A useful constraint on the "what is the Jose mod?" question, from Dave Friedman's Dec 2025 solo interview with the Marshall Modification Project (~[89:51]): *"Early early amps were just uh like a single gain stage and it was not super gainy but later he developed another one that was more gainy. Um, but other than that, those are the only things he did."*
The implication: across Jose's entire career, his work boils down to two circuit families.
Family 1 — Early Jose (lower gain): - A single added gain stage in front of the stock Marshall preamp. - Modest gain bump over stock; not yet the saturated Brown Sound voicing. - The new V1A acts more as a buffer/preamp than a fully-driven additional clipper. - Closest JMIL approximation: Stock 2203 chassis + v0-stage mod alone (no cascade, no MV mod, no NFB mod).
Family 2 — Late Jose (higher gain): - The full "expanded" recipe: V0 + cascade V1→V2 + pre-tone-stack MV + (optionally) diodes + reduced NFB. - This is the variant that the public canon has come to call "the Jose mod." - Documented on EVH #12301, Lynch, Sykes, Mars, etc.
Why the "two variants" framing matters: 1. It pushes back on the implicit assumption that every Jose-modded amp shares the same recipe. Friedman's testimony is that Jose tuned the same amp differently for each player based on feedback (see jose-player-driven-variance) — but the underlying CIRCUIT was always one of two families. 2. It justifies the "no-diode" presets in JMIL (Mars Dr. Feelgood, DeMartini, etc.) as genuine Jose variants, not "Jose-minus-diodes-by-arbitrary-choice." 3. It frames the lab's mod-toggle UI more honestly: not "build your own Jose," but "explore the two families and the per-player variations within each."
Note: Friedman's "two variants" is at the level of circuit topology, not component values. Within each family, the specific resistor/capacitor values varied amp-to-amp based on the player's feedback (see jose-player-driven-variance) and the chassis available. So "two variants" describes the topological universe, not a literal pair of fixed recipes.
Sub-variants observed within the "Late Jose" family (per Friedman across Amp Panels QA April 2025, #5, #7):
- Plate-resistor variant: Late Joses sometimes had 3× 100kΩ in series (≈300kΩ) instead of the canonical 330kΩ on V1 plate — a small but documented micro-variant.
- Rotary B+ select switch on V1: A small subset of Joses ("two of those" per Friedman) included a rotary switch on the back panel that varied the voltage feeding V1 — bleeding voltage to the stage, not switching plate resistors. Joe Holmes's Jose is one documented example. This is a third-tier variant — historically real but not part of the canonical recipe.
- Diode-position variant: see diode-position-variants for the three documented positions of the Zener pair within Jose's circuit.
- Presence-circuit split: roughly 50/50 between vintage 0.1µF / 5K1 and later-70s 0.68µF / 5K presence networks (Friedman, Panel QA April 2025 ~[170:36]).
These sub-variants reinforce the jose-player-driven-variance framing: Jose's bench practice was iterative and player-tuned, with multiple defensible recipe paths within the two main topology families.