In the last installment, we talked about the question of power. Once you get past the practice amp stage and into performance power, there will be more questions that you will have to answer to narrow down your choices to a reasonable amount.
One of the most basic questions that will help is one of tone. When you start looking at higher-powered amplifiers, you will be faced with one main style choice before you even plug in your guitar. There are two types of amps, tube amps and solid state amps, and they both have obviously different tonal qualities. Let's take a minute and see if we can differentiate between the two.
The "tube amp" is the original guitar amplifier. It gets its name from the fact that it is run by power tubes, vacuum-sealed glass bubbles with all kinds of electronic gadgetry nestled inside. There are different kinds of tubes that can be used, and there are slight differences in the sounds of the different kinds of tubes. There are even slight differences between the sounds produced by individual tubes of the exact same make and model because of the sensitivity of its inner workings, but all of these differences are subtle and can be hard to even detect at times.
The difference between a tube amp and a solid state amp, though, is fairly large. For a simple example, imagine the difference between a record player and a CD player. A tube amp is like a record player. There are subtle flaws in the sound, but the flaws generally tend to add warmth and depth to the overall tone. And if you crank the volume, the sound generally starts to clip or produce a distortion that also adds warmth and depth to the tone.
At least that is how a proponent of the tube amp would describe it to you. A critic would say that a tube amp is unreliable. The tone could be different on any given day, depending on things like the weather and the amount of fluorescent lights in the immediate vicinity. He would also say that if you ever blew out a tube (which will happen from time to time) you would never be able to count on recovering the same tone that you had before with the replacement tube.
In the next installment of Guitar 101, we will talk about how a solid state amp is like
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