How to Buy a Guitar Amp

Video Transcript

"So let's try and address the task of buying an amplifier. Now, of course it depends on whether you're buying an amplifier for your child, who's going to be a beginning guitarist, and is on their maiden voyage into the world of electric guitar, or whether you are an intermediate player or a professional. So we'll just discuss for right now a beginner, what a beginner would look for in a guitar amplifier. Looking for something that's small, and it's going to have a, if you want to have a little reverb on it to make your sound a little nicer, and that is a good idea. You don't want a whole lot of power when you're a, when you're a, you want a small little five watt amplifier or something like that when you're beginning, depending on how, on exactly how loudly you're going to be able to play wherever it is you're going to be practicing that mostly. That is the most important thing to take into consideration. Now, if you have a place where you can play loud, then you may be able to use a little louder amplifier. So let's look at a couple amps we have here. Now this is, this is more amplifier than what a beginner, a pure beginner might need, but in the same breath, I'd say that, you know, it would be fine for a beginner to use an amp like depending on the volume levels they'll be able to play at and the amount of money you can spend. But here's an amplifier that has a, let's see, this is a twenty-five watt amp, and it has the reverb. It is has two channels, so that's something you want to look for too. Now if you want to play, if you're going to play jazz type of music, if you're, if that's your goal, you don't need an amp that has a drive channel. You just want something that's clean and has a nice clean sound and you want something that has a reverb with, like I say, many of them amps do. But if you're were interested in playing rock music, or, you know, pop music, and things that are going to have a little more of a aggressive guitar sound, then you're going to look for an amplifier that has two channels, at least, which would be, one would be your clean sound, and then another channel, which may be called drive, in this case it's called drive, and that way you can have both a clean sound and a distorted sound and you'll have, here's your gain knob, which will control the amount of distortion in your sound, and the volume for the level of the volume of the distortion."