Electric Guitar Amplifiers: Some thoughts and opinions.

June 17th, 2009 • Music

As an electric guitarist, your guitar amplifier is one of the most important features in defining your sound, which is why you should be as picky as you can when it comes to choosing you amp.A great analogy of the importance of electric guitar vs. the importance of an amplifier: “If you plug a good £1000 guitar into a bad £100 amplifier, it will probably sound cheap. If you plug a cheap £100 guitar into a good £1000 amplifier at worst it will sound pretty good.”

This tells us how important it is to find an amplifier that sounds good (to your ears at least) before you start freaking out over the make/type/model of your guitar. The amplifier is the last stage before your guitar ‘tone’ becomes vibrations in the air, so if your amp is wrong it will destroy everything before it. Simple.

First thing is that Tube Amps don’t necessarily sound better than Solid State amps. A decent Solid State amplifier will probably knock your socks off in terms of sound, but in a very different way to that of a Tube Amp. Don’t believe me? Johnny Greenwood used a Fender Deluxe 85 Solid State Amp for a long time. Why? A good Solid State amp will give you 100% of your sound totally unaffected, so if you want just the sound of your guitar and pedals with no added crunch and magic, try Solid State.

Another misconception: Solid State Amps are more reliable than Tube Amps. This may be true of Solid State vs. Vintage Tube Amps, but today’s Tube Amps are built with serious care and attention to reliability. If you don’t mind having to replace the tubes now and then, Tube Amps are totally reliable. In my opinion,  Tube amps suit my playing and are better, they sound more musical to my ears, plus I like the way they break up and crunch when you crank them.

Here are some things to consider when choosing a Guitar Amplifier:

• Breakup Point – at what level will the amp begin naturally distorting? For most Tube Amp users this is an important question. Can you get your amp to break up nicely without setting your volume on 10 thus destroying the building and creating an earthquake on the opposite side of the earth? Or will it break up too soon for your playing environment, so everything sounds like sludge and there’s no way of getting a shimmering clean tone? It is important to consider how much headroom you’ll need in order to get the job done and the tone you want. If you plan on recording at home or whatever with your amp, will you be able to get the tone you want at a reasonable volume, or will you need the amp to be shaking the walls? You can definitely get a better recorded sound from a low level naturally overdriven amplifier than you can from an amplifier on volume 10 pushing far to many dB’s into the microphone. Too much volume when recording means loss of dynamic and sense of space. So unless you have a stadium to record in, consider a smaller more tuneful amp. Volume does NOT equate to tone.
• Distortion Character – Just bought a 59’ Fender Bassman and that Metallica riff your playing just doesn’t sound heavy enough? … Even with the volume on 10? Well you should have bought a high-gain amp not a vintage amp! There is a difference between to two. Hi-gain amps often have circuitry built in which allows for a much quicker onset of distortion … and then some. I prefer vintage sounding amps, they sound more ‘3D’ and authentic to me. But that’s my opinion.
• Amp Class – Your amp could be Class A or Class A/B. This has nothing to do with the quality of the amp. Some of the finest guitar amps ever made are class A/B, so don’t get confused into thinking Class A is in anyway better. There is an electronic reason for why some amps are labelled A and some A/B, but I would ignore it completely and go on sound alone when you play.
• Price – You can get some amazing guitar amps for next to nothing (Traynor, Selmer) and you can get some incredibly bad guitar amps for a lot more money than they’re worth. This is another good reason why you must hear your amplifier before you purchase it! Doing this could make a considerable difference to your pocket and your guitar playing satisfaction.
• Size – I own a Fender Twin Amp. It’s not the biggest amp in the world, but it is deafeningly loud, it’s open back means that sound cries out from the speakers out of all angles putting the likes of a Marshall stack to shame on occasion. The other thing about it is that it weighs about as much as something that breaks your back, should you lift it incorrectly. I’m sure it’s not designed to be used at gigs unless you have your own personal road crew. Quite simply, if it didn’t sound so good, it would be nothing more than a massive pain (in the back). Take these things into consideration, if your playing in properly kitted-out music venues, go for a smaller amp which breaks up sooner and mic the thing. It will sound better to the audience and you’ll get better tone at a lower volume and therefore better onstage separation. If you know you’re going to be lugging a massive heavy amp up flights of stairs only to play on a stage that is about the size of your amp, then you’ve probably got the wrong amp. One of the best onstage electric guitar sounds I ever heard came out of a Vintage Reissue ’65 Fender Princeton Reverb, and that’s a small amp. In front of about 2,000 people with a mic on the grill it sounded awe-inspiring. So you see, size does NOT equate to tone.

Tags: '65, amp, amplifier, breakup, choosing, class, distortion, electric, fender, guide, guitar, opinion, overdrive, price, princeton, reverb, review, selmer, size, solid state, sound, stage, tone, traynor, tube amp, vox

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