How to Buy a Low Watt Tube Guitar Amplifier

In today's quick action, buy it now society, there are lots of products to choose from. If anything, the music business is one of the most cutthroat examples. Knowing about electronic devices is getting even more foggy to the general public even when companies want to teach their ways to the consumers in order to help them (buy) more. If you are a musician, you might know a few good things about your style and instruments. If you don't, it won't take long for you to learn about them, sometimes the hard way ($$). If for instance, you are a guitarist, you hear about all of the good old instruments and guitars that have marched down the red carpet over the past decades. You find out what is good and what is just (old) and used. One thing that comes to mind is tone. If you play guitar, you know about amplification. Amplifiers have gone through many changes, just to end up performing the same task, amplifying. Some amplifiers did their job and added a little more to the picture. These amps are well known among guitarists looking for the perfect feel and tone. The amps i'm talking about are called valve amps, or more commonly known as tube amps. They use a thermionic vacuum tube to do the job of amplifying an audio signal. I won't get into the difficult explanations of how they work, there are other articles out there much more suited to do that.

What i would like to do is explain the finer points of understanding, finding, and buying a tube amplifier that will get a player the really nice warm textural sounds that tube amps employ. The classic sound of a guitar amp is this (it has to be warm, punchy, tight, quiet when not played, and affordable). Well, any tube amp will justify itself with the first four of those needs. Affordable is not quite up to par with tube amplifiers. Sure, you could go into a local pawn shop and maybe find a small tube amp that needs a little work ($$), but who knows enough about them to fix them? You see, tube amps for the most part were designed by companies in the 1940's on up to the 60's. Well, these were the big companies, and the big boys wanted to mass produce there products. They actually did a great job with building, because some of the most popular amps were made in that time period. But, the way they amplified guitars were very clean and overbuilt. What i mean is this, the amps were never produced to create the heavy overdriven (distorted) sounds that rock and roll has grown into. They were designed to be played in more popular genres at the time, like country, the light pop of the Beatles and other music were clean tones were the norm. Well along came others who wanted more of the overdriven harmonically tight sounds, that later became the "rock" music we all love. Groups like Cream, Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin, etc.... were all overdriving their amps to get that chunky rock sound. This did not help the amps at all, of course to get that sound, the amp had to be turned up to full volume and played that way for extended periods of time. This killed the transformers in the amps and practically destroyed the hearing of the players. Later, other companies worked on trying to create little overdrive preamp pedals for guitarists to place in front of their amps to push the preamp harder to get an overdrive sound. This still, in my opinion does not create the sound of a tube amp preamp at full tilt pushing the output tube section of the amp into overdrive.

Smaller amps designed now, can do this without destroying the amp. Amplifier builders today can use the same old style amp stages within the unit and change the way and amount of gain the amplifier displays when pushed.
Now these amps can be as low as 1 watt all the way to 200 watts of power. The advantage of the lower wattage amps is that they can be miked for onstage use, and used at lower volumes for recording or just practicing. There are a few really cool companies out their that create the so called (boutique amps). These are the higher priced amps built usually by one person and checked and tested to much extent. These amps can be affordable if you know what to look for. Do a search for low wattage amps, specifically 15 watt tube amplifiers. This seems to be a great amp wattage for many very useful situations. I checked out some of the tiny amps also, one by Zvex, one called a Firefly, and one company with a very nice 15 watt amp called the Effigy 15 by Barchetta-valve-amp.com. There are a great many of these amps out there online and with many sound samples that show the usefullness of these little giants. They can produce the nice overdriven tube sounds that all guitarists seem to fall in love with. I would search for an amp with about 15 to 20 watts and preferably a seperate speaker cabinet. To me, this sounds great and gives a good sound for the money. I think that an affordable price for these little titans would be somewhere around $600 to $800. Go for it !! Check out these amps and listen, you'll hear the sweat sounds you always searched for.

JF