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One of the long-time most neglected pieces of gear, in at least SOME guitarist-circles, is the amplifier. A large box with speakers and it's functional namesake, or sometimes a functional namesake sitting on TOP of a box full of speakers known as a "cabinet"), used to make electric/electronic instruments LOUD.
Now, it might seem rather quaint some rando on the internet is writing what seems like a basic-bitch piece on amplifiers but I'm going to be completley honest, this isn't going to be all that "basic" and definatley not a "b****". Actually, I'm going to explain how to get enough know how to get the sound you want in the ballpark with almost any amplifier you touch (assuming you understand what the amplifier you are touching is for).
Basic Amplifier "Form Factors"
In the computer world, a "Form Factor" is the basic size and shape of components, I'm using it here to explain the different sizes/shapes of amplifier that can be found in the wild.
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| Portable Headphone Amps
| These kinds of amps would include things like the Vox Amplugs, Boss Katana Go, or even the legendary Rockman amplifier designed by Tom Scholz of BOSTON fame. These amplifiers come in all kinds of sizes from the "Rockman" type design that was almost one-of-a-kind in it's time designed to imitate a Sony Walkman type device that clips to your belt, all the way to more modern devices that utilize a computer to program "your sound" into, and then you plug the whole AMP into the guitar and a pair of headphones into the "plug" and practice in the quiet. The whole idea is so that you can practice or write music on your (solidbody) electric guitar in the wee hours of the morning and nobody is the wiser of it. These can range from $30 all the way to about $500+ for a vintage Rockman.
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| Portable Battery Powered Amps
| Typically these are small facsimiles of much larger and more powerful amplifiers. IE the Fender MiniTone Master, the Fender MiniTweed, the Marshall Micro Stack, the Danelectro HoneyTone, the Blackstar IDCORE Fly, Roland Cube, or the BOSS Katana Portable. Older designs are pretty much just basic LM386 op-amp based designs that run on a 9 volt battery and just have a genric, transistor amp sound. Newer units like the Fly or Katana, or even the older Cube design by Roland/Boss, are modeling amplifiers (at least to an extent) that can sound like much bigger, more powerful amplifiers. The primary ideas for these, is to be able to play with a small group of people at a campfire or in the backyard, where you're not in a full band. Like maybe jamming with your uncle on a acoustic, or just noodling around in front of family at family gatherings in a corner to not bother the cranky boomers with your shred-fests. These can cost between $35 to about $200 depending on what it is.
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| Small Combo
| The classic "Practice Amp" as they are often called. These amplifiers plug into a wall outlet, and usually have a 5" speaker to either a single 12" speaker or 2 8" speakers. They usually have a wattage (worry about that more later) between 5 watts and 30 watts. Amps I've used in this series include the Gorilla Tubestack series, Gorilla GG/GC series, Peavey Rage/Backstage/Audition/Blazer series, Epiphone EP-800 and SC-28, Fender/Squier Frontline 10G, Line6 Spider in it's smaller variants, and in classic tube amps, the Fender Champ series. These amps wer the original "entry-level" guitar amplifiers, often paired with starter student guitars, or paired with a more mid-tier guitar as a "first amp" (mine was a Kramer Focus 3000 by ESP and a Peavey Rage 158). Cheaper amps are lacking in controls and might be harder for a beginner to get a good sound out of, while more toward the mid end you start to see amp modeling and even some smaller copies of cheaper Tube designs turn up. These can be had for as cheap as $10 at a garage sale, all the way to around $500-800 for some hand-wired, botique clone of a Champ. The use cases range from students starting out on guitar learning how to play and work with an amplifier (Though some of the conscious design decisions on these are, uh, sometimes not the best), all the way to professionals who like the sound of a cranked-to-hell five watt tube Fender Champ miced up in the studio or even live. 5 Watts is surprisingly loud. So imagine a 30 watt combo like a Peavey Backstage 30 cranked to hell - the Backstage 30 was a pretty loud little amp. That's the BIGGER side of a "Practice Amp".
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| Midsized Combo
| Midsized Combos have gained a lot of interest in recent years because of the science behind amplification finally being SCIENTIFICALLY quantified, and not quantified by a bunch of strumming babboons who think "ooooh, 100 Watts!!! I gotta have 100 Watts! It ain't rock'n'roll unless it's loud enough to be heard the next town over" - not thinking their 100 Watt amp isn't the reason they are audiable for miles - it's the 50,000 Watt P.A. System that's taking that 100 Watt Amplifier's Shure SM57 and sending it through a server-closet rack of power amps. Midsized combos include things like the Fender Princeton and Deluxe Reverb, Peavey Bravo, Boss Katana 50 Watt series, Peavey Bandit 112, Peavey Special 130, or Fender M-80 Chorus 1x12. Basically, Midsized combos usually have one or two 12" speakers (ex. 2x12), and have a wattage between 25 Watts and 75 Watts (usually). These amps are sort of the mid-range F-150 pickup-truck of amplifiers. Powerful enough for most people, bujt reasonable (well...mostly....that Special 130 was a friggin Lead Monolith of a 1x12 Combo!).
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| Large Combo
| Large Combos were the original performance amplifiers. These typically range between 50 Watts and 120+ watts, and in a lot of cases are nothing more than a combo version of the "head" part of the Stacks/Halfstacks below. Some famous large combos include the Peavey Decade, Peavey Stereo and Classic Chorus 212s, the Mesa Boogie Heartbreaker, the FEnder Twin Reverb (and it's variants), the Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus, the Marshall "Bluesbreaker", the Bugera 333XL Combo, the VOX AC30. These are true, full size, professional grade guitar amps intended to be loud enough to fill a bar or club with enough volume to be heard while you're pissing and scrutinizing the graffitti on the bathroom wall. However, this power comes at a cost - the cost of added WEIGHT. These amps can weigh 75 LBS or more, making them literal backbreakers for some people. They also can be wallet busters too since most of these amps start at the $350 range, and go all the way into thousands of dollars range, maybe tens of thousands if we're talking vintage stuff from the 40's-80's. Most of these combos have 2 12" speakers in them, though some like the Fender Bassman (originallyu intended to be a bass amp) have 4 10" speakers.
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| Stack/Halfstack
| A "Stack" or "Halfstack" consists of the actual amplifier (or "Head"), and then a cabinet full of speakers, which can range from a single 1x12 cabinet (effectively making the head a combo sized amp). Famous "heads" include the Marshall "Plexi", Marshall JMP series, Marshall JCM800/900/2000 DSL/TSL, the Mesa Boogie Rectifier series, CArvin X100A, Bugera 6262/333/333XL/ - which are clones of the Peavey 5150, XXX, and JSX heads, Ampeg V4, popularesque 80's favorites the Peavey Butcher and VTM series also, the HiWatt DR103 custom, or even if we want to go all the way vintage, the Fender Bandmaster and ToneMaster heads (Fender and Marshall started using separate cabs around the same time with Fender being slightly earlier). The original reason for this design, was so that speakers could also be amplified by the added number of speakers in the cabinets attached to the head. The most famous (or infamous depending on your point of view) is the "Stack" - basically, a high wattage amp head plugged into two 4x12 cabinets - usually sitting atop the 7+ foot tall "stack". A Halfstack is a more common configuration in your average club Saturday night - a high wattage amp head with a single 4x12 Cabinet. Heads can range from $200-300 for a cheap, inexpensive transistor or modeling amp head like a Crate GT-100H or BOSS Katana-Head like my mkii head, all the way to $4K or higher for a pro-grade, botique, custom made, custom tweaked vintage Marshall or some kind like the famous guys used in the 80's.
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Transistor vs. Tube Vs. Modeling
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| Transistor/Solid State Amplifier
| At the bottom of the food chain, we have the "Solid State" amplifier. Solid State is a more accurate term, because the electricity flows through solid components, unlike Tubes in which the sound in the form of electricity travels between grids and screens inside a vacuum tube made of glass (technically could be a gaseous state). It's also more accurate because only the earliest of these designs like the infamous solid state Fender amps of the late 1960's, or 70's Peaveys like the Backstage 30, were 100% driven by little 3 contact components called Transistors. More modern designs, starting in the late 1970's onward, used "IC" or "Integrated Circuit" chips like the LM386, TBA2030, or TL074. Now, why am I not m
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| Modeling Amplifier
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| Tube Amplifier
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