AYNSLEY LISTER SIGNATURE
Like many of the best things in life, it all began with lunch. Aynsley Lister has been a customer of Rift Amplification’s Chris Fantana for a number of years, bringing in various pieces of vintage gear for service and repair.
“We started talking about doing a signature amp over lunch one day and what that might look like, what tones it needed to capture,” Chris remembers. “Crucially, it needed to offer Aynsley the touch response and feel that he wanted, being one of the handful of guitarists who rarely, if at all, uses pedals.”
Initial inspiration for the circuit came from Bletchley, via Switzerland. “Aynsley found a very rare 1979 Marshall JMP 50-watt 2x12 combo, model 2144, in a music shop in Switzerland,” Chris reveals. “The 2144 is unique in that it was one of only two Marshall amplifiers from that era to have onboard spring reverb, the other being the 100-watt head, model 2959.
“A few years later, he took it into Marshall for a service and the tech looked at it and proclaimed: ‘That’s not right, at all!’. It had, as he then discovered, been modified away from the original circuit in the past. Incredibly, these modifications are not
