suited for the pedal platform duties.

The set features 42 full captures of channel I and III (which feature the 2 slightly different voicings this amp offers) that were recorded through a 1968 Marshall 1982B cab with G12H30 55Hz Pulsonic coned speakers and the mics used were 2x Royer R121, a Beyerdynamic M160 and a Neumann U87. Please refer to the full list of included captures in the product photo section.